Ara sınav ve ondan sonra... UPDATED!

Yet another million years has passed since my last post and so much has happened... so here's a short excuse for my absence online.. ARA SINAV! that means.. midterm exam.  So yes, last week Thursday was our ara sınav and I was busy pretending to study, plus every single night something seems to pop up.. and I get back home late and have tons of homework or something.

So last week was lovely, I forget most of what happened, but there was a storm for the first time since I got here and it was amazing! rain, lightning, hail, everything!  And to think I'd been whining about it so much back in SD..  One night we went to starbucks.. ><  I know I know, but it was right on the Bosphorus and we wanted to watch the boats, we went with Josef (from another, more advanced class)..  I think I'll stick to normal coffees.  no, çay, I'll stick to çay.  So anyway, after the ara sınav Thursday Alyssa and I and Josef went out to Taksim to relax for awhile.  So Taksim is where I finally crippled myself on the treacherous streets of İstanbul... for all you facebook people and whoever else has been wondering.  Its only a sprain, but honestly with how much we walk here, its plenty annoying. (plus by now its all bruised and mosquito-bitten! yessss :D)

A few hours after (at about 9:30 pm), I jumped on the night bus with some friends and classmates and left for Selçuk for our long weekend.  It was a strange bus ride, more like a flight than anything.  They fed us ice cream, fruit juice, instant coffee and slightly hard, packaged pastries.  We arrived at about 7:30 the next morning. We got a Turkish style breakfast then went across the street to visit some ruins in the city....

Pillars! we first thought this was the Temple of Artemis, but it wasnt.  We dont really know what it was.. Pillars!
Ruins! ohhh they're my favorite! I forgot what this was called actually, it was definitely a church though, of St. John or so, I believe... I'm the worst tourist ever..

more views of it..
nice floor! I want...

This is a view of the surrounding area.. taken from the churchy ruins.  It was beautiful, very home-y :) Later we went to a down there and...

Ok ok, after about 3 guesses, we finally found the REAL Temple of Artemis! So here it is... what's left anyway.

Not much left, ne?

The goats of Artemis.  One kept sneezing, just constantly.

The one pillar left, reconstructed of course. Sooo, after all these ruins we showed up at our hostel...

Our room looks like this... AND!

There was a scorpion in it Saturday morning! Arthur pummeled it to death with a flip-flop and it looked like this after... Although I'm from Arizona these days, this is the first time I've seen a scorpion not through glass.

Here's the bar area of the hostel..

The pool of it..

Just another view.  It was quite a nice place, super friendly.  25 a night with shuttles to Selçuk and Efes and breakfast and dinner included, included and delicious, especially the menemen, an egg dish for breakfast here.

Just a view from the hostel. So, after we lazing around for awhile there we went to Efes (Ephesus!!) and it was incredible.. Picture time!

Despite my generally annoyed attitude toward Greek, I wanted to steal all the millions (literally, I swear) of things with it engraved.. I settled for pictures however, this is one of many!  
Ancient Greek toilets! gotta love the communal feel of it all.  Devrim and Arthur demonstrate the proper usage, reading material and all :P

ahh its soooo awesome!

At first I was thrilled to see pillars, remember?  But at some point, one questions... when is enough just too many?

Yes I climbed to the top of the stands, even with a crippled foot!  It wasn't half as treacherous as the Aztec pyramids, however, Tyler almost died on the way down, ironically, he slipped just as he was commenting on the shoddy workmanship, the grievously uneven stairs.. nahaha

So... after the Efes trip we returned to the hostel and chilled out for the rest of the night.  Strangely, they were having a cross-dressing party but we didnt participate because I didnt really have any man-ish clothes on us really.  We couldn't help any of the guys out either, because we didnt have woman-ish clothes with us either.  One wonders what we did have...

