More Turkey info

An interesting piece of conversation at our dinner at the school last Friday that we forgot to mention was about the mayor of Eskisehir.  Apparently the people give him credit for much of the enhancements in their city over the past 10 years.  He’s currently on his third term and is quite a visionary.  He is around 70 and the citizens would like to see him stay around for as long as possible.  We didn’t take good enough pictures to really show the beauty of the city but there are statues and fountains everywhere. 

While this is a very modern town there is an old town which we visited today.  A lot of old ottoman homes are being restored.  We walked through a mosque that was built in 1525.

We bought a dictionary the first day we were here but is really wasn’t very adequate.  We thought small was better to carry around but it didn’t have most of the words we were trying to find so we traded it in for a bigger one.  We’ll try that one tomorrow and see how we get along.  We went to a travel agency to see if we could find a guide to take us around this area which apparently is best explored by car but there aren’t any guides.  The travel agency (the guy spoke a little English) can help us if we want to go to other cities but not his one.  I’ve picked up about 6-8 words of Turkish so we have a long way to go.