At Least I Didn’t Get Sunburnt

Day: 28

Well, now that I actually have sunblock and the fact that I was slightly hungover I decided I’d just take it easy and walk down to the beach, sit in the sun and listen to music. A bold plan, but one I thought I might manage to carry out. By the time I was up, had eaten and omelet, and packed my bag with my towel, my camera and a bottle of water it was near 11am. I made a call to Aaron and spent about 15 minutes on the phone just talking about everything in life going on for each of us. When my card ran out I was just letting him know that Turkey is actually on the Asian continent, he had made a reference to it being in Europe. I realized during this conversation that Aaron was one of the people I am beginning to miss.

I took my time leisurely strolling down to the beach where I scoped out a prime spot of beachfront, a small strip of land between the Mediterranean and the river that flowed into it. The sound of the rushing water was brilliant. I spent a couple of hours napping, reading Huck Finn (which I haven’t made much progress on lately), listening to Jimmy Buffet and George Strait, taking a few pictures, and getting a little sun. This has been one of the nicest days, weather-wise, that I’ve had so far in my World Tour.

I made it back to my Treehouse just in time to spend about 40 frustratingly slow minutes on the internet before they closed for a couple of hours. After 40 minutes all I had accomplished was to get my blog up with no pictures, and check on the comments you have all left me recently (and yes, I do read everyone, even if I don’t get a chance to respond personally to each). Freaking dialup. It may be a few more days before I can get everything up, but I do have the pictures ready and I will upload everything since Athens when I find a decent connection.

This eclipse thing tomorrow seems like a huge deal to everyone around here. There are all kinds of “Eclipse-Chasers” who are on their 4^th, 5^th , and 6^th eclipses, they all seem so excited, there was even one guy who spent ten minutes trying to convince me of the spirituality of the eclipse. It is supposed to be pretty sweet though, it had better be, I mean I did come like 30 hours out of the way to see it. A few of us are planning to hire a bus and head up to the Chimera (some naturally occurring gas vents in the earth that are constantly on fire, and will automatically relight themselves if ever put out) to watch the eclipse, everyone thinks it’ll be sweet if when the earth goes black for 3 ½ minutes we have these naturally occurring flames surrounding us. I guess I see what the big deal is at 1:52 in the afternoon tomorrow.