To Manisa

This week I had 5 day weekend. It all started on Wendesday, when My host family and I went up to Izmir to visit some relatives. My host fathers grandfather has recently fallen and Okan wanted to go up and see him for a few days. I got to meet Okan's (my host father) grandfather, mother, and sister, as well as his sister's family. His family cooks really good food, and they had a piano. I tried playing it, but it has been about 6 months since I have laid my hands on a keyboard and while my fingers remembered the first half of Pacabel's cannon, I forgot every other song I knew. Thursday I spent wondering the city on my own I found the bazaar and as typically happens, my blonde hair shouts "tourist! come talk to me and I will shop at your store!" and after walking for about half an hour and being bothered by every shop owner I passed, one finally sucked me in. I talked to him for a while in my broken Turkish and told him I wouldn't buy anything but I might take a tour of some of his shops. and this is how I got a free guided tour of the bazaar and met a some of the shop owners. Some of them were really interesting and spoke 3 or 4 languages, while others had great stories about stupid tourists. Later I traveled across Izmir to meet up with my exchange friends and caught up on the latest news, and discussed future plans.
Friday was a lot of fun. I stopped off at my favorite doner (meat and a few other ingredients in a tortilla shell or bread loaf) place and went to meet my friends at a cafe. We all had to run to catch the bus to the Manisa fun weekend. The ride was really fun, and somehow I ended up with people writing messages to me on my shins in pen. But after arriving in Manisa, we were separated into host families, me and my friend Alejandro from Pensalvania were paired up and taken by a really friendly family. Even though only one person in the family actually spoke english we still managed to talk about lots of things at diner. I think I spoke more turkish at that dinner than I have in the last month combined. We left the appartment after diner with our host family and went to their friends house. I completely reminded me of my uncles. A few guys hanging out in living rooms with a really expensive home theator system, a few beers, watching the game. Only here they were watching rugby instead of baseball or football. Despite the familiar setting, we still had to go to our real host house for the night. Once we got there, my temporary host father showed us his impressive sound system and we stayed up until 1 am watching led zepelin and placebo music videos.
It was saturday that was the best day of all. Alejandro and I woke up and went to the local college and learned how to dance. All of us exchange students actually learned how to perform a traditional turkish wedding ceremony. Alejandro ended up getting married to Alexis, while the rest of us were busy screwing up the dance. We were truely terrible at this dance, but we were laughing and having fun all day anyway. We finally broke off at 2 and loaded up onto the bus again. The bus origionally had barely enough seats on it for s exchange students, but we managed to gather 4 more kids from our host families. The bus was packed as we began climbing the mountains to the north of town. Turkey has a weird landscape as it is either completely flat or covered by large hills and mountains. Manisa is on one of the plains and the mountains actually form the northern border of the town. We drove for almost an hour and a half to the top, and the views were amazing. The top of the mountain was so high, there were little pockets where the snow from the last winter had not melted yet. As soon as the bus stopped about 5 of us, mostly northern States and Canadians fought to get out of the crammed bus to be the first to throw a snowball. As a gentleman should, I allowed my friend Madison to throw the first snowball, completely missing her intended target. Thus began the best snowball fight Ive had in years. There were no teams, no lasting alliances, just complete chaos as 15 teenagers thousands of miles from home threw snow at each other. We wrestled eachother into the snow, stuffed eachothers backs full of it, and tried baseball, all the wile just laughing at the relief of finally finding snow after over a year without it.
As fun as it was, it had to end. The driver had parked in a huge mud pit, and we teamed together to push it out, with the wheels spitting mud out on us the whole time. The way down was pretty uneventful, just lots of punches to the shoulder for perceived "wrong doings" during the snowball war. But we did start singing the most random songs. From trying to do the barbie girl song in rounds, to rap songs that we only know half the words to, working down the adrenalin rush and mountain air took a while. At the bottom we came to a cabin like restaurant where delicious food was served. Actually it was a free-for-us Rotary sponsored trip so they brought in fast cooked meatballs with rice in. But that's besides the point and the backgammon games were good, some Turkish teenagers came and we met them, befriended and temporarily adopted them into our exchange group. After dinner was the Turkish marriage ceremony. We didn't really remember much of it, but Rotary really wanted to see it. I had no real important part in it, but it was Alejandro and Alexis who got married, and Andrew and Luana played the part of the brides parents. They were perfect for this as they are always near each other and bickering like and old couple anyway. We were apparently surprisingly good, though I think that it has more to do with pity than pride that we were told that.
That dance concluded our trip for the most part. We all separated into our host families, Alejandro went back to our host family's house where we almost went directly to sleep. We were both invited back to Manisa any weekend we wanted by our host mother as left and after getting back to Izmir, I left the next day to come back home to Bodrum.