There and Back Again

So, Today I am writing to you from Istanbul, Turkey. I haven’t journaled for a while, so i thought this was a good excuse to start again.

I am here with Melissa and some of our friends, Bethany, Kim, Courtlyn, and Tim. Are main objective, other than to see Turkey, is painting a mural here in Istanbul. I will try to post a pic of it. it has been a great trip so far, good food, good weather, good people.

The mural theme is Kadikoy, showing some of the main sights and common elements of that section of Istanbul. We are hopeful that the wall will no longer be covered in graffiti, especially during and after our painting process.

~Daoud

Before the Mural

Basic blocking of color

I am aslan! (lion in Turkish)

The blueprints

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Well, I am off to Nicaragua!

That is assuming nothing odd happens and i don’t make it on the plane…  I am super excited for this trip.  I am going with a varied group of people (most from the church at Slate Hill Mennonite), and we will be building a church building near Leon, Nicaragua.  misc facts, it will be warm (85s this week), but not as warm as PA right now.  It will probably rain alot, thunderstorms are in the forcast.  I think they had a hurricane a week or so ago?  I am taking some fun toys to hopefully give away down there, frisbee (of course) soccer ball, and to inspire artists, a water colour set.

It felt so awesome to leave work friday, now granted i left late because i was trying to wrap up lots of lose ends for being away this week, but it was sweet.  When i walked out the door and locked up, it felt like i was about to spend a day at the beach.  yes, that exciting!  they heat helped that feeling.

pray for travel, and good experiences.  also that we get the building done.  power lines are down from a bad storm last week, so we are renting a generator (hopefully) and may need to use more hand tools than we expected to.  but of course things won’t go as smoothly working on a construction site in latin america like it would around here – which is what i am used to.

I am off to the airport, and will be back next monday sometime.

I blame it all on the warm weather.  I have been totally distracted at work this week.  I have also been very interested in not work things (while at work) like waiting for the latest version of xubuntu to come out this week so that i could try it on my eeepc, reading up about the specs for the new eeepc 900, and installing a couple versions of linux on usb thumb drive to test out on the eee before i wipe the default install it comes with.  Oh, and googling hardware hacks like adding bluetooth support (bought a usb addon for it today), and adding GPS sensors (haven’t picked one yet).  There are some way cool hacks out there…

So right now i sit here watching xubuntu slowly install itself from the ‘livecd’ running on one partition of the usb drive, to another partition on the same drive.  probably not a smart idea because it is dog slow.  Oh, and i am waiting for dinner to cook and for the office to come on at 9.  woo!

I do have some exciting news to share, which i have neglected to mention to much of anyone (time has been just passing me by).  I am going to Nicaragua in June!  wee.  I am excited to have something fun and new to look forward to.  It is a service project near Leon (30 mins from the pacific coast).  We will be working on building a block church building, and living in tents!  I don’t know anyone else on the trip (yet), but that is part of the exciting part of it i guess.  It reminds me of when i went to mexico while at messiah, i only sorta new 2 people on that trip.  More updates later i am sure, my rammen is done and i needs to eat!

The long awaited story is finally here for your viewing pleasure. Unfortunately I had posted a day pic regarding this several weeks ago, thinking I would relate the story in short order. But obviously that didn’t happen. Hopefully no-one has looked at my day pics (what a sad thought!) and therefore the supprised has been saved.

The story goes thusly. I went down to Florida back at the end of May. Mike Bert had invited me to join his family oh their trip to visit family and amusement parks in good ole’ FL, and I happily agreed. (many thanks to his family for including me) As a brief overview, the time was initially spent at the Magic Kingdom and MGM parks, followed by a last day of park fun at Universal. This is where we join our protagonist. (it has been so long since HS lit, I hope I am not embarrasing myself)

The day started out clear and bright, a perfect day to take in some thrills. First up where some fun new rides and attractions (i had never been to Universal before), such as MiB, where you get to shoot real aliens!, and much walking around. Then we continued on around the park and came across the Fear Factor Live stage, (not to be confused with the tv show, this was a park experience *based* on the tv show) and Mike’s brother Jonathon said “lets wait here, I want to get on this thing!” Ok, so his exact words escape me, this was like a month ago after all! If you went and stood in this line 45 minutes or so before the next show, you got an opportunity to try out to be one of the contestants. Well, I thought this was plain silly, who wanted to wait around for a whole hour just to try to be in a show where you would probably have as much fun simply watching the other fools acting like … fools?

Somewhere along the line Mike’s mom insisted that Mike and I try out to, because “we might regret it since we are here now and won’t ever be again!”. Hm, well I kinda obliged and joined the long line of 3 ppl. Mike somehow managed to get a phone call and snuck out of the line, I am not sure how he managed such fortuitus timing. I on the other hand remained in line, and decided that this might just be worth doing. Well, it seems like they have pretty stringent size and weight restrictions because of their ‘one-size-fits-all’ security gear, So I got bounced by the guy with the ‘you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride’ measuring stick, although in all fairness it was a ‘you-must-not-be-any-taller-than-this’ stick. I was a whole half inch to tall to compete! how lame, I bet i would have won a cool shirt.

No the story doesn’t end there. It seems they try to persuade the suckers they disqualify (me and another dude 10 pounds over the weight restriction) that they can still be part of the fun, they just have to eat some ‘food’. The quotes are quite appropriate. They would not tell us what the food was (has anyone not seen fear factor? this isn’t rice pudding type fare), only that it would be in smoothie form, about 4 or 5 ounces of it. The trick would be to drink it all before the other team of two. Fun. After like 45 minutes of just siting around the time came. The fear factor show was in full swing, and I was siting there wondering if it would be rude to get up and leave.

So, since I am rambling and not moving this story on, I will skip to the ‘thing’ itself. The smoothie was made from the following ingredients.

1. Fish heads, rancid squid, icky oyster (with bits of shell) all marinated in their own juices
2. Mystery meat (???)
3. Something else… I forget
4. Sour milk
5. and the final last minute surprise, wriggling meal worms and grasshoppers!

Pulse to taste!

This yielded a nasty brownish ‘liquid’ that was more lumpy than it was fluid. Drinking it? I must confess that in the excitement of the moment I failed to notice the taste. I did notice the texture, boy was there a lot of texture. I was so engrossed in the experience of drinking this, that I almost forgot that we were in a race to down this noxious concoction, So I quickly downed the last of my drink, to lose to the other team by .000023 seconds. What a rip off!

Heh, so it was fun anyways, and I didn’t puke. Although the wisdom of having nasty stuff in your stomach at the outset of a fun day riding roller coasters could be called into question. The most anoying thing was that I kept belching sour milk burps, and the taste was NOT enjoyable to continually relive.

Thats all for now folks!