Walk to the Mall

Tonight I decided to make the 45 minute walk to the mall for dinner for two reasons. The first was to postpone grading papers or working on lesson plans. But the second, more important reason, was because the mall is one place where I can eat dinner alone and not feel strange. The mall has an actual food court with Burger King, McDonalds, Sbarro Pizza, and myriad Turkish brands of fast foods..mostly kofte and doners. There are even two semi-fast food restaurants where they have actual waiters, the chairs are really comfy, and the menu has pictures so I have a pretty good idea what I'm ordering. Tonight I chose the semi-fast food restaurant and ordered an adana iskender because the picture was pretty. (For all you English buffs, I would capitalize Adana because it's the name of a city here in Turkey, but maybe the iskender is not really named after the city or maybe Turkish has different capitalization rules)..Oh, I guess more importantly, an iskender is like a long skinny kabob made with ground hamburger or ground lamb. The food was tasted fine...not amazing, not bad.

The best part of this restaurant was that they had a TV playing so I could engross myself in trying to understand Turkish. On the television set appeared to be either Brandi Chastain or Tiffeny Milbrett helping girls in Africa learn to play soccer. Two things struck me about this program: 1. the fact that girls were playing soccer and 2. location of the playing field which consisted of dirt and rocks, with a few tough drought resistant weeds sprinkled in as obstacles...very similar to here in Turkey...the fields, that is. I haven't seen many girls playing soccer.

Then I got to thinking about Ellen and all the soccer fields we've seen and soccer players we've met. So, I decided it was time to walk home before I made myself homesick.