Turkey: Where East Meets West

So, I'm heading home tomorrow and I have yet to tell about my past week spent in Turkey. When we arrived in Prague Sunday morning, Ana and I literally had 24 hours before we needed to leave for Istanbul. We went to the apartment and slept, and all of us kind of just relaxed. This was the last time I'd see Ekta and Tete, so we were planning to go out on Sunday night, for one last hoorah, but we didn't even make it for a drink! Ana and I had some rearranging to do luggage wise, whereas Tete and Ekta had a few days to pack. We ended up going to sleep relatively early and on Monday morning, Ana and I woke up around 8 AM to head to the airport. Now, remember how I always have the most outrageous things happen to me when I'm travelling? This is certainly a first.

Ana and I woke up at 8 AM, showered, packed, and were ready to go by 8:30 AM. Our flight left at 11:35 AM, so we were giving ourselves plenty of time to reach the airport. We were saying our finals goodbyes to Tete and Ekta, wishing them the best and telling them that we'd see them soon. As we were saying our goodbyes, Ana begins to leave the apartment and opens the door. Well, the only problem was that the door was locked. Yes, that's right, the door was locked. Now, I'm saying goodbye to Tete, and I hear Ana say from the other room, "Oh My God! The door is locked!" This moment seems to last forever in my head, because I knew right away, we were really screwed.

I 100% knew that there was no way to unlock the door without the key. Now, here's why we didn't have a key. Somewhere in Krakow and Berlin, Ana, and her hoards of clothes, souvenirs, and personal items, seems to have misplaced the key to the apartment. Well how did we get in the apartment you ask? Simply by calling the two people that lived there, Chuey and Elvira (an Argentinian and a Russian). The only problem was, even though Tete, Ekta and Ana have cell phones, only Tete and Ana had credit. After calling the people to let us into the apartment, Tete ran out of credit and only had her Portuguese phone to use. So, anyway, we're locked in the apartment.

I totally blame Ekta for this situation because not only was this her THIRD time being locked in somewhere (AIESEC office, Jenny's house in Roztoky, and now this apartment), her bad luck seemed to have come back to haunt us at the worst of possible times. Ana and I had a flight to catch! In three hours! So we thought, what could we do? Chuey and Elvira were at work, because it was a Monday morning. Someone says that they told one of them not to lock the door on their way out, but I'm not sure they got the message. Either way, I could see how they would naturally lock it because most houses, when you lock the front door, don't lock the people inside. I had a few thoughts jump through my mind, like throwing my suitcase out the window and scuffling down the side of the building like Spiderman, but I knew that Ana wouldn't be able to do follow. Tete's phone was with no credit, Ekta's phone was with no credit, but Ana! Ana had one last phone call to make. So she called Chuey.

It was a desperate attempt to cry for help, but he picked up and we tried our best to explain the situation. Poor Chuey, he was always letting us in when we didn't have a key, but this time he couldn't help. He said he was going to call a few people, because someone was supposed to be dropping off an extra key sometime during the day. Luckily, Ana can receive calls without using credit, so when he called back, he just said that he couldn't get a hold of anyone and we would just have to wait. Great…

By this time, I was just completely frustrated and angry. I was doing nothing to help the situation, because I had no phone and no internet and nothing else, so I laid down in bed and just fell back asleep. I took about an hour nap and woke up to Ana telling everyone that she got a hold of one of the other Brazilian interns and he was doing his best to call everyone and try and get us out of the apartment. Eventually at 10:30 AM (2 hours later) we received word that Lessya was coming to drop the keys off. At this point, we were really confused because Lessya was supposed to be back in Kazakhstan, but we figured it was a different Lessya.

Turns out, around 11:00 AM, Lessya shows up at the front door, and in comes our favorite group leader from Kazakhstan! In all the excitement, Ana and I barely had any time to say hello to Lessya or goodbye to Ekta and Tete and we were out the door within 2 minutes. The fresh air couldn't have seemed more refreshing. I knew we were definitely going to miss our flight, and we arrived at the airport around 11:45 AM. Knowing that we are broke college students (I guess college grad for me), the airlines charged us a €50 rebooking fee and our flight left at 18:30. Great. Not only did we have to wait 6 hours at the airport, but we had to pay $60 to change our flight, just because someone locked us in, we had no keys out, and Ekta was with us.

We eventually caught our next flight, arrived in Turkey around 10 PM and began our next journey in a whole other world.

Cooking Up Some Culture

Well, of course today was another adventure on the other side of the world.

