Oct 10--16th

I got to hang out with my friend Çagrı again this week. This time I watched him eat a huge kumpir. A kumpir is an incredibly large baked loaded baked potatoe. It usually consists of butter, two kinds of a lot of cheese, salt, and another half of a big potatoe. It is then placed back into the oven and browned on top. Then there is an assortment of toppings that can be requested. I usually get grilled chicken, grilled mushrooms, pickles, onions, olives (green and black), jalapenos, corn, ketchup, mayo, and BBQ sauce. It sounds horrible but trust me its awesome. Anyways as I was watching my friend eat a kumpir I decided to order a chai. We sat there for abut an hour just talking. Then the subject of smoking came up and he asked me about my past. I told him that I had tried some things but only a handful of times. His next question was about why I stopped doing all the stuff I did back in the past. So this was a great opportunity to tell him about Christ and how He changed me. I got to tell him about who I was and then and who I am now. This was basically the conversation for the rest of the night. We went to several other places such as D&R and Starbucks, and messed around a bit. However, our conversations always ended up coming back to God.

I really liked this guy a lot. He was a person that thought for himself and was not a follower of society. He did and said what he saw to be right and stuck closley to his word. We had some great conversations concerning more than just religion but the world in general. We had a lot of the same interests in views, movies, music, and much more. There was one movie, for instance, we both absolutly love which is known as, "Into The Wild." We would talk about that movie all the time it seemed like. There is just so much to talk about concerning that movie. It brought up questions of identity, life, society, and God. We even found ourselves singing the song "Society" from the soundtrack to the movie by Eddie Vedder outside of starbucks that night. The worst part of that nght was that it was our last night of being about to hang out. I didn't know it at the time and neither did he. Çagrı has been waiting since September to get his visas to Spain so that he could attend Valencia University. He recieved his visas week and a couple days later. He was on the bus to Istanbul on the very same day to catch a plane to School. He called one of our mutual friends while on the for just a split second and said his good bye's vicariously through him.