Day 23

Today AnnaLeah was my bus buddy. It was a long day on the bus, again. I got a window seat though so it was nice to lean on. Our first stop was at Assos, where we had to walk uphill through a little village to get to it. Where all the little old village ladies were trying to sell things like knitted socks. Aristotle lived here and also the apostle Paul passed through here at the end of his third mission. We took some fun pictures. Then we were on the bus again for a few hours. We then arrived at Pergamum, which is one of the seven churches of Asia and is a Hellenistic site. We got to ride a gondola up the mountain to it. Once we got to the top it started raining a little bit, but that eventually turned into a down pour/wind storm. At one point we were all huddled into a group against a wall trying to stay dry and warm. We all got soaked and eventually the doctor forced us to head down because the lightening was really close. It was really fun, while we were up there. My bus actually came down earlier than the other bus, so we sat in the bus and watched the other kids come running down. It was pretty funny because they were up there a bit longer and had got so much more wet than us. They all had to change their clothes. We drove to our hotel after that. We all checked into our rooms and then it seemed that every one went out onto their decks and we were all talking to each other from there. After our buffet dinner Allison, Melissa, and I convinced Michael-Sean to go out with us. We walked over to this supposed castle, which happened to just be a statue of a pigeon. Then we walked around and looked through some stores. And met up with another group of kids at a karaoke bar. It was a tough small crowd of old people, a bunch of our group got up and sang a few songs. And we were all up there dancing with them. We ended up having to run back to the hotel to get in before curfew. Because when we leave the hotel we have a sheet we have to sign saying we left and they check it right at 10:30. Matty and Izak were late and only in a group of two, so they pretty much got grounded. They weren’t allowed to leave the hotel for the next two nights. And that was the excitement of that night.