my favourite place.

i truly love it. to me there is nothing more quintessentially summer than lying on a towel reading a book, splashing in the water, having hours long conversations with friends, climbing rocks, and roasting wieners as the sun sets over the water.

i have been three times in the last week. i'm praying for a smoking hot september like we had last year so that i can maybe go to the beach three more times. pretty please?

heybeliada island.

heybeliada island, turkey

well, i may be back home...but the turkey posts will probably still keep coming for awhile. because that's what happens when you take hundreds+hundreds of pictures of a beautiful country. bear with me, mes amis.

on one of our glorious days off, krista and i took an hour long ferry ride (for a whopping $2!) out to heybeliada island. heybeliada, the second largest island of the princes' islands, can apparently be translated as "saddlebag island". luckily for us (and you my dear blog readers) the island turned out to be much prettier than the name suggests.

the island has a cute little tourist centre, filled with shops & restaurants & a gorgeous waterfront. a stroll along the water took us into a bit more of a run down area of town, which still had a certain charm. we also walked to the national park and saw heaps of families have huge barbecues by the water. that's my kind of weekend activity.

home.finally.

while it's never fun to leave a beautiful sprawling metropolis like istanbul, i was more then ready to come home back to mike. upon arriving in toronto, i started shaking with excitement and didn't settle down until i had thrown my arms around mike in the winnipeg airport.

mike took the week off so we've been having an incredibly beautiful, lazy time - going out for dinner, smoking hookah, watching lost with friends, visiting family, going to see salt (which prompted some agent salt re-enactments... in which i karate chopped mike's hand. whoops), getting massages & haircuts - and just being generally silly & extremely lovey dovey.

here is us all dressed up + out for dinner. i was telling mike that when we do this, i still feel like a 13 year old pretending to be a grown up. when will i actually feel grown up?

the kiddos.

in my absence, my boyfriend mike has been going to a lot of my family's functions without me. a little while ago, he went to my nephew's birthday party. i just about died when i received these photos from him - aren't they incredible?!

two lovely little weeks.

two lovely little weeks. from Janis RoseAnne on Vimeo.

this evening i was feeling a bit nostalgic about our two weeks of traveling around in greece + turkey. while there were many things i should have been working on... i decided to put together this little video!
song: to rest in peace on righteous tides by ohbijou

ice cream by the bosphorus.

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basically the best idea ever after a long day with the kiddos...

blue skies.

blue skies in istanbul

and the summer job officially starts.

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and this is where it's all going down! ahhh!

today marked my first day as a counselor at the rc summer program which is run on the robert college campus in istanbul. what a wild, crazy, wonderful day! i'm in charge of a group of the littlest kids (affectionately called "the limes") and they were so cute, forgetful, clueless and hilarious!

some of my duties as a counselor includes making enormous totem pole sculptures, photo scavenger hunts, making a music video to justin bieber's "baby", running a diner's club, and having a half an hour dance party with 200 turkish kids every morning. oh boy! 

souhaite-moi bonne chance! 

bodrum boat trip.

**windy boat ride + salt water + short hair = unfortunate hair in boat trip photos...

when we arrived in bodrum, we almost passed out from the heat. carrying our huge backpacks down the winding streets of bodrum and up a few flights of stairs to our hostels proved to be a trip low-point. we spent a warm quiet evening on the rooftop terrace and ended up sleeping up there for a whopping $6.50!

the next day, we decided to beat the heat by going on a little boat trip. the boat visited five different beaches on the mediterranean, served lunch, and cost about $16 - incredible! while i loved diving off the side of the boat into the clearest water i have ever seen, i may have gone partially deaf from the turkish dance music that was pumped at an extremely loud volume the duration of the trip.

oh mediterranean, i love you.


ps. sad to report that our mini-vacation is finished... kd & i started orientation today at the english immersion day camp that we're working at in istanbul - phew! what  long day! my boat trip days seem long behind me...

lovely lindos.

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 while on the island of rhodes, we took a bus to the lovely little coastal town of lindos. the town is comprised of numerous whitewashed buildings, overlooking a heart-stopping view of the mediterranean. we walked around the town in complete awe before heading down to the turquoise water for a lazy beach afternoon.