And the orientation week of hell only continues...

So my retardedness only gets better and better. Last night, while boarding a bus after getting dinner in town I sprained THE OTHER ANKLE while stepping off the sidewalk...again. Luckily it's not half as bad as the other one, as it isn't even swollen, just painful when I walk. And I've decided to baby it for the next couple of days in the hopes that it will get better faster, so I have a frozen water bottle that I plan to use to ice my ankle twice a day, I'm trying to walk on it as little as possible, and I've been actively elevating it when I sit down. But now I'm sporting the ever stylish 2 ankle wraps which draw even more attention, so now I'm really known as the crippled girl who's retarded and can't walk down the street without hurting herself. Although I have to imagine that this wouldn't have happened if the first ankle wasn't already sprained because I've been favoring it a lot plus my balance is already off and add on an absurdly high curb that I have to step down from while I'm tired because its midnight does not make a very good combination. That, and I have to think that my brain cells that would have otherwise gone towards helping me walk down the street and feed myself without getting food all over me were allocated to more useless areas of my brain, like the place where I remember random information. The good news, though, is that my really bad ankle is getting a lot better, and if it weren't for the bruising and stiffness I would be able to walk pretty comfortably. The swelling has almost completely gone away as well.

So the extra little bit of hilarity to this otherwise hilariously tragic first week of orientation is the gem that I woke up to this morning on my facebook. So a little bit of background story: A couple of days ago I was walking from the computing center after checking my email, and it was dark, and I noticed that another student (male) was walking about 20 feet behind me as I hobbled up the hill. After a while he caught up to me and asked if I needed help carrying anything, which I told him that I didn't, and we started making small talk and discussing what we major in, and he apologized for his relatively broken English and I apologized for my extremely limited Turkish. At the end he walked me up to the road that lead to my dorm (not even to the door) and we both agreed that we should get coffee sometime. I walked away, excited that I actually made a Turkish student friend and might be able to have someone to practice my Turkish with. Then, this morning I wake up to find this in my facebook messages:

hey Sarah. how are you. Tonight ı was at party (radio Bilkent) and ı decided to invite you. ı came to your dormitory but you were not there. well ıf ı had seen you, ı would have told you something. actually ı wanted to talk about an issue face to face with you. however you will be busy because of orientation. so now ı am writing here to you. little girl, ı am captured by your beautiful eyes already. well ı like you finally ı succeed to explain .Sarah, you are in my mind since we have met. ı cant forget your eyes and your simile. you were in my mind even at party. sarah please be my girlfriend. be my angel. thanks god ı met with you.
ı will wait for your respond impatiently. ı like you sarah. iyi geceler.

Jesus. H. Christ. This is NOT what I asked for. I was so excited to have a friend, and then I find out that not only has he sent me what's basically a love letter, but he went to my dorm looking for me AND fantasized about me all night. Ew. Creeper. Stalker. Ew. After I found that this morning I just sorta banged my head against the keyboard a few times. It's like "Welcome to Turkey! Here's a cast! And a stalker!" Luckily he thinks that I'm going to be living off campus during the year so he won't know where I live during the semester.

In much better news, I decided to live in the dorms for the semester instead of find an apartment. The whole search was just turning into a shit show, especially after I got ditched by the one group, and then I found two other girls who were looking but they were getting really picky and a little bit unreasonable about what the price of apartment would be, so I just kinda gave up on that. I'm much happier now because I registered for my dorm today, and I believe that I'm going to be living in a double with an Italian girl named Valentina that I met yesterday on our fieldtrip to Beypazarı who is also an archaeologist (although she studies pottery) and is going to be taking some of the same classes as me. That, and living on campus is going to be so much easier since I discovered that I'm going to have a class at 8:40 in the morning. So now I can just roll out of bed and down the hill to my classes instead of waking up at 6:30 in the morning to catch a bus in the hopes that I'll get to campus on time. And I'm still going to have a kitchen so I'll be able to cook for myself during the semester. Also, I realized that one of my arguments for living in an apartment was the whole 12:00 curfew on weekdays was ridiculous because I'm in bed by 11:00 anyways. In the end, the dorms were a much better idea.

More good news! I made friends! I've been hanging out with a Finnish girl named Hilla who was actually one of the girls that I had mentioned I wanted to live with but was living in the dorms for the semester. She's great because we both joke about how we are like old people because we both get tired really easily, and hate going to night clubs, and all those other things that make me an oddity among the "normal" 20-somethings. This became especially apparent when I came to the conclusion that, unlike myself, most of the exchange students here are in the country to party most of the time, since they're out drinking almost every night, where I actually had a specific reason to be here, which was to study. Anyways, Hilla's cool. Plus, she ends up saying things that end up sounding really funny because of a) the Finnish accent and b) the sarcasm that she couples it with. Oh, and also, neither of us can dress ourselves so it works out pretty well. She was saying that sometimes her mother tells her that her clothes don't match, and I was like "in the winter time, I get made fun of for looking like a hobo". I also make fun of her because she's from Lapland. Like, Santa.

I was going to end this post, but then I remembered that I went to Beypazari yesterday on a field trip. The city was pretty cool, as it had a bunch of really old Ottoman style houses that were winding down a hill on little cobble stone streets. We actually passed by a woman who was making homemade tomato paste in a big vat in the middle of one of the little streets that we were walking down. I was told by my Turkish teacher that the city is known for it's carrot juice, so I bought some which, surprise surprise!, tasted like I was drinking a carrot, complete with that sorta dirty taste that one gets when eating a carrot. There was a little museum that we went to that was put in an old house in the city that tried to preserve the traditional way of life for the Beypazari people. I got to make a cool traditional painting out of these paints that are all natural but mixed with cow poop to get the right consistency so the place smelled a little strange. To make the painting they make a water mixture with a special root, then drip the paint into the water and swirl the water around to make different designs for the background and add additional drips and swirls on top to make pictures. My picture was of a gold fish. The lady doing the demonstration did most of the work, but I got to put on some drips so it's still kinda mine. I'm going to give it to my mom and write "Sarah Giffin Age: 22" on the bottom.

During the fieldtrip we had to hike up a hill to get a good view of the city, and I was congratulated by one of the ESN members because I have a bum ankle and still beat almost all of the other students up the hill. Mainly I was trying to get away from them because they kept on bitching about how hot it was outside, which was pissing me off. I felt proud of myself for making them look like complaining idiots. And then later that day I sprained the other ankle, so I guess that showed me.