No internet is crampin' my style

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Geo: 37.0391, 27.4302

It seems like I have a connection for about an hour or two every other day or so. On the other days I'm going to have to take a field trip downtown. Hopefully we can combine shopping and internet into one trip. Since we don't have a whole lot else that we have to do, that shouldn't be too bad. Here's what I wrote at home:
It's Saturday morning. We dropped Mike off at the airport last night. He flew back to Istanbul where he was going to spend the night at the same hotel that we were using before. He should be up and about soon and heading out to buy a few trinkets to share with the kids' friends back home. There were a few tears at the airport and the kids maneuvered for position to be the last one to hug dad before he left. Alex had some tears in the car, but generally held up well. Kate kindly tried to comfort him. Later Josh was my dinner helper and he insisted that we not set dad's place at the table (the best seat in the house for watching the view) out of respect for him for one night. He got a little teary at only setting 4 places. We said a toast to dad during dinner.

Dinner was cheeseburgers on the grill. We used slices of bread in lieu of rolls. We also had a fruit salad with cherries, peaches and some sort of melon that his bright yellow on the outside and green on the inside and, to me, tastes vaguely of cucumber. I thought it was OK when we mixed it in with the other stuff, but I'm not sure I'd eat it on its own.

Mike left his video iPod here and it has the first (possibly only) season of a sci-fi show called Eureka. We felt a teeny bit bad for him that he forgot it, but we were also kind of excited to get to watch TV last night. I had thought that I could download movies here on my laptop, but since our internet connection seems to last for an hour or two per day when it's doing well, that's not really an option. We brought one board game with us called Blokus, but everyone seems to be getting tired of that. Last night I poked around on my hard drive and found that I also have chess/checkers/backgammon/tic-tac-toe/reversi on my computer and Kate played with that for a bit.

Today we pick Lucy up at the airport around six. I expect that we'll spend some time down at the beach in the morning and make a run into town later so that I can get my email. Usually by now we have some sort of connection, but so far there's been nothin'. We have a "date" Wednesday to go down to the internet café and do a video call to Mike. I really hope that goes well and we can do it a couple times a week, although it might get a little loud trying to do it in a public place.

Kate's birthday is at the end of the week. I'm not too sure what to do about celebrating it besides taking her to the Harry Potter movie, assuming that we can find it in Bodrum. I saw a theater, but no poster for it yet. There are also some good-looking cakes at the bakery. Anyone have any ideas? She'll be twelve! So far the only thing on the list is a new pair of flip flops because one of the dogs stole one of hers off the porch.

Tomorrow are parliamentary elections here. That should be interesting. I wonder how long it takes for the tally and the announcement of winners. There was a big article about them in the July 23 edition of Time, which I was able to get at the airport. I don't know how the billboard owners will make money after the elections are over. It seems like every other billboard in the country is devoted to electioneering.

We spent the morning at the pool playing with some balls that we bought at the market at Yalikivak. There is a French girl Kate's age that the kids played with for a while. She's a little goofy, but friendly. We've all taken turns making up games to play at the pool that require very little talking.

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Photos

our "beach"
We have chosen to use these docks as our beach. There are some big floats out in the water that you can swim to as well. The kids like to play "survivor" out there.

The beach restaurant
You can get toasted cheese sandwich and French fries and drinks at this little restaurant. They serve the fries with mayo, which we don't care for. The owner doesn't speak English, but his daughter is pretty good and she spends her days mostly beaching until she sees her dad talking to someone and then she comes up to help. Honestly though, the menu isn't very complicated and my Turkish is good enough to manage order placement.

The water is much deeper than it looks
It's at least 15 feet here