Home Again, Home Again, Dancing a Jig

Hello, lovely people! I'm back stateside again, and by the look of my remaining vacation days, I won't be going anywhere else anytime soon. But that's okay--I'm ready for a stretch of settled, unexciting routine.

The trip was nice: a day in Istanbul, and then a few days in Antalya in the south. Our main purpose in going was to provide familial support for my father-in-law at an engineering conference he was directing, and to be there for his 65th birthday. So most of our week was spent lying around the pool, doing a little sightseeing, and stuffing our faces with delicious Turkish food. Oh, and I had my first visit to a Turkish bath, which was kind of hilarious. Burke Williams it is not.

Never in my childhood would I have imagined that I would end up spending so much time in Turkey. I used to dream that I would marry someone named Toby or Todd who would come from somewhere like Virginia and have two brothers that I would play practical jokes on. But life doesn't turn out like our daydreams, and it would probably be pretty boring if it did. When I first started running around with my future husband, I got a fair amount of warnings and "Not Without My Daughter" references from well-meaning people who didn't know any better. Turkey defies any Middle Eastern expectations you may have, with its secular government and a split population of both of both modern Western and conservative Eastern people. It still faces its share of challenges (as I realized when I discovered that access to Blogger is blocked there right now), but it's a remarkable country and a great place to travel.

I'm feeling refreshed and ready to face the world again, and my ambition is creeping back. We're already a week into May, and I've got a lot of stuff I still want to do this month. Fortunately, the 5 a.m. wake-up time enforced by my jetlag is making me productive. Also, today is my own personal new year's day, and there's no time like the new year to get a fresh start. I'm ready to rumble!

All the horrors that await you in southern Turkey