Friday, May 15th - Katy

My favorite visit on Friday was the 700 year old mosque that was built with some sort of special engineering where no metal (i.e. nails) were used. Not only was that unique, but it was so beautiful. We are continually humbled by how old things are around here. I know that humbled seems like a funny word to use, but I can’t think of any other word to describe. Insignificant may be another word, but not insignificant in a bad way. I am just continually amazed that I’m visiting places where people have lived for thousands and thousands of years. We went to the archeological museum today, and while it wasn’t very big in size, the items on display were incredible, which was then magnified by the fact that everything in the museum was found near Kastamonu. From the 6 ton sarcophagus from the Roman era to the conch shell in glass dated back to 2,000 – 3,000 BC, it was just very cool.

We had our second Rotary meeting and presentation tonight. It went really well. We are slowly getting into the rhythm of how these will go. We were introduced at the beginning, and gave our presentation shortly after. We cut out about half of what we’d originally come up with to save time for translation. We also include about 3 slides of the activities that we have done during our time visiting their city. (These are always a big hit!) Following our presentation, the formal presentation of the flags, lots and lots of pictures, presentation of gifts, and then onto socializing. It has been nice to have the meetings closer to the end of our stay in each city because by then we’ve really gotten to know our host families and all of the pomp and circumstance has much more meaning.

We said goodbye to our Kastamonu translator, Pinar, tonight. She is so dear to all of us; we hated to say goodbye. She is 25 and teaches English at the University of Kastamonu. She spoke excellent English and we have had the best conversations with her over the last several days about the differences between Turkish and American culture. She has fit in so well with our team, it is hard to imagine going forward with the rest of our trip without her.