Back to Turkey!

In case you were curious, this post is because I am so so SO tired of working on my class! I've spent oh...  15 hours or more(?) working on it this week. It feels like way more. And Matt is out of town until Saturday night. I don't really know how that relates to my class, but.... there you go. I may or may not miss him a smidgen. (Mom, you'll be happy to know that I haven't called or texted him at all today.) Where was I going with this??? Oh yes. Pictures. 

Sailing on a private yacht down the Bosphorus Strait

Castle along the banks of the Bosphorus, European side

Maiden's Tower (Lighthouse), Bosphorus Strait

Heather and I in front of the private yacht

Audience at our first venue, Lake Kucukcekmece Festival

Flag banners of the participating countries at Kucukcekmece Festival

Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofia)

Hagia Irene, inside Topkapi Palace Complex

Balcony at Topkapi Palace, overlooking the water

Basilica Cistern

Medusa-head Column at Basilica Cistern

Scarf vendor at Grand Bazaar who loved my eyes

Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet)

Clog America and Turkish dancers from a children's group

On the see-saw at Miniaturk

Turkish Apartments

Sunset over Lake Kucukcekmece

Turkish ice cream vendor... the taffy-like ice cream. They do all sorts of tricks with it!

Spinning a star with a Taiwanese performer

Old Victrola and Underwood Typewriter

So our costumes were all hung up... apparently they were too heavy for the rack

Shop in Egyptian Bazaar (Spice Bazaar) with plates! Love these plates

Egyptian Bazaar- Spices

Random guy I found outside the bazaar... I mean, my DAD!

Interior, Hagia Sophia

Dome on pendentive!

Medieval mosaic uncovered in Hagia Sophia

Upstairs hallway, Hagia Sophia

Venue for Bakirkoy Festival, on Marmar Sea

Clog America!! The massive pile-on

And there's a conglomeration of pictures briefly detailing the Turkey part of my trip. I hope you enjoyed all that!! I sure did. Auditions for next year's tour are in a few weeks and I'm looking forward to throwing my hat in the ring one more time. I love dance. And travel. And dance. And friends. And... I guess maybe I'll look at my class prep for a few minutes.

I like these pictures

So.... this has nothing to do with my trip to Greece and Turkey. I still need to put up some pictures from Turkey so you can see what it was like. However, this last week I went hiking in Yellowstone and the Tetons with a fabulous guy named Matt Schultz and... well I felt like putting up two of my favorite pictures. (FYI: those are two different red shirts I'm wearing.) There's a ton of other amazing pictures, but you'll just have to wait for them.  Ok, actually, here's one more; probably my absolutely favorite landscape picture, courtesy of Matt's eye for photography. 

A bird between two branches

Life is a smidgen interesting right now. I think -- hope!-- that it's because I'm at a very transitionary point of my life. Tomorrow I leave my full-time employment of over two years. I'll be going back to school full time. I will be a university professor this fall, responsible for teaching students. And I'm sort of (?) dating someone. I know, could I please be more ambiguous on that count. Sorry, you know as much as I do! All the change and life stress right now has me feeling... weird. 

For example, I have been super indecisive lately. The Academy of Ballet contacted me to 1) finally pay me my June wages and 2) see if I wanted to teach Irish again this year. I knew after the recital in June that I didn't want to teach, and I also have conflicts this year that prohibit me from teaching after December. Despite that, I still debated for about 4 days what I wanted to do. In the end I told the studio I definitely would not be able to teach at all.

Or how about my class load for fall? I've had my classes figured out since April. Until today, when I saw a different class and added that and had to decide which one would be more useful. Yeah, that would be the class I originally signed up for. Duh. I dropped the other class...

And the dating thing? Well, I have no clue where I'm at on that one. As in, for the first time ever I'm not jumping the gun and thinking into the future a ton, and while that's a little uncharacteristic, it's also nice. Living in the moment is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm happy to let things play out as they will, on this count. And in case it doesn't sound like it, I am happy about dating this guy. Very happy. But it has been a transition too, from a phone/long-distance relationship to actually dating and being in the same city/state/time zone. I guess it's just part of a lot of change all at the same time.

I very much need something. Stability? Vacation? Sanity? Sleep? I'm not sure, but I hope I figure it out soon.

Introducing Turkey

Welcome to Turkey! So I got out of chronological order a little bit, but that doesn't matter. This is my blog and I can write in whatever order suits my fancy, right? And sometimes different stories are just more compelling. Remember last time how I talked about the awesome humanitarian work we did? This is nothing like that.

At our first meal with the festival in Turkey, we learned a few things. (This was a late lunch, served some hours after we arrived at 6 am at Adela Hotel.) 

In Turkey, two popular drinks are Cola Turka and Yedigun. Not being a fan of soda pop, I actually didn't sample these. But they sure look cool!

We had some time to wander our nearby "neighborhood." Istanbul really feels like one gigantic metropolis from the airport area, where we were at, all the way to downtown, which was about 30 miles away. That is a mosque behind us, and minarets dot the continuous apartment skyline as far as the eye can see. 

Hats are cool. Our festival handed out these sweet hats along with our festival t-shirts. We opted to appropriately display them in true American style. Yeah, that was a lot of fun :)

And that was July 1oth. 

Good News

So this post was actually written on July 1, 2010 but for whatever reason I didn't actually post it. Enjoy!


I got a job! Just in case I didn't already have some for Fall... (aka teaching and most likely being a TA as well). In addition to those, I will be staying on at my current job. They had to make some arrangements for me to be able to work more than 20 hours a week.

Andrea said she was really impressed with me.. well -rounded, interesting life. That was a cool comment. I felt like it validated my educational pursuits and my lifelong foray with dance. 

One of my Favorite Moments

One of my favorite moments on tour this year was the day we did our humanitarian work (July 16th). Part of what we do as Clog America, besides representing the United States of America at international folk dance festivals, is we select a humanitarian project for a country we visit. This year we actually did projects in both Greece and Turkey, but in Turkey we got to interact much more with the children we were helping.

We showed up in costume at a school for children with disabilities and there was this huge sign welcoming us! That was pretty cool.

We went inside the school to set up all our stuff. We had SO many things to give away. 

This is one of the girls from the school. She was super sweet! We performed a few dances and then had the kids come up and dance with us. It's so wonderful to me how responsive children are to dance. We couldn't speak their language and they might not have understood us even if we did. But through dance we could connect with them. 

This young man was SO into the performance! I brought him up to dance and Thomas put his chaps and cowboy hat on him. He had such a blast being a cowboy! If I remember correctly, I talked briefly to his mother afterward, and she said that his name means "peace." I wish I had written down his name at the time, but that's the best I can do. He certainly had such a wonderful, loving spirit. It feels great making a difference for a child, even if it's just for a few moments of smiles. 

In the afternoon, we had the chance to do another visit for humanitarian, this time to a school for Armenian children with disabilities. Only some of us went, so we got more interaction with the kids. Two of them were so hilarious! They were in love with Kyle and Alex, our videographers, because they had facial hair (the two boys did too). There was also a sweet little boy, maybe 2 years old, who was so fun to play with.

Hooray for love and kids!