Direniyor (He/she/it/they are resisting)

Everyone has the most annoying voice possible in the Turkish dub of Arthur. Just wanted to share the most important piece of information I found from channel surfing.

Right, I'm going to write this quickly, since this post only covers the Fourth of July, which wasn't the most interesting of days. In fact, in some respects, it was a very sad day for me.

July Fourth I had no class, due to the fact that our excellent teacher was at a conference presenting. We made up for the lost time with lengthier classes on the other weekdays. I made use of my time off to get some extra sleep in. Then I headed to Kızılay and had to go to Turkcell to put more minutes on my phone. Ignoring the fact that there are packages available, I just put slightly more money on it than there was at the beginning. Turkcell then immediately began spamming me with messages about their great deals. What a company!

Then, I wandered around town for a bit, found a music store with everything overpriced and in USD, and then eventually went into a "Vitamin cafe" because I wanted lemonade. I had a long conversation with the owner and another patron in which I exclusively used Turkish. They told me about some other Americans they knew, and repeatedly told me how great my Turkish was. At some point I explained my parents' occupations (psychologist and geologist), and they assumed for whatever reason that my parents must have pretty cool cars. Well, they do. The owner showed me a picture of a motorcycle he has from the '40s. It was neat.

I departed from the shop, and met up with my friends for lunch, where I had some more mantı. I unfortunately did not return to the Iraqi restaurant I previously went to, and apparently the waiter was asking about me because I named all the fish on his wall and he really liked that. He apparently said imagination was 90% of life.

After lunch, we had another one of our weekly meetings with our resident director, though this week we had a visitor from the State Department who wanted to see what our program was like on the ground. He was a super cool guy.

With the meeting over, I went with my friends Jack and Erin to an antique shop in Tunalı, a neighborhood of Ankara which I hadn't visited yet. It's a cool place. I still don't like antique stores very much in Turkey, but I liked how the stuff had much greater potential to actually be old. For legal reasons, nothing was purchased.

We rested for a bit in a cafe in Kuğlu Park (Swan Park) which is where a lot of the protest action has taken place. The tea was nice, and I took a lot of pictures of graffiti and the park itself, which is small but nice. Obviously, the title of my blogpost comes from the graffiti.

One walk back to Kızılay  later,  I hopped the metro home, had some dinner, grabbed my  Cümbüş and hit up the CLS July 4th festivities: a Turkey vs US soccer game. Sherri provided wonderful musical accompaniment on the trumpet that I could not match. Eli gave a rousing speech about how if the American team lost the game, then America would lose. Jack valiantly fell over repeatedly during the game. America lost. We then were handed sparklers and they went out after thirty seconds. Happy Birthday, America!

Future careers not in the cards for Steve - Sports Photographer