Izmir

Izmir is an amazing city. But let me explain why I was there. This weekend was the first exchange student meeting on Saturday. It’s only a 5 hour meeting, but it was great. I’ll talk about the exchange meeting in the next blog. I got a ride from the President of the Rotary club Tugai, in Bodrum and his family. They were really great, Bert and Berfin are their kids and Ayla is his wife. They dropped me off at the rotary office and went shopping. A member of the Bodrum rotaract club, Feti , picked me up. Feti is about 25 and he showed me around Izmir. It’s a city of about 4 million and is jam packed full of people. The bazaars are amazing. He took me to one of the larger ones and we walked around for hours just talking and him explaining what everything was. There was a street for everything, an electronics street, a jewelry street, a clothes street, a meat street and so many more. It would have been easy to get lost in these streets as all of the shops have a few stories of apartments above them. It was almost impossible to see the sky enough to figure out north and south. Then there was the Aegean, the sea between Greece and Turkey. It was beautiful to look at unless you looked up against the shore, then it looked dirtier than the Mississippi. We stopped by one of the Mosques and it was really interesting. We took our shoes off, a religious requirement, and walked in. There was the guy chanting the Islamic prayers in Arabic and about 40 people just sitting and listening. I was shocked when I found not the annoying droning that you hear in the evening and morning prayers, but a very soothing, peaceful, almost hypnotic sound coming from the prayer leader's mouth. I truly want to go back to a mosque sometime soon and just sit for a while. I found them to be very tolerant of Feti and I as we whispered back and forth, and also took pictures. I will write another blog soon about Islam in Turkey. It’s nothing like anybody back home thinks. We continued to walk around and saw the fisherman's area which reeked, but only because I hate the smell of fish. I got to experience haggling, and even more Turkish food. was amazing because the only thing that he let me spend my own money on the entire weekend was a single shirt. He paid for all the food and drinks that he could persuade me to ingest. We slept at Feti's aunts' house; one was from Holland and the other from France, both speaking Turkish. The next day he dropped me off at the Rotary office for the exchange meeting and left to finish the business he was originally there for. Then I got to meet the exchange students in the Izmir and southwest turkey area, but that is for another Blog