We started the day off by meeting in Holesovice Nadrazi (Holesovice Station) and began our day's work in the park nearby. Today we came up with all the night activities for the camp. Among my favorites are:

• International Dance Night: Music from each country is played and each nation has a chance to show traditional dances. I'll be playing hip-hop and rock music (songs they already know), but I will not be preparing any dances.
• Capture the Flag: Run & Directed by me, this night game will give them a chance to paint their faces and their flag and play a crazy game of capture the flag.
• Amazing Race: A game, led by Ekta and I, which has the students do a number of tasks, with only one team winning the title of Amazing Race Champions.
• Talent Show
• Mr. & Miss MBM: A slightly modified version of Mr. Mullen or Mr. Fordham--a chance for some camp participants to show off their stuff and compete for the title of Mr. & Miss MBM

The park was the perfect place to get our creative juices flowing, and we ended up finishing early. Jenny stopped by in the afternoon to check up and see how we were progressing. She also had some gifts for us--our money for our monthly passes and some money for food. In total it was about 1350 CZK for me, which is about $65. Perfect!

After we finished, we went to the bus station to book our bus tickets for our trip in between the camps. It's official, we're going to Vienna and Budapest. Our bus tickets are as follows:

• Brno--Vienna: July 13, 2010 <15:15 departure -- 18:00 arrival>
• Vienna--Budapest: July 15, 2010 <19:00 departure -- 21:50 arrival>
• Budapest--Brno: July 18, 2010 <9:15 departure -- 14:30 arrival>

This means we have Tuesday and Wednesday night in Vienna and Thursday, Friday and Saturday night in Budapest. I'm really excited to go. Especially because we'll have had such a crazy schedule during camp, it'll be a great break to see Eastern Europe and explore places outside of Prague. I'm still working on seeing Turkey after the camp ends, but so far I've already got my first week planned out. I'm going to Berlin with Lessya and Ana because both of them have friends in Berlin right now. We'll stay there for a few days (3 max) and come back to Prague. We'll be in Prague for one night, and head to Krakow, Poland for another 3 day trip. The middle of this trip will be dedicated to seeing Auschwitz Concentration Camp.  After the trip to Poland, I'm not sure what to do. Tickets to Turkey are about $300 round trip, which is much more than I expected. We'll see what my budget allows. I'm still surprised that all three of my bus tickets to Brno-Vienna-Budapest-Brno cost less than my ridiculously priced haircut the other day. The girls nicely pointed that out to me.

After buying tickets, I had to go to Tesco with Harrison, Lessya and Aysegul to buy the last of our Global Village ingredients. I found tortillas, cheese, and some chili/salsa to put in my burritos. The beans have been cooking for 3 hours now, and of course I didn't listen to my mom when she told me to make sure they were covered with water because they'll expand and absorb the water...so halfway through cooking the beans, I checked the pot, to find almost no water and the beans about to overflow out of the pot. I did some rearranging and now the beans should be OK. They still have a few more hours to cook.

For having never really cooked that much in my life, living over here has been a real challenge for Chef Regis. I think it's funny how all of us living here at Jenny's (Lessya, Ekta, and Aysegul) have never really cooked in our lives. We're all preparing "traditional" dishes from our countries...all for the very first time. I've never made beans and its funny that we're using Czech students as guinea pigs for our experiments in the kitchen. Aysegul is making a cous cous dish, with pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, and spring onions. I've tried a small plate and it is quite good. Ekta is attempting to make curry (she get's mad when I say attempting) and Lessya is going to make beef empanadas --a la Kazakh. We're all laughing at our attempts at cooking.

Speaking of cooking abilities, I was quite shocked today when we were at the grocery store and I was looking for things to cook for dinner. I knew at the apartment we didn't have much in terms of groceries, but I decided to suck it up and just make something. If anything, we had eggs, potatoes, onions, garlic, and a few other things, so I could make a concoction of sorts. While perusing the meats section, I didn't feel like beef, chicken or pork, but I did find some tasty little morsels of rabbit. So I bought it, having no idea what to do with it. When I got home, I Googled "how to cook rabbit" and found some pretty funny stuff, but there was a link on the first page led me to the answer, "Excellent rabbit seasonings include parsley, rosemary, sage, bay leaf, lemon-grass, coriander, and basil." Hrmm...I know Jenny has spices and I just found out that Ekta has a bunch of spices in her bag, so...what the heck. I cut it up in thin pieces, rubbed some spices on it, threw it in some olive oil and BAM! it was done. I boiled a few potatoes to go on the side, and the result was a delicious feast that not only surprised myself but my tastebuds as well. Here's a picture:

It was delicious. I got to even torment vegetarian Ekta, asking her to guess what "innocent" animal I was eating today. She was only slightly amused. As for tomorrow, after the Global Village and Meet & Greet, we'll be going out around Prague. This weekend there are a bunch of free concerts going on around Prague (United Islands), so we're going to try and catch a few and enjoy the night free of work. Sunday, Ana, Tete, Zhou Lin, Harrison and I plan to go to mass and then finish all the projects and work we didn't get done the past few days. Until next time, take care!