Turkey, Greece Recap. 
Ah… back in Nice.  We arrived home and were quickly reminded that when we took our apartment, the landlord said that the internet had already been paid up until the end of October by the last tenant.  After that, it would be shut off.  Well that went by fast!  So now we are reduced to taking our laptops to the university on our day off to use the wireless internet.  We are going to try and set up something for the last two months, but it sounds like the company only works on a year-long contract basis.
Our traditional dinner in Turkey was awesome.  We had a spicy chicken stew with rice and salad.  We had wonderful conversation.  The next night we all met up for dinner again at Jimmy’s restaurant and Adam and I paid (the Euro sure makes a cushy conversion to the Turkish Lira).  Another testament to the Turkish hospitality: the night before we left Turkey we went down to the Taxi place to order a cab for the next day.  Right away 5 cab drivers usher us in from the cold, offer us their seats and make us tea.  They each introduce themselves and they just start chatting us up.  We said we were Canadian, and this one nice old guy said his daughter was going to America to study English and he wondered if I could become her email-pen-pal so she could practice English.  I obliged, we finished our tea, and we left 20 minutes later with a cab ordered, warm tea in our bellies, and one additional Turkish pen-pal.  This is just a normal occurrence here.  All in all, we enjoyed our experience in Turkey - from smoking traditional Nagile or “Hookah” from a Turkish water pipe, to eating kebaps for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  One of the things we thought was the coolest was that in every large city, five times a day (once at sunrise, 3 times in the afternoon, and again at sunset), they broadcast a Muslim traditional prayer song/chant over giant city-wide loudspeakers mounted on each one of the Mosques (churches).  It eerily reverberates through all the buildings and the streets.  I’ll tell ya – that first one at sunrise… it’s quite the alarm clock.  The point of it is to remind Muslims to pray to Mecca (East) 5 times a day.
Our trip back was long: one cab, two planes, three trains, and two busses – but we managed to cram it into one long day from 8am to 1am and just read some really good books along the way.  Next weekend we are going up to Paris for the weekend to do the typical touristy stuff that you gotta do while in France: Eiffel Tower, Louvre… etc.  Adam is taking off with Jordo in a few weeks and I will miss him… but I will also finally have some undisrupted study time (it’s not his fault, I’m easily disrupted).  Perfect timing for exams!  It turns out that Christmas is a big deal in Nice and the city is setting up Christmas lights all over the Promenade along the coast and along our street.  We will take pictures once it’s in action!
Hope you’re all doing well!
Love,
Erin & Adam