Intercourse, of Course

This morning we started the day by visiting Mr. Ed's Elephant Museum and Candy Emporium.  They have over 12,000 elephant knick-knacks of all shapes and sizes.  Plus candies of all sorts.  We loaded up on the caramelicous goodness of candies such as Mary Janes, Slowpokes, Bit-O-Honey, Longboys, and Amy's new favorite: Squirrel Nut Zippers!

Then it was off to Gettysburg and the National Military Park there.  The museum has many artifacts and tells the story of the civil war with an emphasis on the most famous battle at Gettysburg where over 7,000 were killed, 33,000 wounded and 10,000 missing.  Pretty somber.  One quote said "Ye advocates of war, come here and look, and answer what compensation is there for this carnival of death."

After all that we took a detour to visit the factory outlet stores for Utz potato chips and Snyder pretzels.  We purchased a bag of snacks at each place.  That should get us through our trip and then some.

On a lighter note, we traveled the backroads towards our hotel outside of Philadelphia.  The journey took us through the town of Intercourse, near Lancaster.  Amy wanted a double entendre in Intercourse, so we stopped and Dave gave her one. Sadly, it seemed that all the Amish stores are closed on Sundays.  We passed many buggies and Amish farms.  It is always fascinating to see how two different cultures coexist in the same space.

A nice Chinese dinner and some light shopping followed our checkin at the hotel.  Now it is just time for unwinding and relaxing before we hit the big city tomorrow.

Frank Lloyd Wright Day

Today we spent some time at two Frank Lloyd Wright houses: Falling Water and Kentuck Knob.  Both are in Pennsylvania south of Pittsburgh.

We left out hotel at 7 am (after arriving at 1 am - ouch!) for about an 75 minute drive to Falling Water, which is probably the most amazing house built in the 20th century.  We had tickets for the special in depth tour that is available early mornings on the weekends.  It allows visitors to see spaces at a more leisurely pace and see spaces not on the normal house tour.  What and amazing place!  This was a built as a summer weekend home for a Pittsburgh department store owner in the mid to late 1930's.  Their only son was gay and never had children, so he left it in a public trust as a museum.  Here are a few pictures, but they do not capture the sense of space and the connection the house has with the landscape.

 

We had a nice lunch in the little town of Ohiopyle, on the way to Kentuck Knob.  The town was filled with activity.  In addition to the FLW houses, the area has several state parks, a very popular rafting river, and the Great Allegheny Passage (a 150 mile long rails to trails path from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, MD).  We had a window seat for buses filled to the rafters with rafters.  My favorite sight was a cyclist carrying about 10 kayak/canoe paddles in his hands as he peddled his bike through town.

Our next destination was Kentuck Knob, where we had 1 pm tickets.  It was a short tour and a smaller house.  The current owners do not allow interior photos.  It was an interesting house built using regular hexagons and triangles as a motif and as the footprint.  Here are a few pictures:

On the property there were a few small garden spaces and some large sculptural pieces.  There was also a piece of the Berlin wall.

We did a little tasting at a local winery near our evening hotel in Chambersburg, just west of Gettysburg.  Then it was off to dinner at the Roy Pitz brew pub.  We sampled some of their "liquid art." Dave had a nice IPA (not too much of a surprise) and Amy had a lighter lager.  Afterward we came back to the hotel for some relaxation and blogging.

Summer 2015 Roadtrip

The summer travel season is here.  Dave is traveling to two conferences and Amy has some vacation time and will be doing some professional development work.  Dave is headed to the Bridges conference in Baltimore which is the largest annual mathematical art conference in the world, and then to MathFest in Washington, DC which is an annual summer mathematics conference.

After a late start, we began our summer road trip last night.  We left Michigan and headed for Pennsylvania.  We had planned to visit the Rubik's cube exhibition at the Cleveland science museum and then the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but our delayed start allowed us only time to travel.  Leaving in the evening meant that we missed most of the heavy weekend traffic.  However, there was plenty of construction.  Just when I thought we escaped, we came upon the largest water main break I had every seen;  the four land road was reduced to two lanes as the the water had turned the outer lanes into a raging river for about a mile.  We got to the hotel around 1 am and spent a brief night near Pittsburgh.

