To be honest, I had heard bad things about New Orleans in general. Partly because of what happened after hurricane Katrina and the current crime rate etc. However, my perception about the city took a 180 degrees turn as soon as I arrived in the city. Since, we had nothing planned for the first day, the crew decided to explore the downtown and the infamous “Bourbon Street”. The best part was that our hostel was only half a block away from Bourbon Street (Now, how cool is that?). We started our journey from Bourbon Street then on to Canal Street, which stretches through downtown New Orleans, and finally we went on a free ferry ride from New Orleans to Algiers.

On Sunday, the Connick Family invited us to view the St. Patrick’s Day Parade from their front yard. That’s where I tried some delicious New Orleans cuisines (sea-food!!!!) and became a part of the longest parade of my life. The parade lasted for almost 4 hours and I collected all sorts of beads, vegetables, candy and snacks! That was an amazing experience overall.

Monday was pretty laid back too. Our assignment was to perform different tasks at a nursing home.  For the first half of the day, David and I worked in the kitchen. After lunch break, the whole crew got together and played Bingo with the elderly. Even at this age, the competition was fierce. Each winner received a quarter for every win and a huge smile on their face showed how much the victory meant for them, it wasn’t about the money, it was about who came out as the winner.  Working at the nursing home was an eye opener, watching all the elderly people and what they had to go through made every one sad and happy at the same time. Sad because their children have abandoned them, happy because we knew that these people are in safe hands and well taken care of. Later that evening, a family hosted our group for dinner. They served us shrimp. Lots and lots of shrimp!. Their house was beautiful and the delicious dinner made it even better.

Our real work started on Tuesday. Rhodes college along with Purdue University students worked together on an old nursing home which was badly effected by the hurricane. We had to gut down a whole room from the walls to the ceiling. The task wasn’t as easy as it sounded, the ceiling was not high enough and it took a lot of effort to take it down. However, effective team work enabled us to complete the assignment on time. For the evening, The Head of Alumni relations organized a dinner for different group of students who were in New Orleans for spring break. This included the Catholic Student Association, Rhodes Rebuilds and the RUF. The dinner also included Rhodes Alumni who are currently working in New Orleans. This provided us (the students) with an opportunity to interact with alumni’s who are living a successful life and learn some important tactics on how to pursue our career goals. I was also able to meet up with my RUF friends.

On Wednesday and Thursday, our team was given a new task. This time, we had to gut a house of an 86 year old gentleman. The house had not been opened since hurricane Katrina, so we would be the first one’s to actually open the house. It was a painful experience. Mold had taken over the entire house. It took us 2 days to complete the entire assignment but it was by far the best project I had ever done. The house owner was grateful for our efforts and as a reward, he brought us special Italian subs from a famous New Orleans restaurant. For the night, a student from Rhodes College hosted us for a dinner. His mom served us the traditional New Orleans dish, Rice and Beans. To top it off, we all tried Snow Balls (If you ask for snow cones, the person won’t serve you). On Thursday night, the group decided to eat at Bourbon Street. That’s where I tried the famous Po-boy sandwich with fried shrimp. Boy oh Boy, that was by far the best meal I ever had in New Orleans. After all the things I had heard about New Orleans before going there, I was eating my own words. I just simply love that city now. The culture, food, city spirit and the architecture  make the city so special. Now, I can’t wait to go back to New Orleans, but I guess I’ll have to wait for at least another year.

“New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse, and I can only dream that one day she will recapture her glory. I will do everything within my power to make that happen and to help in any way I can to ease the suffering of my city, my people.”  Harry Connick

Or at least I thought it was until I ran into the laundry room in my building to wash my first load of laundry in Turkey. Not only are all of the machines in Turkish (not terribly surprising), but these newfangled pieces of washroom tech have a great many options and settings available to students. I understand the desire for new and beautiful machines that will really wash students’ clothes to that spit shine clean we all want, but let’s not forget that we’re still on a college campus: where walking to the cafeteria is sometimes forgone from sheer lack of enthusiasm. Does anyone here really need 12 wash settings?

My first foray into the laundry room left me a little intimidated at the bevy of options I had in front of me, all of them written in a language I did not understand. After some note taking and dictionary lookup, I have figured out what most of the settings on the washer and dryer mean, but most of them have turned out to be very slight variations on each other with one being a little warmer than another or one having a longer spin cycle than the previous setting.

The Washer dial:

The Washer display panel:

The  Dryer controls:

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the fact that this school wants me to have options when it comes to household chores like laundry, but I think they’ve gravely overestimated the need for customization of the college laundry process. I like my laundry simple and efficient. It’s the way it’s done at Rhodes and that’s the way it ought to be.

Why should you become a fan?  

Are you aware that Barret’s hours of operation change during holidays or exam periods?  What new resources are we offering?   Where can you find those “scholarly” sources your professor keeps talking about?  Did you see the incredible model of Barret designed entirely of graham crackers and candy?  What about that Flash Rave that rocked the lobby last semester?  The Barret Facebook page offers answers provides all of this and more! 

We want this page to belong to the Rhodes community.  Feel free to posts comments, questions, photos of events in the library, photos of you and your friends just hanging out, reminders of upcoming events, source suggestions, etc.  We look forward to hearing from you!

