Summer?        The Bartering System       Games Night                                                                                             The Blob,  Vol. 3, Issue 2, March 2008
Saturday March 1st, 2008

Summer?
So it seems that summer has arrived.  We went out biking last week-end on Buyukada (the big island) and it was very beautiful.  Two Wednesdays ago, we cancelled our American Football activity because there was a foot of snow on the field and this past Wednesday I was running around in shorts!!! So cool! :)
A family came over to visit Mark last week-end who had five kids!  Three of them were entranced playing solitaire on my computer while the youngest

girl cooked me some Chinese food made from checkers in a blue cup. ;)
My Indonesian friend on the right has an interesting biology which causes him to sweat in the cold.  Needless to say that he's quite enjoying the warm weather just now.
Alex on the left is from Austria and he just returned home this past week.  I'm very sad to see him go - he gave me the best hugs!  He was like 6'5" and he lifted me off the ground! :)
Toni, diagonal left, just got here this year and is enjoying nannying and learning Turkish.

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Thursday March 6th, 2008
The Bartering system . . .
is alive and well in Turkey. My co-teacher helped me put my motorbike up for sale on a Turkish website. Two days later we had five web responses. One fellow wanted to trade me a new Nokia cell phone, another wanted to trade me his laptop, another wanted to trade me for a yellow scooter, another wanted me to accept his credit card and the fifth wanted the price lowered (more what I was expecting). Absolutely hilarious! :)
Tomorrow I'm planning to ride it away from campus
forever. :( My co-teacher lives closer to the city so it makes better sense to leave it there for easier viewing. She brought me some fun times last year, but now it's time to say adieu. May she find a great new owner who'll take better care of her than the previous one to me.
On the right is the heli pad at my school - yep, that's the kind of place where I work. My school is owned by a rich family in Turkey who are said to own half of the country. When some of them visit the campus, they arrive in style. A couple of security guards were actually around it the whole time it was parked to protect it from the
students I guess. Security is a big thing in this country. You have to pass metal detectors to get into the malls!!! We also have to pass through security to get into our school but my motorbike is small enough to pass through the gate so I just ride on through. It's my home, right? ;)

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Sunday March 9th, 2008

Games Night
So we had another games night last night.  We introduced Desmond to Settlers and we played two games. I took the first game after stealing the longest road from Desmond right at the end and then Scott took the second game leaving him enthroned as the current Lord of Catan. Feeling the call back to our boyhoods, we decided to pull out Monopoly and go all out. As you can see, Scott was a little distraught when he landed on New York and went bankrupt. Sweet vengeance! ;) Desmond hung in a little longer but not having any set except for the railroads made it a little difficult for him. :)
Fuad, a Russian friend, was supposed to join us but he actually looked up the game duration time on the internet and planned his schedule around that (busy social life that boy has!). He had to leave before we even got started playing! He obviously didn't know what 'games night' meant.  We'll se you next time Fuad . . . :)

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