Today was A’s first day of training. It was pretty easy to drop her off at the right building in the morning, but as I pulled away I realized she’d taken the directions with her! That’s what I get for letting her navigate! (Just kidding.) I managed to find my way back to the hotel, even though I had to take various exits and ramps to avoid ending up in the LAX parking lot. On the way, I passed a Budget Car Rental store with a sign outside saying “Don’t Get Lost, Rent a GPS” and I wished Hertz had that option too!

I knocked around in the hotel room for about an hour and then I got on the road to Long Beach. I was due to meet Maria at 11:00, and I got to the aquarium much faster than I had expected to! I talked to my mom on the phone a little bit, and then when Maria arrived we went inside. I think we were the only “tourists” there, but there were at least five school groups, so we ended up swarmed by children more than once. It was pretty cool though, because we got to pet rays and even a shark! I have never touched a shark before, though I did read Sevengill growing up, so I knew about the denticles. It was just a little bitty shark though, I think it was a leopard shark. But still, I got to pet a shark!

When we were done at the aquarium, we got lunch at a nearby restaurant and then hopped the free bus over to the Queen Mary. We had bought combo tickets at the aquarium, so it was inexpensive! I am a little bit of a ship geek, so I really enjoyed looking around, though I wish it had been a bit brighter so it would have been easier to read the displays. I would have liked to have gotten a book about her because there was a lot I think I missed - we saw the whole ship, but there must be more story that I missed. I find it strange that she is such an icon of ocean liner travel, when she really only sailed for 31 years, and for many years she was a troop ship during World War II. But the books were all expensive, of course, so I didn’t get anything. We did take a break and got smoothies at an on-board shop, which was kind of cool…but I know there was more story there that we didn’t get. I wish we could have spent a night in the hotel section on the ship, but it’s pretty expensive.

I made it back to El Segundo in about 25 minutes, and I waited 10 minutes, and then A came out, 30 minutes before I was expecting her! We had a boring dinner…just IHOP. I think tomorrow I am going to take the day off and just hang out in the hotel room all day. I can have my leftover Mexican food for lunch before it gets too old…it’s from Saturday night. I have been walking all day for six days in a row: (1) Disneyland, (2) Disneyland, (3) Sea World, (4) Tijuana, (5) Balboa Park, (6) Long Beach. It is time to sit and rest for a while. It was A’s idea, she said she feels reinvigorated after just sitting in a classroom all day. So I will probably do that. And at the same time, I will work on uploading photos from the past two days. The connection here is great, so it should be easy! Unfortunately A accidentally had the camera in her purse all day, so today’s photos were taken with my camera phone…better than nothing though!

Yesterday, Saturday, was such a wonderful day. It started out when I overslept by an hour, but I hit the road and drove into the city to meet eyes_of_cyrene at her hotel. I got there at about 11:30, valet-parked the car, and spent the next 16 hours with one of my best friends, who I don’t get to see very often because she lives in Iowa! First we got something to eat, and went to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and did some shopping at Filene’s Basement, where I got a new purse. We went back to her hotel and chatted for a while, and then we went to dinner in Chinatown. She taught me about beer! I have no idea what all I had - this was at RFD and we got lots of samples - but the one I liked the best basically tasted like raspberry juice. (She said - “yeah, except this will get you drunk!”)

We had leftovers when we were done with dinner, so we were going to take them up to the room and then go back down to the hotel bar for another drink. But she realized she’d forgotten her hat at the restaurant, so we went back and picked it up, and then went to the hotel bar. I ordered a “chocolate covered cherries” drink, and I remember it had Godiva liqueur and Smirnoff Black Cherry Twist in it, but there was something else that I don’t remember. Oh, and at no time during the night did I get carded - Gretchen said it was because we were signing, and they assumed I was deaf, and they didn’t want to deal with asking for my ID. (Or hey, I didn’t get carded Friday night either, maybe I finally look old enough to not get carded?) Anyway, we also got shots of the new Bailey’s Flavors…the caramel was very good but the mint chocolate was nothing to write home about.

When the hotel bar closed, we went back to her room and chatted for another couple of hours, and then we took a three-hour nap before it was time to get up so I could take her to the airport! Oh my god, I had such a fabulous time. I seriously did not want to take her to the airport…I wanted to keep her here! I don’t have a huge number of people that I am really close to, and virtually none of them live in the DC area. I had so much fun.

Wednesday was a day of showmanship. I did very little in the morning, just stayed close to the hotel because I knew A’s conference would be letting out around noon. I did make it back down to the Flamingo to take pictures in the habitat, at least.