The man in charge on the bus was kind of a stickler for details, meaning we could not simply sit wherever we wanted to even though there were many empty seats. We made the best of it, strapped ourselves into our tiny seats, praying for the ability to sleep, and shipped out of Istanbul at 11pm. It would be 8.5 hours until we would reach Izmir, a coastal city that was fairly close to Ephesus, our final destination. How we would get from one to the other, where we would stay in Izmir and what we would do to bide our time was still up in the air, but at least we had time to mull it over on the bus. I for one took to reading under the tiny overhead light and almost finished Hunter Thomson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”—not an easy thing to do on a never-ending bus ride. I was in quite the sleepless fog.

But wait, there, in the distance: the sun slowly began to shine as we neared our destination, its rays illuminating the large mountains we drove in between as we slid our way into the valley in which the city of Izmir sits. Dropped off in a bus station that was a few miles away from downtown (who knew?) we bargained with a taxi driver—who spoke German, which is why having a native German with our troupe was quite handy—and were dumped downtown with the assurance we were a block from a travel agency…that turned out to be closed.

Like anyone might do in that situation our mangy crew stumbled our way through the streets in the early hours, all eyes peeled for a place to rest. In the middle of the bazaar we came upon such a place, in an alleyway behind the knockoff shoe salesmen. For 12.5TL per person per night, we couldn’t say no. And just around the corner was a café that sold soft-serve ice cream for 1TL a cone. What more does one need but a bed and an ice cream cone?

We explored the city. Granted, there’s not much to see in a touristy beach city off season, but we made the best of it, touring the city’s park and checking out the ruins of a Roman Agora—the old-world market where Roman civilization came together (hence why people who are afraid to leave their homes have Agoraphobia). It was not much to see, save for some ruins of pillar stacked in piles like UPS had just dropped them off. It was sunny now, however, and like zombies in a Romero film we wandered about the streets in a hungry, staggering gate towards our stiff mattresses and the hope of adventure on the horizon.

And that adventure came (right after some greasy omelets) in trying to navigate towards Ephesus. We knew where it was but knew not how to ask for it in Turkish. See, Ephesus is “Efes” in Turkish, but that moniker has also been given to many things, such as ever-present Efes beer and the Efes hotel where the nice bus driver dropped us off when we asked to be taken simply to “Efes”. Lesson learned, we found two men who were willing to cut us a deal to take us to the city and back in their taxis.

And so we were there! Almost! Ninety minutes of cramped taxi travel behind us we first visited the home wherein the Virgin Mary stayed for a time after Jesus’ death. But we only found out about this after driving past the entrance to Ephesus, and upon our taxi driver taking us up a steep mountain road while laughing on the phone, we all assumed he was driving us into the wilderness to kill us and bury us where no one would ever look. It was surely the end, until we saw the signs for Mary’s house and quieted our throbbing hearts and wiped the sweat from our brows. It was a small abode on that mountain where Mary lived and without the signage and shrines it would be a very pleasant stone house and beautiful landscaping. Our time was brief, but peaceful and contemplative.

And so we were there! Indeed! Our bumbling group had finally reached the old city and what a sight she was. Pieces of marble rested haphazardly in what were once grand structures, their sheen long since wiped away by time but their grandeur still subtle and distinct. Unlike most historical sites in the US, Europeans are free to wander and climb and jump around upon their history, and thus we did, climbing atop the smaller theatre and looking down the valley towards the rest of the city. To the library we wandered, down streets of marble that in their youth must have been pearly white roads of pure beauty, something someone nowadays might admire rather than dare walk upon. A grand and ornate facade, the library looms over a courtyard and hosts carvings and sculptures from times long ago when libraries were special places, temples of knowledge and reason, where the learned went to be…learned.

But it was the Great Theatre that stole the show (pun intended). Holding around 24,000 people it is an ominous structure that wraps around the small stage at its center, the picturesque mountains wrapping themselves around the theatre. My voice effortlessly carried itself to the tops of the stands as I stood onstage, imaging the thousands of Ephesians who once laughed, cried and socialized here to the words of the ancient comedies I’ve read in school. On the highest part of the stands you can see for miles out into the valley and up to the mountains, the clouds falling from the sky to slowly swoop past the scenery. Two thousand years ago there was truly something special when structures of this magnitude were around.

When the rain began to fall we left the grand old city as quickly as we had arrived, my mind wondering what it would have been like to have lived in such a magnificent place. Back in Izmir we ate dinner, went to a bar, got cold sitting outside and ate dinner again at a second bar. Back on our bus heading home I reread Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums”, my favorite books of his, and tried to take in the scenery. Heading south through Turkey the plains start to look much more Mediterranean than Istanbul, which was a well received change of pace. Another eight hours on a bus, another shuttle back to school, and another unforgettable weekend of travel and exploration under my belt.

Anyway, I really couldn’t believe how much snow was coming so I texted my Spanish friend, Dave, to get a video of the snow. Here ya go

What have I been doing? OMG. These past two weeks have been substantially harder than what I’ve been used to in Spain. Extreme amounts of reading (I’m taking a Central American literature class, and it’s INTENSE), friends with hella issues, Mock Trial practice, Singers rehearsals, oh lordy, it’s been rough.

This weekend has been unreal awesome, though. Like I said, the weather has been divine, so I’ve been to Overton Park more times than once. Kite flying has been a constant go-to activity, and lazing on the quad has been my vice of choice. I can usually justify my sprawling on the grass for hours on end by claiming to do “reading for Management,” but that just means that most of my homework will be left for…now.

In spite of all this, I feel the need to enjoy a little time with fellow blogger TYLER. We’re going to the Paradiso for Alice in 3D. Can’t wait. Speaking of hanging out with bloggers, I’ve also actually gotten to meet Sameer, who’s really cool, no lie.

K. Off to Alice.