This morning I woke up before nine (which is usually absurd for a Sunday morning) to Skype with Kat and Sibylle and make some plans for our trip to Turkey. We’ll be sticking in + around Istanbul (pays + province), instead of trying to extend ourselves down the whole of the western coastline. I doubt we could make it too far south anyways, with missiles headed toward the border with Syria.*

I do hope we can make it to see some of the Black Sea coastline. But Istanbul is on the water – straddling it, even – so I’m sure I’ll be astounded by everything anyways.

I’ll start making lists. I’m excited. I hope the dude with a potentially Chinese/Korean last name on my curling team (we haven’t met yet) doesn’t have to take a game off for the (lunar) new year. It would give me an extra day in Turkey. I’ll see what the schedule is like and then I can book my flights.

* My friend L and her husband have spent the last several months in Jordan studying Arabic. It must be so… iunno, different/awful to be so close to civil war, when you’ve grown up in relative security. I wonder how Turkey will feel. L has roots in Syria and her fam is quite involved in the Syrian community in the GTA, and I think she’s been involved in relief efforts since moving to Amman, so it must be all the more difficult.

When I was dreaming up the ~gap year that constitutes the first year of this blog, I’d made hypothetical plans to study in Damascus for a semester (you know, between a hypothetical internship in Europe and a semester in China… a girl can dream, until the economy falls out). I had no idea what it was like under Assad. And now it’s like this.

My short reference to the war and the violence followed by [Ooer! Black Sea!] reminds me of something I once heard on RNW. I’ll find the clip later.

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