I’m now on the bus heading across Turkey. We’re nearing our destination, Goreme, in Cappadocia. We’ve been on the bus for almost 12 hours, and my butt is telling the tale quite woefully. But back to the story…
Werner dropped Mitch and I off at the guys’ dorm, and I ran in to search for my inhaler. Robby was quite surprised to see me there, and came to help me in my quest. After completely emptying my suitcase, the much-desired piece was AWOL. I was becoming rather concerned and quite peeved. Robby brought me some Claritin to help with the allergies, but my inhaler was nowhere to be found. So I printed off my flight itinerary on Robby’s computer and spent about 10 minutes talking to Mitch before bidding him a final farewell and heading up to the school. Robby drove me up because he was going to be driving me back to the train.
By the way, at this time it was about 10pm, and it was as sunny as 7pm normally is in the summer. When I finally caught the train at 11:23, it was just starting to get dusky.
When I got to the school I expected the school building to be locked, but surprisingly it wasn’t, so I ran in and headed up to the computer lab, knowing exactly where to find everybody. Sure enough, I found Emily, Allie, Joliann, Shannon, Alonna, and Alex. I had given my camera to Allie to get pictures off of, and she also had my Italia jacket I had bought (she had to carry something for me if I was going to carry her backpack). Alex needed my camera to get pictures, so after tracking down a card reader, I gave it to her. Since I needed to wait for her, I ran out to the girls’ dorm to get an inhaler thingy that Chrissy was going to let me borrow. I told her that I couldn’t find mine, and she had a light-bulb moment and went to her closet, from whence she quickly produced my inhaler from a coat pocket. I had lent it to her months before when she was having asthma issues. Man, did I feel better! She also gave me the other thing. Allie came down and I borrowed an adaptor from her since I’d left mine in Torre Pellicci. Then I ran back up and got my camera and jacket from the computer room, telling the girls in there good-bye in the process. Then I ran BACK down (I ran up and down a few more times, but I don’t remember why) and told Jadie good-bye in the chicken house (the little house that Jadie, Yvette, Emily, and Alex stayed in). Then I ran in and told Shannon, Allie, and Chrissy good-bye. That was the closest to tearful that any time became, but from what I was told, the tears flowed in abundance afterwards. I was too stressed to cry at the time, though I was tempted to. I scurried back out and jumped into the car with Robby, and we sped off to the train station. He stopped and bought some orange juice, and we sat and waited for the train for about 20 minutes. It arrived, I hopped on, and was off.
That was the longest trip I think I’ve ever taken. It was then that everything hit me. I’d been going, going, going for so long that I hadn’t really had time to think about it; but like I told the girls on the way to Hokksund, that was a long, lonely, and quiet train/bus trip back. It took a little over two hours, and for a time I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to the right place, but at last I ended up at the Lufthavn, the airport. It was a little after 1:30am and the sun was just disappearing behind the horizon, leaving a bright pinkish-orange in the western part of the sky. I walked back into that familiar airport and began to search for Ricky. He wasn’t in the area we had all slept in before, so I walked all over, finally finding him in the exact opposite side of the building. I woke him up and we walked around chatting for a bit. I hadn’t had anything to eat basically all day, so we looked at the two little stores for a while, trying to decide what I should buy. I finally bought some rolls, a couple of apples, and some blueberry yogurt. Airport food is notoriously expensive, and Norway is an expensive country. So that is NOT a good combination. Anyways, I ate and crashed on a bench. Two hours later, at about 4:45am, Ricky woke me up so I could get myself cleaned up and we could check in for our 6:20 flights. I felt totally hung-over and, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I realized that I looked even worse. My eyes were all bloodshot and my face had a bunch of red lines on it, to go with my hair that was poofy on one side and flat on the other. I was completely discombobulated, and it took me most of the day to regain my wits. After checking in and proceeding through security, we split up and headed to our separate gates. Ricky was flying to Munich via Copenhagen, and I was flying to Munich via Frankfurt. Then we would both take the same flight from Munich to Izmir. The whole trip went without a hitch, and we arrived in Izmir right on time.
This was where we both began to get a little bit nervous. We needed to make it through customs, get a multiple-entry visa (in case we were able to make it to Patmos, in Greece), and try to avoid discussing the nature of the work of the people that we were going to visit. We stopped behind a little pillar, shot up a quick prayer and walked to the counter. Two minutes later we had our visa, no questions asked, and were walking to the passport check. Two minutes after that we were through and out into the baggage claim area. It happened so fast that we stopped and kinda looked at each other in disbelief. We were definitely praising the Lord!
After collecting our luggage, we had a short wait as we tried to figure out which person there was the one that was there to meet us. We tried to call Daniel*, our friend there, but Ricky wasn’t quite sure how to dial from within Turkey. Pretty soon a guy showed up holding a sign that said “Ricky” on it, and we knew we had found the right guy. Shannon would have been proud: he was wearing Chacos. J His name was John* and we found out that he had graduated ARISE the year before we did. He led the way to his car, where his 11-year-old son Samuel* was waiting. We got to see some of the sights of Izmir as we drove to our apartment, and he gave us a crash course on Turkish, both the language and the customs. The pronunciations are pretty straight-forward, but the language itself is TOTALLY unfamiliar. It’s sorta like a combination of Arabic and Norwegian. Don’t ask me to explain.
Anyway, after a short drive we arrived at our apartment in downtown Izmir. He took us in and got us settled in, after which we began to plan for our trip. We pored over a couple of maps, and he told us what we wanted to see what we didn’t want to see. As it turns out, a couple of the 7 churches are nothing worth seeing, so we decided to skip them. What would work best would be to hang in Izmir for the weekend and take the Sunday night bus to Cappadocia, spend a few days there, bus down to Antalya, spend a few days there, then bus back to Izmir where John would give us a blitzkrieg tour of a few of the churches. So that’s the plan.
More later….
*Not their real names
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