The month of April went like this:
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| Where the big white space is Turkey and the black lines are my travel route |
And I saw a lot of amazing things that made me feel like this:
Like:
- In Fethiye, an abandoned Lycian ghost town called Kayakoy. Getting there required hiking up a hill that went forever, sweating balls, and then eventually hitchhiking with an old man who was also transporting a box of precious tweeting baby chickens
- A rock that eerily resembled Abraham Lincoln
- In Bodrum, a series of very ominous thunderstorms, a Byzantine castle, dogs the size of horses, and about a zillion free cups of cay and kahve from very friendly locals
- In Mardin, kilometers and kilometers and kilometers (still using metric system) of gorgeous rolling green fields and luxurious 1000-year-old hotels with shmancy showers
- A private Kurdish jam sesh, Kurdish snack time, and Kurds playing Tavala (they take that shizz sursly)
- In Midyat, 325843920 Orthodox monasteries that all looked and smelled the same but were majestic nonetheless
- Also in Midyat, children playing with goats (!!!)
- At Hasan Keyf, the Tigris River, the site of one of first civilizations of mankind that will soon be underwater, a group of picknicking children that I almost pillaged for food in another one of my infamous crazed hypoglycemic episodes
- In the middle of BF nowhere, an ancient Assyrian city covered with the poop of various wildlife
- In Ankara, the site of the dead rotting carcass of the legendary Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a man whose pinky nail I will never amount to
- Jennifer Rhima shaming America in front of a group of Turkish politicians
- In Konya, young boys who committed their lives to God and Sufism put on tall hats and long skirts and twirl in a circle for an hour so they could trance out of this world and into some other world where God is much closer
- Neolithic archaeological site Catalhuyuk, which I don't remember much because of the heat-induced coma
I feel a little tug to insert every single detail of every single trip to every single place and write a biography of every incredible person I met during my travels, but for the sake of brevity and to be respectful of everybody's attention spans, I'll just throw some photos down (only the good ones):
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| Lycia |
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| Kween Kleo Kitty Kween of Kayakoy |
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| Fethiye at sunset |
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| Kedi felt entitled to our beach picnic |
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| Trying to scare the bunnies out on bunny island |
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| Fethiye hotel room Easter egg hunt! (Emily is a good lil' hider) |
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| Playin futbol with some kid in Bodrum |
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| Bodrum Castle |
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| The bluest water I seen yet |
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| Who let the Bodrum dogs out? |
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| Mardin |
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| Dope Hotel |
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| Gettin Kurd-ed out |
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| Tavala with Kurds |
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| One of many monasteries |
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| Most magnificent... |
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| NO MORE CAY |
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| The dumb-ass kedi we had to set free from the dungeon twice at the Assyrian association |
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| Hasan Keyf--This will all be underwater within the next 20 years! |
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| EL TIGRE |
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| Never trust anyone who gives you Ayran |
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| Jammin out to "Call Me Maybe" on the roof of the association |
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| Ataturk's turf |
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| BEHOLD |
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| Everyone is miserable |
That was April, and the month of May involved a lot of parties, which involved a lot of alcohol, which invariably led to me, the patient, kind-hearted sober shepherd, peeling my friends off of gross old guys and hooking them to my drunk leash.
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| An earlier prototype of the
Drunk Leash℗. The advanced model has pockets for phone, wallet, and camera
and comes with a banana bag to intravenously pump your shitfaced friends full of fluids
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There was a boat party on the Bosphorus, which I enjoyed thoroughly, although I had a hard time figuring out who didn't foresee this recipe for disaster:
- 1 parts exchange students
- 4 parts alcohol
- add boat and mix thoroughly
Yields 100 of these:
Then there was mine and Jennifer's birthweek, in which we both had the opportunity to turn 21 in a country where it doesn't matter.
During birthweek everyone else was like:
and I was like:
And that brings us here, to the last week of the semester. The end of the semester makes me feel like this :
which gives way to this:
and then this:
But....I have good news.
IT AIN'T THE END.
Because I get to stay in this amazing country all summer!
And that makes me feel like:
