A Little Taste of Turkey!
After 4 airplane rides and 31 1/2 hours of travel, the team is now in Erzurum, Turkey!
This is the view from my hotel room window. Our hotel is at the end of a road up a mountain with an elevation of 2450 meters. It makes walking up the stairs tiring but also gives us a great view of the town of Erzurum, especially at night.
It seems like if you want to live in Erzurum you have to live in an apartment complex. I don't think I have seen more than three houses while driving through the town. There are more houses near Kandili (where the trails are) but even those ones don't look too spacious!
Some of the apartment buildings are nice than others...
There are also a lot of abandoned buildings everywhere; some old gas stations, houses that look like they were blown up, buildings downtown and some buildings that I can't even guess what they were used for.
If you were to look out the bus window for almost the whole bus ride to the ski site and back this is what you would see. A blanket of white everywhere, blending into the white sky.
We visited a part of downtown and went in a little grocery store, they had a big veggie supplies!
The trails in Kandili are very bare of trees which makes the climbs deceivingly long. They don't have many trails, but the ones they do have will make for some hard races for sure.
Yesterday we went to a shopping mall across the street from the grocery store I showed earlier and as soon as you stepped inside it was like you were back in North America. The only thing that was different was having to walk through a detector on your way in with security guards watching you.
When walking into dinner last night a Turkish lady greeted us (all the ladies) with a single rose for Valentines Day. It was a wonderful surprise :)
All for now! The internet is a little slow...
It seems like if you want to live in Erzurum you have to live in an apartment complex. I don't think I have seen more than three houses while driving through the town. There are more houses near Kandili (where the trails are) but even those ones don't look too spacious!
There are also a lot of abandoned buildings everywhere; some old gas stations, houses that look like they were blown up, buildings downtown and some buildings that I can't even guess what they were used for.
If you were to look out the bus window for almost the whole bus ride to the ski site and back this is what you would see. A blanket of white everywhere, blending into the white sky.
We visited a part of downtown and went in a little grocery store, they had a big veggie supplies!
The trails in Kandili are very bare of trees which makes the climbs deceivingly long. They don't have many trails, but the ones they do have will make for some hard races for sure.
Yesterday we went to a shopping mall across the street from the grocery store I showed earlier and as soon as you stepped inside it was like you were back in North America. The only thing that was different was having to walk through a detector on your way in with security guards watching you.
When walking into dinner last night a Turkish lady greeted us (all the ladies) with a single rose for Valentines Day. It was a wonderful surprise :)
All for now! The internet is a little slow...
