Steve in Turkey!: Keçileri kaçırmak (To Go Nuts!) [Literally: To miss the goats]

It is important to remind the reader that I spend a lot of my time in class. Four hours a day, five days a week. You can bet that I am learning important things. Sometimes we talk about Turkish grammar, though I have awesome classmates, so I also get to learn about screaming goats, Taylor Swift, and the space needle. A summation of my class experience is offered in the following video, which I hope will be educational:

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Wednesday was the day allotted for "Trip to Ankara Castle and Other City Sites." This meant the ethnography museum, the art museum, and Ankara castle, a castle that is in the area, and which is so old that when the Romans entered the area they found it standing and took over.

The ethnography museum contained lots of mannequins and artifacts displaying age old traditions of Turkish daily life. It was a nice museum, but a bit small.

(Lots of pictures are impending, so if you're on the front page, once again you will need to click "Read More")

How Turks used to play musical instruments, I guess.

Ottoman Armor. Be impressed.

These guns are pretty.

The art museum had a lot of stuff that I liked, and since I'm into weird pictures with crazy colors, that's what I'm posting. This is not representative of all Turkish art, merely the stuff I really liked. Which is the weird stuff.

The outside of the museum.

Portakalı soydum...

Arabic script is gorgeous. I am glad I don't have to write it

The castle itself was mad cool, mad old, and mad high up. Seriously. I was a little surprised by the fact that there was no real info when you were walking up to it. Just people trying to sell stuff. It struck me as the sort of thing certain family members of mine would be into.. no museum, just giftshop.

The roads leading to the castle are rather narrow.
In other news, I told you there are a lot of Hyundai Accent taxis, Dan.

Old buildings on the way to the castle.

The castle itself was also surprisingly small. Just a few rooms, but definitely a place you could defend an area from. I was also rather frightened of being so high up without any guard rails or any thing. The view was to die for. It's just that seeing it on all sides was possibly a bit much for me.

The castle itself.

This is one of my CLS buddies. See what I mean by no guard rails?

Stunning view though.

Just had to take a little sit down. Note: this is not the top level.

I would not make like my classmate and sit like that.

After the excitement of Ankara city sites, I went to a cafe with some friends of mine, and drank the greatest lemonade ever created. I weep knowing I will someday be unable to drink it again. (I know I will also miss dondurma. Turkish ice cream isn't the best stuff in the world, but it sure is good, and I think it's a lot of fun!)

Comes with a cookie, slice of orange, lemon, and mint leaves. Mmmmmm....

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I'd like to close this post with sexism. In class, we did a particularly sexist exercise in our textbook. For the benefit of people around the world, I have translated it into English. (Well, most of it. I'm lazy so I have in fact omitted two lines.)

The offensive page in question.

Us Men Are Very Lucky!

We're charismatic!
We can easily open lids off jars.
We can wander the streats without bags.
On a hot day, we're able to take off our shirts.
For a five day vacation, a small bag is adequate.
Chips, Soda, and Chocolate! We can eat anything freely.
We are able to have thirty second phone conversations.
We can wear the same two pairs of shoes to twenty different places and no one will notice.
We can get our hair cut quite short.
In ten minutes we can shave, shower, get dressed, and leave the house.
No one cares if we're late.

Us Women Are Very Lucky!

We're beautiful!
We can make food by ourselves.
We can wear 10cm high heels.
There are no naked baby pictures in our photo albums.
We can cover acne on our faces with make-up.
We don't snore.
Our socks can easily be found.
We can go somewhere without a partner and have fun.
“Behind every accomplished man there's a woman,” men promise.
We can easily recall the special days in our lives. (I assume this means, not forgetting anniversaries.)
At the movies, we can easily cry.
We can dye our hair any color.
And... we can be mothers.

Finally, the page concludes with an exercize in which you get to determine who's speaking... a man or a woman. I will omit the answers, but I'm sure with the knowledge imparted by the wise book, you will be able to figure out which gender is saying what statement.