Extra! Extra! Read all about it..... we're in a Turkish newspaper...?

So a reporter from Haber Turk came to our performance on Tuesday night and actually followed up with a story in today's paper! In it, we're praised heavily for our interest in Turkish culture and badass dancing skills. I'm paraphrasing, of course.

In the bottom right corner, you can see me (along with some other students from my program) dancing backstage before the show. It was, ironically, the one point of the whole night at which we were not performing a traditional Turkish dance. What you see here is the "I'm awesome" Dance. The dance was invented in early 2007, and it's purpose is to boost the self esteem of the dancer, who, while gleefully singing I'm awesome awesome awesome, I'm awesome, I'm awesome, etc, must dance about spastically in the hopes of killing anxiety with absurdity. We were dancing it at this moment to help one of the girls with her stage fright. Clearly it was the most appropriate picture to publish with this article.

On an unrelated note, I spent the evening at a friend's house, and when it came time to join her host mother on the balcony for tea, was (somewhat) able to hold my own in a Turkish conversation. I feel like my speaking ability has improved a lot during the past week, and it's a shame that we have to leave so soon. I've lost most of my motivation as far as our Turkish class is concerned, but I could definitly stay in Ankara for a while longer. The summer has (as expected) gone by extremely quickly, and I need to start plotting my next trip back to Turkey!