A Little Bit of ‘Extreme’
How dad drew my girlfriend into ice-cold water?
Well, those who had spared time to read my previous memo about Adana probably already knows that we have planned to come here as our second stop. Thankfully my dad had picked us from airport and gave us a ride through our apart. Before leaving our luggage at home, we have decided to eat together, thus my dad took us to lunch. I preferred to had a quinoa laden avocado salad after sunk into meat-coma in Adana.
Mom at the moment was so curious about what we are doing and wanted to be sure that dad was enjoying his guests in the best way. So we found the solution to made a video call together.

Anyway, we did nothing except of sleeping whole day in our room to get rest. Because I had known that old guy will make us suffer from some extreme sports activities later on. As a lazy couple in terms of bodily activity who rather loves to whole time read and being full-time digitally connected, father has a completely opposite personality. But I have to give his credits, whenever I complain of doing something that I being forced to do, at the end that gave me a lot informative and adventurous experience that I could not had lived by myself otherwise. So these are the key words that may contain clues for you to understand how my dad drew my girlfriend into ice-cold water. You might call his inspirational attitude both as motivation or manipulation. At some point, it isn’t always easier to separate the two from each other.
Here is the results:

You heard it right, we have been playing old-cult game Left 4 Dead for a while together with our friends, and what’s more we have a competent Turkish team trying to survive against zombies. To not being fall out of topic, I’ll turn to main story. Yes, where were we? My dad was trying to convince us to do sports in the canyon, right.
Somehow we found ourselves waiting in line, dressed in lifejackets and wearing helmets to start racecourse with a length of two kilometers. I thought my blood circulation has stopped after I have jumped into ice-cold water but still was striving to swim forward while Özgecan has been yelling like, ‘Babe! Babe! Something happening to my heart, I think I could not make it’. Suddenly, we heard a voice of my father maybe from ten meters away already, ‘Nah, You’re good. You just don’t know it’ see? That’s what both manipulation and motivation looks like.
After about forty meters water was drawn to our knees so we had not to swim anymore but this time the hard-core wind still was shivering us. During that time we have met with a Russian tourist group on the road and asked for photo because they had a waterproof phone case which made them able to use their phone’s camera feature. I gave them my email to send us the photos that we have taken later on.
The racecourse took about one and half hour to finish. I would like to add a small detail that I skipped; to reach the course you need to go out with a truck on a ramp that takes about ten minutes which also gets you back, means you don’t have to walk down the road but guess what happened? We have decided to finish our long-running activity with a final walk, except Özgecan who rather waited the truck to came back.
In the evening of the same day, I introduced my girlfriend to another couple of friends; Çağan and Ece, who have a very different personality characteristics than us in terms of avoiding contact with different sections of society. They prefer to live in a more isolated way because of their hollow prejudices that stigmatize low-class people with robbery, murder or sometimes for being psychologically perverted. I wanted to remark especially that point to show how incompatible our communication channels are. Even so, we have thought that we can find a common ground by playing Monopoly, as many of you might know it is a board game in which players are tend to bankrupt each other to be the last one standing. Unfortunately, we have forgotten that this game contains too much competition.
We sat in a down-town cafe all together to start playing the game. Even Çağan’s girlfriend was so suspicious that he could cheat on accounting records, because when it comes to the victory he would not recognize anyone and it happened. I was the first who fell down in the face of his sneaky tricks, then he crushed his girlfriend. He had a great entrepreneurial thinking and convincing negotiating skills. But it was not enough for him to win, he wanted to feel the pleasure of being a bedrock authority. I would not have guessed what a simple game could indicate about personality, but believe me it does. He continued to play until he got our last culprit and made us feel like weak emotional romantics.
After the game they took us home with their car. We hugged and said goodbye to each other. The game was lost, bur friendship has won. Another trip came to an end with this story. Our next step is Ukraine, follow up the news!
