Bodrum and Horrible Field Trips

Bodrum is on the southwest coast of Turkey, which is a little um, far for a two-day trip (read: totally crazy and I was so tired when we got back) but hey--we are young. Young enough for a 13.5 hour bus ride, apparently. At least this time they didn't play loud music to wake us up in the middle of the night for a pee break. The best part of the bus ride was the boat part. I fell asleep, and when woke up our bus was driving onto a boat. I woke up because the bus was swaying. So we got to watch the sunset on a boat.

Apparently Bodrum is good for clubbing, but we did not do that. All I did was sit on the beach in Turgotriez, a little town about half an hour outside of Bodrum, and eat midye dolma and sun-warmed cherries. The Aegean is so much saltier than the Pacific or the Atlantic--you dip in and then the salt starts to crystallize on your skin. I thought I had skin dandruff for a second when I first got out of the water (because that exists, obviously) but alas, it was totally just salt. Also I could see Greece from the beach. If I hadn't been mussel-bloated and also if there weren't powerboats everywhere, I could have SWUM to Greece. Maybe.

The view from our room. The little lump in the distance is Greece!

The food was incredible, although I was also a little sleep-delirious (sleep-deprived? I like sleep-delirious better) so maybe it was just me. After our 13.5 hour bus ride, we wandered into this little restaurant that I think might have actually been a house and had breakfast. It was a Turkish breakfast--olives, cheese, bread, whatever--but epic. They gave us kuru fasulye (amazing amazing beans, although I think I'm the only one who is really excited about them) and sarma (stuffed grape leaves) and fresh spinach borek and, the best of the best, dolma cicek. Dolma cicek is a magical food made out of rice and spices that have been STUFFED INTO A FLOWER. It is a stuffed flower.
The people in the house probably thought we were nutso because we were a) exhausted b) wearing our pajamas and c) ordering quantities of food that probably no one should be allowed to eat.

That night we went to a seafood restaurant, and I had some rockin cupra. The waiter came over to me and said very solemnly, "You have to clean it" and then walked away. So then I got really nervous about what I was supposed to do--do fish have guts?--but I couldn't see the waiter anymore so I just went for it and ate the whole thing (including the cheeks!!). I may have eaten fish giblets (is that a word?). Update: I'm still alive, so it's fine.

Cupra, post-eating

In other news (my news-telling is not chronologically sound) I went on a horrible field trip. The class is called "Ottoman Art and Architecture", which sounds awesome (right?). Sadly, the ONLY WORD the teacher can say in English is "problem". (She also thinks everything is a problem.) She took us to this really cool place, Yenikapi, where there's an ongoing archaeological dig and they've found about a billion shipwrecks. But for some reason we went all the way down to the dig site and all we did was watch a Powerpoint about shipwrecks. Not cool. And then we went to the Archaelogical Museum, which is really cool except when you are trying to figure out if the things the teacher is shouting in Turkish will be on the final exam. Hmph. Apparently all the English-speaking tour guides were "busy" that week. Still, the museum was pretty cool.  This week we are going to Topkapi Palace, and I'm crossing my fingers that I either learn to speak Turkish really quickly or we have a guide.

A statue from the archaeological museum whose significance was explained to me in Turkish.