No! Really! Thanks!

So far, Turkey is great. It is beautiful and has actual hills and other changes in land elevation, unlike certain states I could name. On the extremely short (40 minute) flight from Istanbul to Ankara, they served us a full meal (!), including the delicious yogurt I can't wait to eat all the time. Also on that short flight I had my first Turkish tea in Turkey (well, technically, several thousand feet above Turkey). The sizable group on that Istanbul-Ankara flight arrived at the hotel utterly exhausted, and we headed to dinner in search of water more than anything else, when lo and behold the extremely attentive staff started trying to serve us a five course meal. After some hesitant bites of the first two courses, muttering "tamam" ("okay"), and general awkwardness, they discerned our meaning and skipped the main course...but they brought dessert out anyways.

But enough about food (ha ha JK! but I have the whole nine months for that). Let's go back in time for a minute to when I was still at the Ankara airport. I had long since decided my bags were too annoying to drag aboard a shuttle bus, so I took a cab with another Fulbrighter. Since we all have pretty ludicrous amounts of baggage, at first the other girl and I thought we wouldn't be able to fit in one cab. Suddenly a small taxi-directing man, cigarette in mouth, appeared at our side, spoke to our driver, and from somewhere a bungee cord was produced, and before we knew it all of our luggage was haphazardly secured bulging every which way out of the trunk and generally ignoring the laws of physics. Turkish driving entails a lot of ad libbing where the laws are concerned, for as our cab driver deftly demonstrated, the painted lane lines are there as guidelines only, and car horns are useful for either alerting other drivers' to your presence in the in-between-lane-zones or to tell a pedestrian they'd better decide RIGHT NOW if they want to run for it or hop back on the median, because this car is not slowing.

Now fast forward to tomorrow, when what basically amounts to an all expense paid vacation in a hotel in Ankara begins, featuring free WiFi in the lobby (YES!), and of course lots of meetings and lectures disseminating information about Turkey and how to live here without causing too much trouble, other than occasionally confusing attentive waiters and the unavoidable suchlike.