Summit Fever: There Are No Short Cuts To Bliss!

As promised, here are some updates on our journey towards the Uhuru Peak...

The Ankara crew (minus J) went for two hikes in the past week. The first one was through the Bilkent University campus. I, V and myself were accompanied by the very enthusiastic Golden Retriever Sheena, who was our beloved Sherpa for the day. Being outside, at very familiar places, by two too familiar faces was very refreshing. It is always very calming, and an instant rush of serotonin to fall back to our comfort zones. I love interacting with old friends. Makes the time irrelevant. We spent 3 hours hiking up and down surprisingly steep Bilkent terrain, pretending to have summit fever due to our climb up the "Everest". Our break was up at the kiosk that we used to go to in high-school. It was plain bizarre to be back there, and meet parents of 2nd graders. Telling them we are the class of 2005, realizing that we graduated more than 5 years ago was unreal. The parents clearly perceived us more mature than we actually see ourselves (or act to be more honest). We came across 2 teachers of ours, and they complained about how much the school has changed since we left. Apart from the unreal looking middle-school building not much seemed to have changed to us. We still felt like we were there just yesterday. But in reality the entire educational system had changed. Even the name of the school has changed from BUPS/BIS to BLIS. Clearly we have zero connections to this new school...How can we? Such a terrible mistake to change the name of a school. How do they expect to have alumni connections and relationships, when we did not graduate from BLIS?

Ok, bringing my focus back to our journey...

Our second hike was around the Eymir Lake, which is a part of the METU campus. This one lasted about 3 hours too, and consisted of 4 members as well. We replaced our Sherpa with D, and he was our historian for the day. This day was another blissful day, but the better kind :) (sorry for the cheesy language, I reverted back to my high-school self after being at home, and sleeping in my childhood room for 3 weeks now).

An interesting anecdote: All four of us went to METU for elementary school, and then transferred to BUPS for middle-school. Coincidence? Do you believe in coincidences?