Allah kahretsin şu Interneti! (Damn Internet!)

Efforts to post a blog over the last couple days have met with resistance... first, we discover that Internet cafes have Turkish keyboards (c'mon! Now why would they do that?!??), which presents problems. After navigating the keyboard enough to send a VERY short letter to my parents (three sentences... took about 15 minutes), I log into the blog only to discover that all text in the blog's control panel is in Turkish. This is a shame, because I don't really know Turkish (see last entry). After some very helpful assistance from an employee at our hotel in Kapadokya, Jennie and I have figured out how to navigate the Internet in sweet, sweet English.

Despite this, I have continued to have minor victories in Turkish. The cornerstone of my Turkish has been the phrase Teşekkür ederim ("thank you" -- and also "no thank you"... go figure), which I have both used extremely liberally, and which I also forget about every 2 hours. I have also mixed in generous Merhaba's ("hello's"), and am getting fairly good at Tuvalet nerede? ("Where's the toilet?") I've tried to learn Anlamıyorum ("I don't understand"). This seems like a very useful phrase, but also has too many syllables... so I suppose I will have to keep learning.

Here are some new phrases I have been excited to learn in the Lonely Planet Turkish phrasebook:

• Beni sadece seks için kullanıyorum ("You're just using me for sex" -- a useful phrase to say to get obnoxious street vendors to back off when a simple Hayır -- "no" -- isn't getting the job done.)
  
  
• Kafam iyi ("I'm high" -- both has less syllables than the Turkish phrase for "I don't understand," and simultaneously provides a convincing explanation.)

I'm sure with these phrases I'll be pretty much equipped for any situation. More on this later...