Travelling teacher

I arrived into San Francisco airport in the early afternoon to a nice, mild, low-twenties temperature, and after spending over an hour on the runway waiting for the plane at our gate to depart, we were able to get off at last. Border patrol, although not as friendly as some, was less scary than I was anticipating (turns out the school I'm at has been working pretty hard together with the airport to make things fairly effortless for us internationals), and I made it through unscathed. Everyone else in the airport was super friendly and helpful, and before long I was sitting in my rental car trying to adjust my brain to driving from the passenger side.  After a few close calls and providing some mild entertainment for onlookers from my epic driving skills, I found a McDonald's I could scab WiFi from to load Google directions and off I went on my merry way. San Francisco, I've decided, is not much fun to drive through, particularly in their five hour long "rush hour...

As beautiful and sobering as my experience of Gallipoli was, I was excited to get on the road and see some of the history and landscapes of Turkey. Our first stop was Troy. My favourite part was the Trojan horse in its unashamedly obvious touristic nature, even with little windows! But the actual ruins of the city of Troy were pretty awesome.  Troy had been destroyed and rebuilt so many times, that the ruins had been identified as originating from several different eras of Troy built in the same spot. They had little markers to represent which of the cities of Troy the ruins came from. Some of the mud bricks remaining were about 5000 years old, which was mind blowing!           We then headed to Pergamum and Asklepion, the oldest hospital in the world, where there were some beautiful Corinthian style pillars still remaining. Most of my prior interactions with historical sites in Europe had been from the Roman era, and Turkey was my first real en...

Turkey, what can I say? If you're a fan of honey, pistachios, beautiful places, kind people, and rich history, you need to go to Turkey. My bus tour was with Travel Talk, and started in Istanbul. We visited all the must sees, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Palace, and also had some free time in which I discovered the most glorious dessert place ever!  Everyone was very kind, from the greeting at my arrival at the airport to the moment I left, I found the Turkish people to show a generosity and hospitality I had not expected, one extended in part because of our history fighting against each other, which blew my mind, but more on that soon.  Hagia Sophia has apparently been under renovation for somewhere between 10 and 20 years, so it was hard to get away from the semi-permanent   scaffolding, but it was a sight to see. It was unique in that it had been a church first, then a mosque, and now is a museum, so had remaining signs of its different uses historically...