Ace and I celebrated the three-year anniversary of our first date this week! We celebrated the day of by going out to a nice Korean restaurant…then leaving immediately when we saw the menu. 30 bucks for a bottle of soju (which is about 75 cents in Korea)! 65 bucks for a meal that cost us 5 when we were there! Ok, yes, we’re not starving students anymore, but still….we went across the street to some yummy Chinese food instead  We’re celebrating the weekend by spending it in Agva, which is a Black Sea and river-front little town which is a favorite for Istanbullus who want to get away. It’s three hours away by bus- which is about how long it takes to even make it out of Istanbul. We’re renting a little bungalow in an area that’s not accessible by car- we’ll take a little cable car over the river to the facility. The weather isn’t supposed to be great, but we’re planning on huddling in our bungalow, watching DVD’s, hanging out by the fire in the lodge, and just relaxing. Should be great!

Things are pretty normal other than that- Ace is surviving work, and work is looking up for me. Things have been pretty quiet for me lately- I’d actually been getting a little bored- but I’ve gotten a few messages from people interested in starting soon. Last weekend we hosted our first Couchsurfers, which was great. For those that haven’t heard of it, Couchsurfing is a social network site like Facebook, but for travelers. People who are coming into your area send you a note asking if you’d like to meet up for coffee, hang out, show them your favorite places, and/or let them sleep on your couch. When you go somewhere, people do the same for you- kinda a “pay it forward” sort of hospitality mentality. You can build up a global network of friends in no time. We absolutely loved Kamel and Franck (from France) and hosted them for two nights. They spoiled us by doing our dishes and feeding us massive amounts of imported cheese and chocolate. Tonight we’ll have dinner with them again and saying goodbye, as they’re heading back home tomorrow.

We’ve been having some trouble with our landlady, which has been seriously stressing me out. We made an agreement at the beginning of the year that we’d give her 150 extra and she’d pay our bills. Our bills have been over the last few months, so we told her we’d be happy to pay anything she had to pay out of pocket- i.e. anything over the 150, as long as she could get us the receipts or records for the bills. She’s refusing to get copies of the receipts for us and getting extremely upset that “we don’t trust her”, and saying that we need to pay her any time any of our bills are over what she thinks is normal, no matter what the bill total is. I.E. if she thinks our internet should be $20 and it’s $50, we owe her $30, even if all the bills added together are still under 150. I.E., she wants to make a big profit off of us. None of this is in the contract! I thoroughly despise confrontation, but am also not willing to be taken advantage of. Sigh. I’m getting lots of nasty emails, too. This is one of the disadvantages of living abroad…due to the fact that I’m not familiar with the laws, the language, where to go for help, etc., I feel pretty vulnerable and helpless in these kinds of situations.

Wish me luck getting it sorted out…I’ll need it.

Other than that…not much! The wedding website is officially done, so check it out :)
http://weddings.theknot.com/pwp/pwp2/view/MemberPage.aspx?coupleId=7721822499807563

Lots of love to all of you!
Kait