Recapping America

I arrived back in Istanbul on Monday. Here are a few photos of highlights during the week. Unfortunately the photos are loaded on the side of my first week (California) and fourth week (Washington, D.C.) and few from the second week (Iowa) and third (Kansas City) since I don’t have a camera and pictures weren’t emailed to me from those weeks.

Here is Kim and Derek, the happy couple whose wedding I had the privelage of standing in. Derek is cool. You should meet him if you haven’t.

Kim is also cool, but she doesn’t like moustaches. Here is us groomsmen, flaunting the moustache sexiness as much as possible.

Have you ever dreamed that you were in one of those ’80s teen movies, where the nerdy high school protagonist manages to dethrone the high school quarterback from his throne at the top of the high school hierarchy, and then does a C jump to celebrate? We do. And we lived out our fantasy here:

Here is one of the highlights of my week in Iowa. While there, a quartet of females from California who were also in the wedding party took a roadtrip from Cali to Chicago to see off their good friend, Melissa Chapman, who will begin studies at Wheaton. I wanted to show them Iowa, so I took them to the Jasper County Fair:

Here Ms. Chapman and I are enjoying a delicious Tropical Sno at the said county fair

Let’s jump ahead a week to my conference in Washington, D.C. Here’s a picture of the gang and I at National Public Radio. We’re quite an international bunch:

This picture here is a good example of irony. The one picture that is taken of me during a session is when I am about to fall asleep. Whoever took that picture of me was trying to ruin my professional cred.

This picture below is a good sample of what a typical day would look like — the group of us sitting around a conference table, figure out a thing or two about journalism. At this particular session an Egyptian Coptic bishop was talking to us about religious freedoms in the Middle East. He was probably the most religiously passionate man I ever saw in person. Bummer he’s not in the picture.

But it wasn’t all sessions at the conference. One of our cultural excursions was to Baltimore for an Orioles-Mariners game. The fellow next to me was my roommate for the week. He is a Romanian journalist who works as a broadcaster for the state television. I did my best to explain the rules of baseball to him, which he found to like cricket, but slower. But at least our game isn’t so long that there is a break for dinner in the middle.

At the end of the week I saw my very good friend from college, Daniel, and his wife Sara. We went to Turkey together as exchange students way back in the day. Now he is exceptionally professional and living it up at an engineering consulting firm for acoustics. Yeah, I don’t understand it either.

But Daniel’s professional gig doesn’t stop him from dispensing an occasional noogie. Normally I am the one who gives noogies. This isn’t right.

So there is my trip. I’m back in Turkey and will have some time off until my grad program begins in September. A couple of projects include reading a book in Turkish, learning the basics of ultimate frisbee and laying down some other groundwork for the fall. But that info must wait for another blog post.