It's been syllabus week here in Ankara, but that doesn't mean everything is boring. It means that I've had some extra time to get to know the people in my program! Hooray!

So on Wednesday, when our classes "officially" started, we only had class for about an hour. A few of us decided to check out Ankara castle which is a nice tourist image of Ankara because its a huge old castle fortress with a big Turkish flag on top of it.


Here's what it looks like from below.

So Martin, Jake, Dan, and I hiked up to the top of the castle which made for several very fancy looking photos. Inside the old castle walls is like a small village of what Ankara used to be like. It's super old and some of it is falling apart but people still live in the nicer houses.

One thing I learned from this experience is that Martin, Dan and Jake are hilarious. Dan is apparently deathly afriad of heights hahaha little old ladies were trying to get by him when we were walking up part of the castle. To Dan's credit there was a HUGE like 100 foot drop on one edge of the castle.

Here's some of the great views.

We took an ice cream break on top of the entrance to castle.


Martin walking underneath the grape vines.


Martin and Jake at the very top of the castle, on the right was the 100 foot drop.


Dan in his safe spot still next to the 100 foot drop.


Jake, SO SCARY, off the side of the 100 FOOT DROP.

Also through Jake I made friends with some girls named Diruba and Funda who are AWESOME! They're both students at METU too and we celebrated Diruba's birthday on Friday night. So fun! It was great to see how "real" students live here and, of course, it was just like students everywhere, AKA making due with what you have and drinking a lot of beer.

Then the next morning their neighbor friends invited us to breakfast and it was really great! We played trivial pursuit after breakfast which was an exercise in their English translation abilities since the whole game was in Turkish. Either way it was really great and later that evening we went to my very first dance club in Turkey! Horray! Haha it was literally a live band singing American pop music! Haha so good.

So yeah basically I feel way more settled in to living here now. I can (sort of) manage the crazy bus schedules, (sort of) find my way around, I (sort of) have a good sense of the city, and I can (sort of) count to ten in Turkish. I'm sure it'll get easier, slowly, but surely.