Normally Chad and I keep up on our blog pretty well. But we have gotten out of our routine of Sunday blog writing and replaced it with napping, traveling, having friends over for dinner and (our personal favorite) actively doing nothing. If Elisa weren’t around I wouldn’t have written once. Meanwhile as life has continued with out our weekly updates we have done some more nothing and a lot more somethings.
I have been studying and managed to send off for my second midterm in my finance class. BYU is so slow at getting back to Elisa though. I have also been slaving away at getting preparations done for Christmas. Chad and I are almost done with our holiday projects now we just have to figure out what to do for each other. I have also been anxiously checking my emails for news from my brother, Daniel. He extended his Europe trip and has been all over the place. He has great stories and since he is traveling in some crazy areas it’s nice to know he is okay.
We are excited to have Chad’s parents visit us for a couple weeks and will definitely report on our adventures with them as soon as time permits!
Elisa turned 25 this week! She’s no longer my little girl. 🙂
After being sick for the whole week I finally got better in time to enjoy my birthday on Sunday. Leaving the house early in the freezing temperatures for the first time in 4 days wasn’t the best way to start the day but I was so happy to be feeling better that it didn’t phase me for long. A lot of people at church had read it was my birthday in the ward newsletter and wished me well. I also received some very nice cards that I had do my best to translate from German.
I was pretty sure Chad had not left me any surprises for my birthday which sort of bummed me out but I was wrong. He snuck around the apartment that afternoon and set up a scavenger hunt right under my nose. He got me some new gloves and made it so fun to find them. He made it challenging–tricky clues and fun strings I had to follow. I like being a kid. Elisa is hard to surprise, so I was living in constant fear that she would catch me. And the house is small, so there aren’t very many places where something can be hidden where she wouldn’t just accidentally find it too early.
Throughout the day I got to talk to family and open cards and gifts from them. We also had a few friends over for Hawaiian Haystacks and ginger snaps. Mmmm, ginger snaps. And the Baumanns brought over Sprüngli Luxembourgs, which we’ve been savoring all week. I have a lot of really supportive people in my life that make me so comfortable to be me. Even with the dumb things I can do sometimes it is great to be surrounded by people who look past those things and love me for me. Thanks to the Baumanns, Schwendeners and Mascaros for celebrating with us. And thanks Milo and Nik and Rahel for singing that version of Happy Birthday.
Chad was so sad that we didn’t have a proper cake with candles. My family knows I am not a big cake fan. I humored Chad by making a wish and blowing out our decorative candle. He seemed pleased enough. I just hope I can make him as happy as he makes me.
They Might Be Giants was stuck in our heads all weekend. “Istanbul, Constantinople, Istanbul, Constantinople… Nobody knows but the Turks!” There are other words to the song, but we don’t know them. 🙂 Actually we just looked it up and we even had those lyrics wrong.
Elisa and I took a flight to Istanbul on Saturday. Todd and Linda and Julia were already there. Julia’s on semester at sea so she’s been stopping in all the cool places you’ve ever wanted to visit–Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, Egypt, etc. Todd wasn’t feeling good so they hadn’t seen too much of the city yet.
Daniel also made his way to Istanbul to meet us. He has gone to all these other cool places in the Balkans that I didn’t know I would want to visit. His stories make us want to see them–Romania, Albania, Macedonia, etc. It was a lot of fun hearing from both Julia and Daniel all the cool places they’ve gone.
I had been sick. So we had just planned to take it easy anyway. Plus we had heard that it was supposed to rain all weekend. We ended up all going out to dinner to a really nice seafood restaurant. We called it a night and then Daniel and Julia partied until the early hours of the morning. Our hotel room was so loud! Luckily I had brought ear plugs. That’s the only way we slept. There were loudspeakers out in the streets, plus the horns, plus eventually Daniel’s snoring. 🙂
The next day we got some good pictures of the tourist attractions. The weather was great for us. We managed to get ripped off by a cabbie. He had his meter running twice as fast. Then he wasn’t satisfied with that, so he thought he would try to convince me that I had given him the wrong bill. I wasn’t amused enough to play along with that part. Not to mention he almost killed us on the way home. He was a terrible driver. We found really good local Kebabs and Turkish pizza. I was really impressed by how huge the mosques were. It was cool to hear them calling for prayer from nearby. Todd and Linda had to leave before we could see the Topkapi Palace. But Daniel and Julia came with us and we really enjoyed seeing the harem. Everything was really ornate.
Julia had left by Monday. And we needed to leave in the afternoon to catch a flight. We window shopped at the Grand Bazaar. It’s thousands of shops under one roof. We got lots of practice ignoring people. But it wasn’t near as bad as Kusadasi. There were all sorts of random trinkets that we almost decided to buy.
The best part was seeing family. It was a little unreal to be in such a foreign place with such familiar people.
