Plants vs. Zombies

I’m sitting here listening to the call to prayer at the end of a wonderful Sabbath. The minarets here are comparable to church steeples in Utah—they’re EVERYWHERE. As you drive through Istanbul you weave in and out of hills and valleys, each climb ending in a gorgeous view of a valley covered with brightly colored buildings…with pointy minarets poking out all over the place. Istanbul is like the cactus of geographical locations. The geography here actually reminds me a lot of Israel’s, and the housing is exactly the same, packed tight on every front, except that here it’s all different colors instead of the law-mandated white limestone required for all house fronts in Jerusalem.

So I woke up and got ready for the day and then headed down to breakfast. Oh my goodness. Can I tell you how much I love the Mediterranean? The table had an array of small white dishes full of different kinds of cheeses and olives. There was a basket of bread and different varieties of jams and honeys. My favorite was this rose honey—it’s like honey with rose petals in it. Scrumptious. It was heavenly. After breakfast I looked up the address of the church branch here in Istanbul and Zavfish and I headed out. I’m glad we left an hour early, because Zavfish had a hard time finding the building. He stopped multiple times to ask people for directions and finally took me into this huge Catholic church where a priest named Zadik showed us where to go.

The branch here is small, but stalwart. There are maybe 30 people on a good day, they say. I met some dear people though, one of whom was named Shanna. She is probably somewhere in her early 50’s and is from Utah. She’s in the process of getting her master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies and is here by herself for 8 weeks to learn Turkish at a University. We became immediate friends and she said she would love to do things together in the evenings sometimes…she sounded pretty lonely. I can imagine.

When I came home the house was all a-bustle with preparations for our summer vacation. That’s right. We leave Wednesday morning for Chesme in Izmir on the Western Coast of Turkey. Supposedly it’s very near to Greece and you can see some of the islands from the beaches we’ll be at. We fly out Wednesday morning (the driver will drive all of our things down on Tuesday so that we don’t have to deal with luggage at the airport—it’s an 8-hour drive) and will be gone for 2 weeks. I think we might also go to Bodrum. Both are hopping tourist destinations with yachting, beaches, and buzzing markets. I’m really, really excited. There actually isn’t internet in their house there, so I’ll have to post all my writings about it when I get back.

Okay, so media here is hilarious. The TV is on 24-7, even while the kids sleep, and is pretty much in every room of the house, including at the kitchen table. The funny thing is that Disney is the most frequented station and most of the shows are the teeny-bopper ones in America, but with dubbed-over Turkish. I wonder what it’s like for kids in other countries to grow up watching shows where the characters’ mouths are never quite in sync with what they’re saying. Although, it’s funny because you can tell the dubbed-over voices are trying to speak in a way that makes their mouths move like on the screen…pretty much the funniest thing ever. But something I realized while in France and that’s been confirmed here is that Americans have HUGE mouths. We open our mouths so much when we talk!!! Classy.

So, TV=funny. But one of my favorite moments since being here was when Zeynep decided she wanted to show me her favorite computer game. Name of the game? Plants vs. Zombies. No joke. The game consists of you strategically planting a variety of verdure with different offensive capabilities to defeat the zombies. If you lose, the zombies eat your brain. A male voice shouts, “Nooooooooooooo!!!” and slimy green writing pops over the entire screen saying, “Zombies ate your brain!” AHHAHAHA!!! Who thinks of these things? Someone pretty awesome. My favorite was when it looked like Zeynep was going to lose and I asked her if the zombies were going to eat her brain, but she managed to kill the threatening ones off and told me, “No. If again they will come they will eat my brain.” It was so RAD hearing that come from a 7-year-old in all sincerity.

Agh! This is already getting so long, but I have so much more to write! There’s so much to say about this place! The Ustunberks live in this gated community of extremely wealthy people…birds of a feather kind of thing. Anyway, there’s a large community pool and cabana club that we went to yesterday since Zeynep didn’t want to swim in their backyard pool. They eat dinner late here. We ate out on the patio at around 8:30 after I played sports with the kids outside. Dinner was FABulous. Gyro-type meatballs, tomato/cucumber/onion salad, marinated green beans…I can’t tell you how good the food is. It’s funny, the kids usually eat a little bit of whatever we’re having and then their favorite thing to eat is “spaghetti” with ketchup on it. (They call every kind of pasta “spaghetti” here, as well as calling every kind of women’s swimwear a bikini, including my very conservative one-piece. Haha.)

I’m going to leave it here for now, even though I could go on for days. I’ll probably try to get one more post up before we leave for Izmir, but then it will be nothing for two weeks, unless I can find an internet café to use. Hope everyone’s doing well.