Hats off to Starbuck's along the Ohio Turnpike for feeding Dave's art addiction by supplying about 75 cardboard coffee cup sleeves.  Stay tuned for pictures....

A day to remember

Okay.  So I haven't blogged about the trip and I might get to that later.  It was a great weekend of adventure in Istanbul.  I have lots of photos and places to talk about.  But today is fresh in my memory so I will post about that first.  This is the first evening I've had to spend some time getting all my thoughts out so I will start with the most recent.

Emily had to work today and her first class is at 9:00. She left me at the apartment to sleep in a bit and come to the university later with her roommates who teach at 12:30.  I got up and showered and was having some coffee while the girls were getting themselves around and there was a funny chirping sound in the hallway.  I really couldn't figure out what it was.  One of the girls came out of her room and said it was the doorbell!  She answered the door and it was apparently the downstairs neighbor. He was trying to explain a problem he was having in his kitchen.  Earlier in the fall, when Emily first moved into the apartment, the kitchen was redone and the water was at that time leaking into the downstairs neighbor's house.  That was happening again this morning.  Roomie 1 called Emily on her cell to translate what was happening be use none if understood enough Turkish to know what he was trying to say. I looked undere the kitchen sink and there it was - a puddle of water and a fast dripping pipe juncture.  Emily called the landlord from her office at the university and he came over.  Before he could get here, we moved everything from under the sink, tried to put a bucket under the drips, when it became a strong stream. The landlord arrived and immediately shut off the water, which was located in the hallway.  He told me that Emily is such a nice girl and that the plumber would be coming to the apartment later. *** I will also add here that Emily's building was being converted to natural gas this summer and it has not yet been completed and last night the temperature fell into the low 40s.***

We left for the university and took a bus to get there. I got to Emily's office and set off with her to her afternoon classes.  Emily teaches English at Gaziantep Universitesi.  Students take English and have a main section with a teacher and then separate reading, writing and speaking sections.  The Fulbright  teachers are here to take sections of only speaking, just as Emily did last year, but this year she has a private contract with the university and also teaches a main section.  This afternoon were two of her speaking sections, each at a different level.  The first class was at rather quiet bunch and they were working on parts on conversation and Emily was explaining How questions rise in intonation at the end in some cases and fall at the e d of others. It was really interesting and their goal is to make the students competent and comfortable speakers.  Emily rhymes a lot in class and uses a lot of catchy phrases.  She plays music on her computer during the break in each class when the students go outside for a coffee or a smoke break.  The students had a chance to ask me questions and learn a litte bit about me and they had questions like "Is Turkey a better place than America?" and "How old are you."  We had a break ourselves between classes when we got a coffee and headed back to the classroom again.

The second section was much rowdier and is a level behind the earlier class I sat in on.  They were very excited to see Emily's mother and a few of them could not pronounce my name, it is not a vowel sound that comes naturally in Turkish so they called me Mahm. Emily has a great classroom pres de and one of her students brought her a bottle of a Turkish specialty drink from a trip they took home to Adana, a neighboring town.  It was purplish in color and he encouraged her to drink it.  Emily opened it up and took a small sip and proceeded to gag about 5 times and drink some water,  her eyes were watering from the spiciness.  She said it was picked beet juice.  She also handed out pieces of bubble gum I had brought to students who brought their book to class,as she is trying to have them bring their books more often and has been marking them as absent from class if they don't have their book with them. Sometimes they spend time talking between themselves and asking a group question to clarify something she has said. Overall this group was very engaging and two of them did a little bit of a traditional Turkish dance when Emily encouraged them to do so.

We left the university and took the bus back towards the apartment.  The sun is setting at 4:30 and by the time we got back it was pretty dark out.  Even though this is the Middle East, it's pretty chilly here, with a high temperature in the low 60s. Emily and I stopped at the neighborhood  market to get a few things - apples and bread and jam.  When we got to the apartment, there were two workmen in the kitchen working on the sink and two in the hallway trying to find the gas leak in the walls so they could get the heat turned on to the building.  Workmen have been coming and going all evening.  The sink is fixed but the washing machine is not yet.  The water is on, but not the heat.  That may still happen later, but maybe not until tomorrow.

