The Adventure Years

My dear friend Melissa was planning to come visit us in Izmir in October. Plane ticket bought, schedules cleared, Google Doc in the early stages of planning... and then the news hits that the US and Turkey are no longer issuing tourist visas to each other's citizens. We sit on this news for a week or two hoping it will sort itself out. I search [turkey visa] on Google News on a daily basis to see the latest. We're down to the last week--Melissa's supposed to be arriving on Friday and we need to make a call. So we start looking at flights. Our friend Tristan had mentioned Budapest awhile back, and we decide to start there, since we can both get there fairly cheaply. We look at some maps and decide we'll do Budapest, Vienna, Zurich, and Paris. Paris was already planned for Earle's birthday the last weekend of Melissa's trip anyway -- plane tickets purchased out of Izmir already. But no matter. We'd get to Paris some other way. Maybe by train! Car! Air! Who

It's hobby time here in Turkey! After some emergency adventures last week (more on this later), I'm back in the country and exploring some of my favorite hobbies here in Turkey. First up, choir. I love choir. Making music with a small group of other singers is one of my favorite things. I wasn't sure what I'd find here in Turkey--none of my extremely knowledgable chorus friends in CA knew about any Turkish choral tradition. But I checked around on some expat Facebook groups, and a woman had written that her friend's choir was looking for members--ideally men, as choirs often go, but they'd take women, too. So I reached out to this nice Dutch lady who told me where and when I could sit in on a rehearsal. I figure, yay, Dutch lady, posted in expat group...this will be a good group for someone like me new to the country and looking to sing. So I went to yesterday's rehearsal a few subways stops away. I walk in right around rehearsal start time. There are 4