Vege on the Edge...of a landmass called Eurasia

Wow, it has been a crazy ride so far, ladies and gentlemen. I am in Ankara at my hotel (The Niza Park, in case you were wondering) and I just finished my first _______(Ex: long, interesting, trying, exciting, terrifying, wonderful) day of orientation. I am overwhelmed, but in a good way.

So, part of this whole Fulbright thing is that they buy your ticket. In my experience, you get what you pay for and that means that when you pay nothing you get...well, a long long travel schedule. It took 24 hours to get from Austin, TX to Ankara, Turkey. But, I was flying with some great people and when our flight was almost delayed (break problems, whatchya gonna do?) in Detroit, we stuck together like troopers. Thankfully we made all of our connections and arrived at our hotel last night, tired and scared and mostly nonverbal (turkish + jetlag = trouble), but alive!

Today was our first day of orientation and as I referenced earlier, it was really something. Actually, it was great. The problem was jetlag. It's hard to listen to even the most interesting lecture when all you want to do is crawl back to your hotel room and sleep for a day. But we persevered.

This evening we went to a Turkish bar, which turned out to be a lot like an American bar. Due to my already scattered system, I passed on the libations, but for anyone who's wondering, yes, Turkey does in fact have beer towers (Don't know what a beer tower is? You're better off that way, so just leave it).

Surprisingly, there have been no really remarkable events so far. At dinner tonight we were discussing how much it sucks to read boring blogs where people just bullet point all the stuff they did. I feel like this current entry could very well fall into that category, but sometimes you don't have much to work with. Maybe tomorrow will bring a mild disaster that I can exploit for a good story on here. Fingers crossed!

I will say that I have had two successful exchanges in Turkish with only minimal use of gesturing. I asked for an iron so convincingly that the hotel desk clerk responded in rapid fire Turkish. I'm 50% sure that he's going to have the iron sent to my room when it's available. He definitely took down my room number (which I gave him in Turkish). I also bought two (2!) bottles of water from the shop next to our hotel. It wasn't nearly as invigorating as the experience with the iron. Oh well.

That's all for now. Iyi geceler! (good night)