In the afternoon, we took the shuttle to the Liberace Museum, which was great. I don’t know why I find Liberace cool and Elton John annoying, but I do. The museum has a bunch of his cars and pianos in one building, and then in another building they have his costumes (including one that weighs 200 pounds ) and replicas of some of his rooms. The second building is adjacent to the original restaurant Liberace opened in the 1980s, but that wasn’t open while we were there. The costumes are just astonishing…did you know he was the first entertainer to convince the IRS to allow him to deduct the cost of his costumes when tax time rolled around? The onsite cafe wasn’t that great, but the gift shop was fun - A got this cool shirt to wear for patriotic holidays at work (and so forth); I wanted this shirt but I already bought a Hello Kitty Las Vegas shirt (at the Sanrio store in Fashion Show Mall) and I couldn’t bring myself to spend $35 on this one. I did get the World of Liberace DVD though.

I was a little cranky in the afternoon, but we went to the Bellagio for shopping. The water ballet was performing when we got there, but my camera’s batteries died again. When we were done in the Bellagio, we got a bite to eat in the food court at Caesars Palace. We took a quick nap back in the hotel room and then it was time to go see Penn & Teller! The shuttle from Harrah’s was full of people who had already started drinking, but we made it to the Rio just fine. The show was awesome. I have never seen them live before, and I still don’t think I’ve seen everything…my jaw was hanging open and I was cracking up the whole time! I noticed that Penn has got really amazing hands. He plays the double bass in the preshow band and during the show itself, and obviously he’s a magician, but his hands were just so animated. I kept expecting him to break into sign language, because his hands were always moving into different shapes and I felt like they were communicating. So when the show ended, I realized I wanted to take a picture of his hands. How weird is that? But he let me do it, and so did Teller, who actually talks to the audience after the show. Penn accused me of planning something nefarious involving Photoshop!

We took a taxi into St. George’s and had ourselves dropped off near the Grenada National Museum. It was a very tiny place; one of the major attractions was the marble bathtub used by Josephine Bonaparte when she was a child in Martinique. There were also exhibits on Grenada’s relationship with Great Britain, and the history of Grenada’s political turmoil during the mid-20th century. The first building was awfully cramped and dark, but after stepping outside and around a corner the second building (upstairs from the first?) had more space and light. The current highlight was an art exhibition, which was very nice. Another exhibit that interested me was the model of Grenada; it gave me a much better sense of the island’s physical layout than I’d had previously. After leaving the museum we stopped off at a convenience store (”Low Budget Drug Store” to be exact) to pick up some conditioner, because A and I knew our hair was going to be in awful shape from the salt water. We then visited two arty-crafty type stores, and C bought an expensive batik shirt in one of them. We wandered through the city for a while after that, ducking briefly into a supermarket and getting persistently invited for a tour of the fish market before getting ourselves lost by going in circles. :R: finally decided that we should split up, so he and A went one direction and C and I headed…up the hill. St. George’s seems to be on two very different levels, with major climbs and long staircases between them. C and I still managed to walk in a circle, so when I ducked into a bookstore to apply more sunblock (my shoulders had felt like they might be burning) we also picked up a map of the island. We wanted to sit down for a bit and look it over, so we headed toward the only semi-recognizable place: a “Royal Castle” that looked awfully like a White Castle (I didn’t see a single McDonald’s or other chain anywhere). On the way there, I had ended up a few feet ahead of C and found myself getting ogled a bit. He went to stand in line for sodas while I sat at a booth and started looking over the map, and I could feel the eyes of the young men at the next table boring into me and trying to get me to look up (I didn’t). When C came to the table, I put my arm around him in an attempt to discourage the guys…but it didn’t work, so I didn’t look up from the map the entire time we were there. C finally managed to figure out where we were and how to get where we wanted to be, so we set off again. We made it to the Carenage and peeked in a couple of shops before deciding to head back. It occurred to me that we should get some food before heading back to the Land Of Expensive Eating (aka our resort), so we wandered back to Hughes Street and stopped at the Island Thyme Cafe. I was delighted with their veggie pizza - it had lots of oregano, some carrots, and other vegetables. It only came in a whole pizza, so I had plenty to bring home, but Grenadian pizza seems to be thin crust so I ate it up fairly quickly because it wasn’t very filling. We caught a cab back to the hotel.

