Day Four.

For the first time since I have been here, I woke up in a bad mood. I couldn’t fall asleep again last night and was very tired this morning. I was getting homesick for sleeping in as much as I want. How sad is that? Plus I thought I was starting to catch a cold. Tugce is taking driving classes, so she was already gone when I woke up. I washed up and went into the kitchen, where Anne asked me to unload the dishes from the dish washer. After I did that she told me to sit down and write vocab like I was last night. I didn’t want to, but I did, of course. I finished the one from last night and then she had me write “nasilsiniz?” a formal way of saying “how are you?” which I already knew. While I was doing that and breakfast was cooking, Anne wrote down the alphabet and had me pronounce everything. I am having a hard time with the accented u and sometimes o. I finished nasilsiniz and copied the alphabet like three times when breakfast was done.

Anne made this very good meal of fresh dough stuffed with cheese and fried. So bad for me, but so very good. I ate like three of them (they’re the size of an Oreo) and tried to tell her I was done. She wouldn’t hear it and made me a HUGE one the size of my hand. I only ate half of it and then stopped. I did have three cups of tea though. (I am so going to be addicted to caffeine by the time I get home.)

We started talking (and by talking I mean her talking very slowly with lots of gestures and me trying to understand) and my bad mood was suddenly gone. She was talking about Tugce and Ayce. About how Ayce is usually the happy one and Tugce is the grumpier of the two, but she has been a lot happier since I came. Apparently she already loves me, which is good because I love her already. (I was sitting last night when it finally dawned on me that I have a SISTER now and that I’m the baby, not the eldest.) She also talked about driving. I think she said they are getting a new car around Christmas because both her and Tugce will be driving, but Baba takes the car to work every day.

After breakfast she took me to the living room and started pulling out games. Without any English, she taught me how to play four board games – one that has tiles and numbers, one having to do with sticks and starts with an M, dominos, and backgammon. Then she showed me some photo albums of her childhood and from when she met Baba on. After that we played backgammon for an hour at least. I won every game but one (but she was helping me).

Then I went and checked my mail. Tawni (another exchange student here) doesn’t think that we are going to change families; she heard that we’re not. I’m kind of glad, because even though the point of having so many families is to get to see the difference between the culture and what is just something the family does, I would like to stay here. They’re so nice. They spoil me.

Anne and I left soon after that. We took the midibus (I had an easier time standing!) to Pendik. From there we took another midibus all the way to Tuzla and then walked to a café where Tugce met us. She ordered both of us a hamburger and Anne had a plate of something that looked like fried bread stuff with meat. I had a couple and they reminded me of one of my favorite Indian foods, Samosas. When we got our food, a cat came over and started meowing. Apparently this isn’t weird because most people ignored it. Tugce, on the other hand, chased it away from us, but it kept coming back. It left me alone after I showed it my empty plate though.

Anne went to a store where you buy things like trays or mini chests and then paint them. Teyze was there too; it is her and Anne’s hobby. While they did that, Tugce took me around and showed me the Marmara Sea – sooooo beautiful! We looked at some stores and she bought a pair of earings. I wanted to buy this pretty necklace but my money is still in US dollars and not Turkish liras. I need to talk to my counselor about that when I meet him Sunday. Hopefully he can set up my bank account so I can just deposit it there and not have to worry. We got some fresh bread and then met Anne and Teyze and rode home in Teyze’s car.

Baba was home by the time we got there and Anne started dinner right away. I wasn’t too hungry because we had a late breakfast and early lunch. I finally had the vine leaves meal, called Dolma (but I’m not sure if that is how you spell it), and it was really good with lemons squeezed on top. Anne made more of the bread, but it wasn’t stuff with cheese, so I only had one.

I had been in my room, practicing Turkish, when I heard a woman come from upstairs (my home is a duplex so we have a door upstairs and downstairs). Tugce and I went upstairs and it turned out to be these two sisters that were friends with Anne. One of them, though, apparently does threading for eyebrows and things. While Anne was getting hers done, Tugce asked if I wanted it. I was a bit nervous, because I have never threaded my eyebrows, (I’ve never plucked, waxed or anything. I have been told it doesn’t look bas so I never bothered) but I decided to give it a try. They said it wouldn’t hurt. They LIED. But it ended up looking really good. The lady tried to tell me something after, but I couldn’t figure out what and Tugce couldn’t translate it. We tried using Google translator, but it came up as “From now on, use a safety blade on your face” and that just confused me even more. So the woman ended up called Can and telling him to translate it. Apparently she was saying “from now on, I will do your eyebrows so don’t do anything to them” and he sounded embarrassed while he said it. We all laughed for like a good five minutes.

After they left, we cleaned up the table in the room. Tugce had brought up some papery chocolate pudding type of thing that was really good, but I was too full to eat too much of it because we had strawberry pudding for dessert earlier. I washed up for bed and noticed that my mp3 player was dying. I plugged it in and luckily it still works while it’s charging (I’ve never checked to try). I fell asleep watching Brokeback Mountain again. I need a new movie. Can told me that downloading is legal in Turkey so if they have internet at the hotel we are staying at for camp, I am SO getting some new ones.