the turquoise trail

{Friday November 1st}  We had an early start this morning with breakfast at 5:30. Dr. T has told us all that we need to be punctual today so hopefully that goes well. We did got on the bus at 6am this morning; we have about 700km of driving to do today so it will be a long day.  Around 8 we stopped for a quick bathroom break.   Around 10 we stopped for another quick bathroom break; w e had a couple more hours of driving until we arrived in Konya around noon. The residents of the province of Konya are very traditionally Islam in comparison to where we have been. Our first stop today will be to see a mausoleum (originally a monastery for the whirling dervishes).  There are several tombs inside a mosque like structure, with concrete hats sitting on them to represent the hats of the whirling dervishes, and that it's a man buried there.  After we'd seen that, we went around the corner to a restaurant for lunch. It was quite good, mom and I shared a ...

{Thursday October 31st}  We got up around 7:30 again this morning and got ready for the day. We had a slightly different breakfast this morning.. Same basics but we also had an egg and vegetable casserole. We left our hotel around 9 and headed towards Pamukkale.  This morning we started with a Turkish language lesson. The English language belongs to the Europe-indo language group. The Turkish language belongs to the Altaic group of languages.  English is an inflectional language meaning we have root words, with exceptions (for example stood; root word stand is not found within stood).  Turkish is an aglotinitive language meaning you have a root word and then many suffixes (for example root word eye, plus one suffix is glasses, plus two suffixes is optometrist - no exceptions) After about an hour and a half, we stopped at a gas station with a store for a bathroom break. I bought some really nice lotion with olive oil in it (smells amazing!) and got some...