I'll try to figure out how to get photos from my phone to my iPad  and see if I can get some of them up soon.

DTW --> YYZ--> IST

So.  There's another adventure afoot and this time it's Amy going it alone.  I won't continue to use the third person, but at least you know who's posting this time.

I'm taking my first real vacation days of the year. I decided a couple of weeks ago it was time to visit Emily and tickets were purchased, laundry was done, my desk at the museum cleared and I'm off!  Thanks to Betsy and Hannah for the ride to the airport!

Things I hope to accomplish on this trip:
1. See Emily and soak up as much of her as I can to last for the foreseeable future
2. Experience Turkey and all the great things I've heard about
3. Relax and unwind

That's it. I don't have a huge agenda.

Things I hope to avoid on this trip:
1. Letting my inner rock star out in Emily's apartment, like happens on so many other trips away from home, usually in hotels
2. Turkey tummy - I have stockpiled medication to avert this if possible

I'll try to update the status of these lists as the trip unfolds.

Nexus 2014

I am in Ankara for the 2014 Nexus conference, a gathering of researchers interested in mathematics and architecture.  It is being held at the Middle East Techical University (aka Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi) in the school of architecture.  As in Gaziantep, the university is an enormous gated community with security at the gate.  It is helpful because they can tell the cab driver where to take me.  The architecture building is full of interesting student projects and posters.  There is also a resident cat that attended the coffe breaks and some of the talks.

It is a small conference with about 50 attendees.  The people are friendly and there is plenty of lively discussion.  I have met a few of the other attendees at other conferences.  There are not any parallel sessions, which is nice that I can attend all the talks.

The traffic in Turkey is pretty crazy.  If a city street has lanes, they are only guidelines.  Cars pass and merge at high speed with horns blaring and pass within inches of each other.  I am amazed we have not been in an accident!  The cab I took today had a racing tachometer and model racecar on the dashboard.  As you might imagine, I got back to the hotel rather quickly.
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Emily has spent the days shopping and relaxing.  We have had dinner together the past two nights.  She was able to get some dehydration salts and a probiotic medicine.  I took my first dose tonight (Tuesday).  Hopefully it will kick in soon!

Other than Turkey tummy, we are doing well.

Church on Sunday

We spent Saturday night in Göreme, a small town in the heart of Cappadoccia.  This region was home to early christians for hundreds of years.  They used caves and undergound chambers to hide from persecutors.  There is an underground city nearby, that we were not able to visit, that was home to thousands.  The geology of the area is very unique and adds to the region's charm.

We planned to be up at sunrise to watch the balloons take to the air and so set our alarms for 5 am.  After getting up, we walked to a ridge above the town called sunset point to watch the balloons.  By the time we arrived, there were about 100 balloons in the sky.  Many were far off, but a few passed very close to our location.  The morning was very still and quiet, except for the hissing of the gas jets firing in the balloons.  We watched until most of the balloons landed, then went back to our cave for a nap.

After rising again, we had breakfast, packed, and then set out for the Göreme Open Air Museum located about 2 km from our hotel.  The museum is a small region containing dozens of man-made caves carved into the soft rock.  They were used for a variety of specific functions including food storage, burial chambers, dining halls, kitchens, and living quarters.  The most intricate were churches used for workship.  The churches were more chapel sized, but were still quite elaborate, especially for caves.  Many had carved pillars, carved domes, and detailed frescoes. They were very interesting.  Sadly, no pictures were allowed.  It still was a memorable way to spend Pentecost!  The museum is a UNESCO world heritage site because of its historical significance.

After seeing the museum, we walked back to town and did a little shopping along the way.  We had a late lunch, gathered our bags, hung out a coffe shop, then caught our bus to Ankara.  We napped a little during the five hour ride.  We made a few stops along the way and finally arrived in Ankara about 11 pm.  The bus station was quite large and packed with people.  We hopped into a taxi and were at our hotel in 10 minutes.  It is a nice place in a nice location.