Georgia! I'm going to Georgia!

This coming Monday is Kurban Bayramı, the commemoration of Abraham's devotion and obedience to God for almost sacrificing his son Ishmael (yeah, not Isaac like in Christianity). So there's a big feast and its a really family oriented holiday and I was going to go with Tugba to her hometown of Gaziantep, but Tugba got a call from work on Tuesday that she was going to INDONESIA for work.

So for a while I was going to be stuck in Ankara while other people traveled around Turkey, but I lucked out and joined my friends on their trip to Georgia! Whoo hoo! In Georgia, a Christian country, we plan on eating lots of pork and drinking the excellent wine that Georgia is known for. We're going to Batumi on the Black Sea(!), formerly the largest beachfront resort in the Soviet Union. Then we're heading to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for lots of old churches and excellent Georgian food.


(click photo to expand, from http://www.map-of-turkey.com/map-of-turkey2.jpg)

Yay! I'm really excited to get out of Turkey for a little bit and see some of the surrounding countries. What's really cool about Turkey is if you look at it on a map it really is the center of the world. It's almost in Europe, Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. I'm going to country that speaks Russian, but right next to it is also Armenia, a Caucus country. Then there's Iraq, Iran, and Syria AKA the Middle East, bordering Turkey as well. And you can't forget that Turkey also borders Europe. What's really cool is that Turkey used to own many parts of these surrounding countries when it was the Ottoman Empire.

Before I came to Turkey I heard over and over again about how it's a mix of East and West, but seriously there is no where else that is so clearly located at the crossroads of so many different cultures.