Thursday, December 2nd, 2004

Today was a sort of do nothing day. I slept in, then decided to go to the IT department at AU, since it’s fun to be there and we usually go out to eat for lunch. Nothing much happened, except I did talk to a guy I met at the Nevşehir conference. He invited me to come and visit the technical school he works at next week. So, I guess I’ll go to see this place on Tuesday. It’s about 100 km outside of Ankara, and he says it’s a very nice place. So there you go. I’ll report about this on Tuesday.

Tonight I hung out with Mehmet. We went to the city center and met a friend of his. Didn’t really do anything except drink tea. Then we came back to the dorm and played a card game that my family sent me called Battle Line. This game is pretty neat. It’s themed like an ancient battle between the Byzantines and… someone else. I don’t know who. Anyway, there are 6 colors of cards numbering 1 through 10. They represent the troops you have in your army. You battle for possession of little plastic flags, which represent sections of the battle.

You take turns placing a card in front of one of the flags. When you have a group of three it represents a complete formation of troops. They have different strengths depending on how you arrange the cards. When you can defeat the troops on the other side, you get to take the flag. The winner is the one who gets either 3 flags in a row, or 5 in total. There are also some special tactics cards that let you do neat extra things. All in all, it’s a really great game. Quick, easy to learn, and really fun. And yay, I’m finally nerding in Turkey!