Monday, October 20 "As yet unknown"

I think this was the worst day I've had here. I had no motivation to do anything. So I slept a long time and got frustrated with Aeden, and then took the kids to the playground after Lacey and Maren got home. The day had started with the girls almost missing the bus in the morning, Aeden wouldn't take his normal morning nap, and I was struggling through getting our Qwest account set up for online access so I can pay our home phone bill and internet (Ayse is paying us) from here. Let us just say that for an internet provider, Qwest has a long way to go in terms of being able to do things purely online, and I used almost an entire 100 credit phone card retrieving passcodes via my home voicemail and such and still do not have a functional account set up. Frustrating.

It was fun when we went to our building's playground (even closer than the one in the earlier photos...just on the other side of the building so we didn't see it earlier). I met Rosie's mom and chatted with her. She said that when Jenny saw Lacey and Maren at the playground that afternoon that she said, "Mommy, my friends are at the park!" I'm hopeful that the four of them will hit it off nicely.

The perk for the day is that Brian went to Turk Telekom with Mustafa this afternoon to arrange our phone and DSL service, and also brought back some very tasty Turkish foods for dinner. More to come on that, as I don't know the names of them yet!

Also, Lacey did a very thoughtful thing. She has Library on Mondays, and she brought home a book for me. She said that the books that she's allowed to check out are too long for her to read in one week while she's reading "Inkheart" (a long book she's been working on since just before we left for Ankara). So she got this for me...and handed me "Anne of The Island", book 3 in the Anne of Green Gables series I had started reading before I went to Prince Edward Island. It was perfect, as I had just finished "A Wrinkle In Time" the night before and was literally sitting there wishing I had something else to read (I've not completely exhausted our supply, but none seemed quite right to get started on).

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The details on our Turkish foods: They were from Cetinkaya Firini and included manti (very small tortellini-like stuffed pasta), su boregi (literally "water pastry", this is a savory layered pasta kind of like lasagna, but flakier on top and bottom, and with Turkish cheese in the middle and no red sauce--here's some info http://www.yogurtland.com/2006/02/22/su-boregi-water-pastry/), and karakoy boregi (pastry from Karakoy, two-bite sized, savory cheese-filled little pastries almost like baclava).

The bonus part was that Mustafa told Brian exactly what to do for the sauces for the manti. We had it for dinner on Tuesday, with the tomato paste sauce and garlic yogurt sauces, and all sprinkled with dried mint. I never would have used the mint on my own, but it was great. (And the fresh-made manti was so much better than the dried grocery-store brand we had tried already!)