Exploring with bike rides and Turkish aka Türkçe

This past week I've been doing my best to get up early and seize the day! I don't have a set schedule so its been hard to create one for myself and stick to it. I've always had school and a job to organize my day leaving breaks with which I would work out, read or relax. But right now I have more free time then I think I've ever had. Which, I've noticed, I am pretty good at wasting :)

My goals for each day are to: spend a couple of hours studying turkish, have a solid workout, do some type of artwork, and work on my cooking skills. I've felt like I've done a good job of actually keeping those goals and its exciting to see what I was able to accomplish!

My Turkish is really coming along, still nervous about speaking it, but the studying I'm doing has really helped. Paris created 4 courses for me on this website called Memrise (his courses are Hacking Turkish 1, 2, 3 and Vocab). It is very similar to the flashcard technique of studying. Its different than Rosetta Stone, but the courses have been really helpful (He also helped create an English for Turkish speakers course on a website called Duolingo, which is free and just like Rosetta stone. Soon he'll be creating the Turkish for English speakers on that site too!) This week I focused mainly on conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives and examples. Some of my favorites are:

Fazla fasülye = too much bean

uzun ufuk = long horizon

fakat = However

eski erik = old plum

geri kafa = backwards mind

sus adam! = shut up man! (this isn't in memrise but i enjoy saying it to Paris)

My workouts this week have been really fun because the weather, for the most part, has been sunny and warm. On Monday I biked to one of the outdoor malls so I could have some coffee (aka Starbucks) and study Türkçe :) I go to this Starbucks (we have 3) because its slightly closer and people actually come here to sit and work on their computers. The other 2 are downtown, one is a high-schooler hangout and the other is for tourists. I've also biked a few times to the bakery, the grocery store and the local market (Ortakent -my neighborhood- has its market on Wednesdays). Today, Paris and I attempted to bike part of the way to Turgutreis to check out the hills (it is on the western portion of the Bodrum peninsula). Well, we made it a decent way but a good portion of that trip was uphill.. more like a steep mountain (dağ). We got to the top and the sun was setting so we turned around and made our way back. Tomorrow I'm going to attempt it again but a little further this time :) I've also been doing yoga and different weight lifting depending on the day to keep my legs in check!

the artwork started slowly but picked up these past few days. I've got some ideas but I'll keep those for another post when I've put things together and there aren't just sketches :)

Cooking - its been a very good week for that! On Monday, Betül and I made pumpkin and spinach lasagna! It was fun because it Turkey, pumpkin (bal kabağı) is really only used in one dish for dessert. So it was fun to cook this and get excited reactions (a common occurrence at my parents house is :) ). I also made a pumpkin and carrot (havuç) soup with curry. I made curried chickpeas (nohut) and some other fun things! I'm feeling the curry these days...

Valentines day was awesome and I'll give it its own post with fun pictures :)

For now I'm going to start preparing for my trip to Paris, France and my moms visit next month!! Such an exciting next few weeks!