To Ankara, Turkey

Vince, Dave, and Amy took a bus from Cappadocia area to Ankara (~5 hours). It was a nice comfortable ride. An interesting note about buying a bus ticket in Turkey...you need to indicate whether you are male or female. It's mostly about making sure the bus company can prevent sitting a women by a man she doesn't know. It's ok for a woman to sit by a man she knows though. Interesting.

Another interesting thing is that the driver smoked cigarettes during the ride.

Amy's amazing co-worker Elif, and her super cool hubby Burak picked us up at the Ankara bus station. Amy meet Elif in Jan 2013 when she spent 2 weeks working in the Ankara office.

We stayed at Elif's place in her comfy spare room. Their condo is huge and tastefully decorated. And we got to do a load off laundry!!!!!

On Friday morning Amy headed off with Elif to work a half-day with Elif. Visiting an Expeditors branch office is fun and interesting. The Ankara branch folks - Namik, Kivanc, Ozgür, Baśak, and Okan Tuna (yeah that's his real name) are super welcoming and friendly.

While Amy was at work the boys hit the Museum of Anatolian History.

After work Amy and Elif ran a few errands including signing some papers for their new Volkswagon Passat Wagon (woo hoo) and picking up some baklava!! We also picked up her niece, Eda, from Elif's mothers. Her mother is an artist and has some amazing paintings. She is in the middle of working on one of a ballerina for Elif. Wow!!

Now we're chilling at Elif's watching a movie (We're The Millers). And hanging out with her super cool weird budgie parrot. It loves iPhones and rings. And it talks...in Turkish of course.

Tomorrow is the start of Ramadan...don't know exactly what that means but we know it's important to a lot of the people in this country so we respect that.