Clearly apologies are owed ...

After a long flight home exhausted and nearly delirious I arrived at the Los Angeles airport to greet my husband and kids. The kids kept going on and on about a bag of bad tennis rackets and Pokemon and Alex and asking if I'd brought Turkish delight and chocolate eggs I figured I must be more delirious than I thought. Finally we got it all sorted out. They had read the blog that I couldn't access while I was on the plane, and they were very happy that I had Turkish delight for them (not so happy that I hadn't been able to locate any Kinder Surprise Eggs in Istanbul, but they seem to be getting over that).

So to clarify: no I did not drop you all. Let's reframe this: through nine days in Istanbul I helped you learn how to explore Turkey for yourselves, initially providing frameworks to help you understand your experiences and showing you how to get around, and then backing off some so you could do your own explorations. For this last part of the trip I passed you off to Tosun, a Turkish tour guide who is very competent and helpful, and I hope you are making use of his presence to talk with him about his opinions on some of the things we've already discussed.

I do apologize, though, if it wasn't clear to all of you that I was going home early. My kids are still little and for them having me gone for 11 days felt like "a year" (in their own words). I thought I'd made it clear to all of you that I was headed home at the end of the Istanbul portion of the trip, but apparently not (though I might have thought the 2 hour debriefing and overview of what to look for during the rest of the trip should have tipped off some of you if you were unclear on this!)

In any case, I have been very pleased to catch up on your travels and hear about your experiences through the blog. Do take some time to talk with Tosun and Şayeste about their views on modern Turkey. Try to set up a time to talk with them as a group about how they understand the "Kurdish problem," what they think of the current government, what they think should be the role of the army in Turkish society, and what they see as the problems and opportunities for Turkey at this point in time.

I know some of you have a hard time posting photos on the blog. I'll post more tomorrow.