Travel and Ankara

We rode to Ankara the next morning, and had lunch just outside the city. We were only scheduled to see Anit Kabir (Atatürk’s mausoleum), but our guide decided to move the museum visit up one day so we could get an early start to Istanbul. We got the first rain of the trip while at the mausoleum, but it was just a light rain that didn’t get you very wet. It was fairly cold, though, so we hurried into the building where Atatürk’s cenotaph stands. He’s actually buried several feet below the marker, but that’s not immediately obvious because it’s shaped sort of like a sarcophagus. We waited a few minutes for the rain to end, and by the time we got outside it was sunny again. There are two other exhibits at the site; the one showcasing his personal effects was crowded but nobody seemed interested in the cars he used. Turkey’s second president, Ismet Inönü, is buried across the courtyard from the building housing Atatürk’s marker, and the next thing you see is, of course, the gift shop. They had what looked like interesting books, but the titles were all in Turkish and the cashiers were already busy so I didn’t bother asking. We went to the Anadolu Medeniyetleri Müzesi (Museum of Anatolian Civilizations) next, which at the time I found boring, but looking back on it I liked seeing pretty much all of what was there. I had hoped the gift shop would have jewelry replicating the ancient pieces, but all they had was the same stuff we saw just about everywhere else at about twice the price. We finally made it to our hotel, where we had a served dinner rather than buffet-style. They already planned for the possibility of vegetarians, so my girlfriend and I ordered omelets. They weren’t expecting anyone to be allergic to chocolate, though, so I declined the dessert they offered everyone. I was very surprised when a waiter brought out a plate with an orange and an apple! We tried to go to the hotel’s art gallery after dinner, but it was closed. Instead we realized that we needed to visit an ATM, so I asked at the front desk where to find one. We tried to follow the directions, but it was dark and vaguely scary (I thought) so we turned back. I tried asking at the desk again, and they actually sent a bellhop to show us the way. He walked us about one long city block, and sure enough there was the Yapi Kredi building. I tried to withdraw 300 million lira, but the machine refused. I tried 100 million, and again no luck. I tried 10 million to see if I could get any money - and it gave me that. It even gave me 50 million all at once, so I slowly coaxed 210 million lira out of the machine. my girlfriend warned me that my card might not work by the time we got home, because they might notice two failed attempts for a lot of money followed by several successful small transactions.

Cappadocia Day One

Now that we’ve come inland a bit, it’s easier to get away with wearing only one shirt. In the larger coastal cities, if we wore just a turtleneck or t-shirt all the men stared at us. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t happen to the older women in our group. We’ve found ourselves wearing a sweatshirt or other overshirt in addition to whatever else we’re wearing; my girlfriend noticed even the local girls who don’t cover their hair still layer their clothing as we are. They don’t seem to stare as much in Cappadocia, fortunately. I was glad to see a variety of cereals at breakfast. They still had corn flakes, but they also had sweetened corn flakes, a granola-type cereal, and a few I couldn’t identify. Unfortunately the orange drink is only almost bearable, as it’s obviously Tang. We went to the Göreme Open Air Museum in the morning. I was impressed by what the ancient Christians could do with a piece of rock, but felt antsy the whole time. Lunch was awfully boring; our guide later said it used to be a good place but apparently the management changed. In the afternoon we went to one of Cappadocia’s numerous pottery factories. We were given a demonstration of how they make the painted plates, and then we were taken for a demonstration of their red clay work. When the artist had finished making a teapot, the factory guide asked for a volunteer. Nobody else was speaking up, so I went ahead and raised my hand. He gave me a pair of clown-type pants, in orange and of course way too big for me. I couldn’t kick the wheel and follow instructions at the same time, so the artist kept the wheel going and helped me make the shape. I’m not sure what I was supposed to be making, but because of the hole in the bottom we decided it was a flowerpot. By the time I got my hands scrubbed clean, the group had moved on to the “we gave you a tour, now buy our expensive stuff” room. We liked a lot of the pieces (including an Artemis statue about 5 feet tall for nearly $8000), but just couldn’t afford any of it. After dinner most of the group went to a folklore night, which included native dancing and belly dancing. The native girls had several beautiful costumes, and I noticed they made noises similar to those the Hungarian girls made when we saw the Hungarian dance performance. They didn’t seem to be calling to each other as the Hungarians did, but the noise was the same high-pitched trilling. The belly dancer wasn’t very good, but she recruited a member of our group and a Chinese tourist for a play lesson - she made both of them take off their shirts and imitate what she was doing. The drinks were free, so in addition to peach juice and lemon Fanta, I also tried a bit of raki, an alcoholic drink made with anise. It smelled like licorice all right, but it tasted awful. In about the middle of the show, the native dancers pulled everybody out of their seats and tried to lead us in a dance. It was mostly chaos, but I finally recognized it as a hora.