Inter-continental trip

Well, I'm glad I'm home. It's really nice to get back to a place and feel like you're home. Today was really hard on our jet-lagged bodies. We haven't been sleeping for our first two nights here... Last night we were up re-arranging our room at 3am... I'm hoping that we get some decent sleep tonight. Luckily we have no plans for tomorrow, so we will be able to sleep in and then do some much needed cleaning and putting things away. We got a lot of things we needed at Ikea (the Turks say (ee kay ah)), so that was great, to actually get a lot of things in one place. I never thought I would be saying this, but there are certain times in your life when you really wish for a Walmart. Back to the trek to Ikea... well, it was on another continent, but it literally felt as if it were on the other side of the world! First off, we walked to the sea and waited 40mins for the next sea bus to show up. The ferry trip was about 20mins. Then, we got off at kadikoy (on the asian side) and searched for the right bus to take us to umraniye, which took quite some time. The bus had to have been over an hour. We were a little confused as to where Ikea was when we got off of the bus, and the guy who sits on the bus and takes your money pointed over the highway. We didn't see anything. So, we decided to cross the street to see what we could see. We found a dirt path leading over the highway bridge, and after we walked quite a long time we started to see Ikea flags and the top of a blue building. It was hilarious, here we were, we had already been on this Ikea quest for a good 3 hours or something and are trekking across a bridge on a dirt path full of trash in the hot sun and with the wind whipping the dirt into our eyes all to go to stinking IKEA! We had decided already that this was never going to happen again. If we want to go to Ikea we will have to wait until they build the new one on the European side. So, since we had taken this route to begin with, imagine us taking the route back but this time with a ton of ikea crap in our hands. And it was quite the load. We bought two rugs (not big ones), a sheet, pillowcases, a lamp, bulbs, 6glasses, 4 glass canisters, etc.... It's a miracle I didn't just dump the stuff in the Bosphorus... It's kind of funny that the things I think to talk about the most are complain-y things when there are so many wonderful things about being here! Oh yeah, before I'm entirely done complaining, who wants to ship us some Dawn dish soap???????? Anyway, as I mentioned before it's really starting to feel like home. We're starting to be able to find our way around Bakirkoy by ourselves (and find our way home!) There's still a ton to do to get settled, like setting up getting jugs of water delivered to us so we have some to drink, and getting a cell phone. If you want to pray for us, seriously pray that Leyla and I get some sleep tonight (and before 5am!)

(everything up there was written last night, Friday night. Now it's 11am Saturday morning)
I finally got some REAL sleep!!! I went to bed around 11:30 and I woke up at 9am (but got out of bed at 10) :) yay.

The ferry on the way there.

A view from the window of the ferry (unfortunately since a the fast ferry you have to be inside in seats instead of outside, so you an get very good pics).

Our first views of the Asian side! I liked a it a lot.
The crazy dirt path we found...
Our first glimmer of hope that we were going the right way... the Ikea flags..
It may not seem like it... but the cutest thing ever. Look at the size of the toilet in relation to the toilet paper dispenser. It's a small toilet for kids!
All of the crap we bought
Leyla sleeping on the ferry home.

I think the best thing that we got out of the Ikea trip was that we now can probably figure out how to get to kadikoy (on the asian side) by ourselves, how to catch the ferry for the islands, and also we decided we want to go on a tour of Istanbul up the bosphorus on a ferry, and now we know how to get where we need to catch it. It was a good day, but oh so tiring.
I'm really really nervous about starting to teach... but I know it will be ok. I will probably spend hours preparing for my first class in horror. But then I will realize that it's no big deal.