Next day after breakfast and stopping at the Selçuk pazar for some cheap fruits, we went to the beach at Dilek Milli Park (Dilet National Park). Took awhile to get there, a little more than an hour.  There were all these large boars wandering around in the trees by the beach, scary!

All sorts of people were feeding and taking pictures of them. They didnt seem particularly vicious.

The beach was rocks, not sand.  That just makes it less messy though :) 

Devrim, Arthur and Tyler, who looks kinda like he's flinching.. feeble Arizonans.  Yeah, he's from Arizona, UA even.. and to think I never knew 'im...

Some view of the beach and the other people on it.

After the beach all day, we were pretty wiped out and we just went back to the hostel, to laze about all night again :P

Sunday we went to a little mountain town called Şirince, known to tourism for its fruit wines.  Most of it was too touristy for us, but we wandered up the windy little streets to escape.. It was quite pretty actually.  I guess a little less than 1000 people reside here, miş...

The hill we walked up despite being lazy American tourists..

The gorgeous view from up there.  

Yey, the group I came with! (That is: Devrim, Alicia, Ruth, Arthur and Tyler(l->r)) This is all? whaaa, I should've taken more group pictures... ugh.

Later, after a strange experience with a little hostel or restaurant or something on the edge of town, we braved the more crowdy areas again, to try a few wines and eat Gözleme, which the town is also known for.

The busy main drag, where all sorts of wines can be tasted, and check out that awesome sign!

Tyler bargains with the peach man.. haha...

Ok, so after Şirince we went back to Selçuk, looked at the Efes museum and then hopped on a bus to İzmir.  We got there around 6ish maybe probably and went down to the oceanside immediately, to hang out until our bus was to leave, at 11.  It was way way too hot and way way way too humid, making me long for İstanbul again :P  Actually, it was the best, since my sensei was there... and lovely experiences like driving backwards down a highway because you missed the turn, which is apparently not cause for chaos, panic and death in this country.  Now, since I'm an awful person, I dont have pictures from the restaurant, where we ate fish which was NOT 95 YTL per kilo, uh, thanks to Seçkin...

Ok, it realllly wasn't a lie when I said I dont have pictures of İzmir and group pictures in general.  I didnt until I stole them from Alicia's Facebook..  

The last picture of the +1 traveling party (sadly we left the +1 in İzmir).. before we got on the bus to class and homework and places that aren't so hot that even in the evening they make you wish for the hottest day in İstanbul.  I will never again ask "why, whyyyy did people settle in Tucson?"

Soo, after another night bus ride, we arrived in İstanbul about 8:45 am.. class was supposed to start at 9, but we were so disgusting from being in İzmir and the bus that we decided... well, showering was more important and we were an hour late to class.  Oh well, I never missed before and I prolly never will again... I was exhausted though, I fell asleep briefly during our weekly movie later that day.

Yesterday, our normal lecture was cancelled so our TA's instead took us to the Kadıköy pazar in Asia for a frantic shopping experience.  It was thrilling and crowded and I bought some cheap clothes :P.  Alyssa and I stayed around longer than the others then we took a ferry to Karaköy (which is back in Europe) and had a slightly less strange dinner experience than last time with the fruit and the plates and the Spanish and the oddness everywhere...

I'm still tired from the vacation today, still my foot hurts, I still have a cough... but mostly I'm still thrilled to death to be here!  Its so great. :D

NEWS FLASH- İstanbul, Turkey.  The city is still trying to kill me!  Most of our class went to Mado for ice creams with one of our teachers this evening and I ordered a vişne thing (naturally), only to find that at the bottom of it was a massive shard of glass (about the size of a quarter.. or a lira), which I didnt notice until I almost swallowed it and died.  Luckily it was big enough that I questioned what was in my mouth before that!  I didnt have to pay for my ice cream and they gave everyone at the table a türk kahvesi in remorse.. or at least because they didnt want to lose our business. I also discovered that selling produce is my true calling, whereas before I only suspected it was my purpose in life.