Hellooooo everyone

Sorry it took so long but here goes:

Turkey is great as Im sure all of you heard. I was a little scared when I first got here b/c i couldnt communicate AT ALL... However, Ive been taking intensive Turkish class now for about 2 1/2 weeks and its getting a whole lot easier. Not EASY to communicate mind you but fun and Turkish people LOVE to help us out... especially b/c half the time me and my friends walk around it is blatantly obvious that we are American... so everyone tries to give us directions/tell us we are beutiful/laugh at us. Its amusing. The only annoying part is that Turkey has never seen a black person most people have no hesitation to stare...

Sooo... on to the good stuff... my dorm is awesome and my roomate is tight too.. her name is Elif... the first letter of the arabic alphabet and a really popular name here.

Speaking of which... turkish is a really cool language.. ive leanred so much about the history of Turkey, the modern republic of turkey, Ataturk, the language, the Ottoman Empire.. the huge amount of ethnic/social/religious sects in the country.

Fun stuff... me and my friends on the program joined a group called ERASMUS... i dont know what it stands for but its the european exchange student group (a big program in the middle east and western europe) and basically the group sponsors parties everynight at clubs and pubs and hookah bars around the city and provides the transportation too. needless to say, my friends and I end up running the parties b/c europeans just dont dance like americans... were cool

Ok now stuff for the family....
Ative English is the place where i take my turkish classes and its in a section of the city called "kizilay" except the i's dont have dots on them... its a turkish leter that sounds like "uh" oh and "ay" sounds like "eye" just in case u were wondering... Well this part of the city also has Ankara's largest mosque Kocaptepe Camii (camii meand mosque)... Oh and also c's sounds like j's in turkish... ANYWAYS... this is the view of the mosque from my turkish class on the sixth floor
Thennn we went to the mosque
And for my family who i know will be saying they want pictures of me This is me and my two friends jessie an morgan outside or turkish classes on valentines day


For some cooler stuff... we leanred in class about a thing called a gecekondu... This translates litterally to "house bulit over night".... Well for decades people in the Southeast of the country or smaller towns (the southeast tennds to be the more traditional/religious/rural/conservative part of the country) have been moving to bigger towns like ankara or istanbul for jobs, more opportunities, etc... well there is a little leeway in the law that says that if you can build four wall and a roof overnight on unowned property then you can have it. Sooo people would move with their kinsman/family/neighbors and get the first part up in one night an then keep building. Well needless to say some of these houses are pretty precariously built... and the people were traditionally not given many rights in the towns they moved into... so these areas developed into "slums" an were disregarded and almost feared by the rest of the city.... So now there is a gentrification process going n that is "relocating" these people into large high rises in the city (people live in apartments.. not houses in the city unless they are INCREDIbly rich or poor)... you could relate this to american cities only the apartments are MUCH higher and everywhere... i have only seen one neighborhood of houses soo far.... anndd ankara is reallly hilly.


So without further ado... these are one neighborhood of gecekondular in Ulus... a section of Ankara. Including some adorable boys local boys that were following us around