Awesome Geography: Turkey

 We had a good time with Turkey.  We did a lot with Istanbul (Constantinople), the Hagia Sophia, and some great travel videos before class.

Our art activity was making marbled paper using shaving cream as a base with liquid watercolor (food coloring works also) swirled into it.





You press the paper onto the cream, then scrape off the foam with a popsicle stick.

The results wee strikingly beautiful!

For our snack we had actual Turkish Delight from Turkey!

I have to say, having tried some from England a while back, it is seriously worth it if you can find the real thing!

One of the gifts of this class is having younger kids for my younger kids to play with.

I mean, Choclo is 13, so my younger kids aren't too young, but they missed out on having little ones around all the time.

It's delightful to see them enjoy little ones the way the older Zoomlians enjoyed them!




UPDATE: I forgot the most surprising thing I discovered about Turkey!  I can't remember who asked the question: Which came first, the name for the bird or the country?

Turks (people from Turkey) visited India, and found them cultivating a food bird we call the Guinea Hen (as in Guinea from Africa, where it originated).  The Turks imported them, calling them India birds, which got shortened to indians.  Seriously, Turks ate indians.

The British visited Turkey and found these birds as marvelous as the Turks did, so they imported them to  Britain, calling them... turkeys.

British immigrated to America where they found a similar looking (and equally tasty) bird in the wild, so they called it a wild turkey.  And since they were calling the native people Indians, Indians were eating turkeys before the Turks were eating indians.

It makes me wonder if residents of Hamburg find it unsettling that Americans eat hamburgers.