Space Camp Turkey: 2006-07-09

Sorry for the lack of updates! Everything has been going great. My international groups have been a lot of fun, we have had kids from Turkey, Israel, Russia, Germany, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Greece, USA, and England. All of the American counselors are here now, a total of 11.

Mr. and Mrs. Tuncer took all of the visiting counselors and their Turkish buddies out to dinner. They took us to a really nice restaurant thatis also a Winery. Each visiting counselor is paired up with a Turkish buddy who helps them learn their way around Turkey. My buddy is Ali, like last year, is a great buddy. It was alot of fun!

Our first E-Pal week was last week and Beth arranged for a guest Cosmonaut to come and stay for the week named Dumitru Dorin Prunariu. He is the first Romanian Cosmonaut and lived aboard the Russian space station Salyut 7. He was a great speaker and the Media Event was really fun, the kids especially enjoyed being able to have a Q&A session where they could ask anything they want and get a photo signed. An E-Pal is a student in the Partner School Science Program who e-mails, video conferences, and does science experiements with a partner school in Turkey. The kids come to Space Camp Turkey to meet for the first time. They were alot of fun and came well prepared for Special Events Night. This is a night where the kids get to present their culture. They were all really good performances and presentations. My team had kids from Bulgaria, Turkey and the US.

Kyle, Seda, Ashley and I went for a weekend in Bodrum which was a lot of fun. A very cool city it was loaded with tourists and it seemed like more people were speaking English then Turkish. Also there is a great place to get homemade nachos, called Nacho Nana's. Bodrum is a really cool city and we stayed at a great hotel. You can see the view from our hotel room below. We went and saw the Mausoleumm at Helecanarsous, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Next week is the second E-Pal week and we will have Astronaut Shannon Lucid flying over from Texas to visit . She is a very famous Astronaut so it will be really cool to have her here.

Life in Izmir is fun. We go out quite a bit and walking around the water is always fun. The summer is going by very fast and we only have one more team before we get three weeks off to travel. Kyle and I are visiting Sweden for one week, then coming back to Turkey for a little while, then off to Istanbul and Bulgaria to travel to Sofia, and the Black Sea coast. We come back for one more group after that before heading back to the States.

I hope you all are having a great summer!