Monday, February 14th, 2004

I have made it to Iskenderun, and I must say that so far I am very impressed! It’s nice here; it’s warm, it’s beautiful, and the people are great!

My bus bulled in to the station at about 9:30 a.m. with me having clocked in a total of two hours of sleep. Not so good. The bus was comfy enough but the roads were often quite bumpy. And let’s face it. A bus, unless you’re traveling in some sort of luxury affair that I don’t even know about, kinda sucks. But I expected as much so it was no big surprise.

My contact lady, Ebru Hosgar, was waiting for me upon arrival. She’s great! Ebru is 33, full of energy and very funny. We get along quite well. She later told me that she figured I was some guy in my thirties who was very formal, due to the businessy emails I had written and some misinformation on me from someone at the school. So she was very relieved to find out that I am who I am!

We checked into my guest house, which is a bit cold but otherwise pretty cool. I have a huge bedroom, a sitting room and a bathroom. There is also a large tv room across the hall with a satellite connection. And I’m the only one in the building! I guess I can run around naked and do as I please, but I’ll probably give that a few days. I took a nap for a few hours, then she came back and took me out for lunch.

The afternoon was spent wondering around Iskendrun, chatting and getting to know each other. What fun lady! I’ll be primarily working with her for these next few weeks and I’m quite glad for it. We ended up going to a café on the seaside to meet with some other friends from the school. I met Mustafa, Mustafa, and Hasan. All very friendly folk, good for laughing, joking around, and discussing serious and interesting things all in the span of a few minutes. Quality.

We ended up heading out for a huge dinner, which consisted of a huge amount of tasty starters, big piles of fish and copious amounts of rakı! I must say I was very pleased at this. After they found out I enjoy alcohol we made immediate plans to go out to some jazz club on the weekend. Yay!

People here seem to be much more relaxed then the other places I’ve been to. It must be the whole Mediterranean thing. I must say I like it. Iskenderun is so beautiful to. It’s right on the coast, with mountains running parallel with the sea. So beautiful. It remained about 55°F all day long, even though it was cloudy, and I was promised that this was the coldest day they’d had in quite some time.

I’ve got an interesting schedule planned, although I’ll find out about it in greater detail tomorrow. I think I’ll be visiting a lot of places in the area, doing the school evaluation thing, and heading out on some trips for the weekends, which include mountain hiking and maybe even some scuba diving! I’ve always wanted to do that!

So… what I can I say… Simon is very, very happy!

I’ll write some more when I can actually stay awake.