Last days in Turkey

Well it is officially our last day in Turkey... this means the tan tint that my skin has will again fade to a the color of a plucked bird.  YEAY! It's unfortunate though, because just as we are getting ready to leave, the life here at our hotel has picked up.  It is the beginning of tourist season in Belek, so anyone who comes here in the next couple months will enjoy a 24 hour fun on the beach with drinks, games, warm water, etc experience, while we got a dirty empty pool and hurricane weather for some days.  Not like we could have participated in the festivities anyways... I guess it was better we came before prime tourist season so we wouldn't be tempted to forget that we are here for soccer.

The weather when we first got here....

The weather as we are leaving...!!

Nevertheless we had our own fun in our own way in the stories I have shared with you... yesterday was nothing short of another fun filled day for us though!  As I told you we were going to, we went fishing.  If you haven't seen in the pictures of Belek, there is the perfect beach on the Mediterranean but then in the background there are huge snow-capped mountains.  It is beautiful and flabergasting because I never actually thought the mountains and the beach could be seen together.  Californians say that it is the only place in America where you can surf and board in the same day.... not like here you cant! In Turkey you can look out over the Mediterranean and without looking in a different direction see the mountains you could ski on in an hour. I bring up the scenery because we got the opportunity to drive into those mountains yesterday for our fishing trip.

We drove about an hour to a little turnoff that looks like the entry into a farm in Wyoming or something. We drove down a little road and parked next to a damned river where there was a tiny, sketch, handmade, wooden bridge leading us to our final destination.   Simone kept telling me that it was like a bridge in a horror film and that scared me so one of our nice coaches carried me...

 This camp/farm had a lot of cool things to explore....

 They told us they had hammerhead sharks in the river and I was determined to catch one so I was picking out the strongest pole!

 Davis, my roommate to my left really loves the outdoors... as you can tell by the expression on her face

 This nice drunk got us all fixed up to catch some hammer heads!

 There was ducks and sheep and goats... which I found out we ate later :-/

 These were all the hammer heads I caught!

 Njoya likes to pretend that she caught this one... but really her, Augustine, myself and Davis didnt catch a single fish. I didnt even get a bite. But someone else on our team caught 9! haha I was slightly embarrassed with my fishing performance, to say the least.

This is the washing station to get cleaned up before eating lunch

 Pointing us to lunch

The lunch room

 We were served a 4 course meal... soup and salad.  This soup was fish soup, basically just a chunk of fish in broth.

 The 2nd course was BBQ sheep and goat with potatoes and rice.  This was my favorite dish, although I will say none of it was delicious.

These were some of the hammerheads that we caught.  They were just steamed basically.  Pretty tasty, a bit fishy for my liking but it was not bad by any means!

On the way back while everyone was sleeping I took some photos of where we had just been... we were back towards those mountains.

Come dinner that night we were all famished and tired. I am not sure if it was because no one really ate much of their meal or because we were out in the sun all day but it sure was a fun way to end our time in Turkey.  Tomorrow we take off to Russia and I will be able to get settled into where I will spend the next couple of months!

For the last time...

şerefe!!


cheers from Turkey!!

Dani