Where do tulips come from?

Contrary to popular belief, tulips do not come from Holland. Here I am with my sister in the tulip fields in Holland. Living there made me love tulips. It turns out that they actually originated from Central Asian countries like Turkey, Iran, and Afganistan. I know, who would have thought. Well they have tulip festivals here, and the parks are all decorated in tulips this time of year. We went to the park yesterday. It was an adventure in it self to get there including two hours on two buses and a ferry. It was a very fun and relaxing day out in the beautiful weather Father blessed us with. We sat and read and of course enjoyed some ice cream. Here are a few pictures of our visit to the park.

Many of the tulips were planted in the shape of flowers and other designs like rainbows or animals.


Here are the Olympic rings.

Squatty Potty

I am sure many of you have seen these before, but for those that haven't I thought I would show a little picture of our beloved toilets here in Asia. Most houses have two bathrooms, one with a western toilet and one with a squatty. We use our squatty room as a storage closet. Also, a lot of newer public places will have 1 stall with the squatty and the others western style. For instance, this picture was taken at the airport, which had a western toilet in the other stalls. Most smaller public areas in Asia will only have the squatty and usually no toilet paper. These toilets have plumbing just like the western toilets. And no, I have no idea why someone would ever prefer to use a squatty. :)

Lets go to the movies

We finally had a free night on Friday and decided to go to the movies. We met a few friends there. One of them is Turkish. Thank goodness she was there. The movie theater was in an outside mall. We went to a restaurant before the movie called Num Num. Aparently that translates to yum yum in English. We were told that this place had real bacon and not the beef bacon that tastes like beef jerkey. We got our barbeque bacon cheese burgers and they were fantastic. The menu even had little pigs next to the item to show it was made from pork. With advice from our friend, we bought our tickets to the movie before dinner because you have to pick your seats on the screen when you buy them. The movie theater was huge and really nice. It seemed just like it would be in the states except we had assigned seats. The movie quality wasnt so good though. We saw Marley and Me. We really loved it. It just seemed so real. There were at least 57 TV commercials before the movie in Turkish. They were so funny. We were dying laughing at them. The commercials here are very cheesy and crazy. Of course we didnt understand much, but still they were still hilarious. Finally the movie started. It was in English with subtitles. We just start enjoying the movie and it cut off like in the middle of a sentence, a little cartoon played, and then the lights turned on. We were thinking okay maybe the film is messed up, but it turns out that every movie has an intermission for a smoke break. Twenty minutes late it started back up. It was a very interesting night.

Marley and Me was such a sad movie. We talked about the dog and how dogs are always so loyal and protective. This reminded me a story of a sweet little dog in Greece. We went to Greece a few weeks ago on vacation and well my purse and passport got stolen. On the way home from the police station I was still really stressed because we were supposed to be going back to my country the next day and I had no passport, and I didnt know if it would be possible to get one in time. My mom and I were walking to our hotel and this very concerned dog followed us walking by my side the whole way. We didnt think much of it, but he the same dog laid on the front porch of the hotel in the rain for the rest of the night. We woke up the next morning and there was the dog waiting for me. I was still very stressed and worried because at this point we were headed to the US embassy to hopefully get a new passport, which we did by the way. The dog followed us to the metro station and went down with us. He kept his eye on us even though they were violently shoo-ing him out of the station. He stayed until we went down the excelator and then went on his way. It is so interesting how dogs sense what you are thinking and know when you are stressed.

Here I am at the US embassy in Athens, so thankful that Father provided a new passport in a little over an hour.