Day 17 in Turkey - Egg Retrieval Eve

Thank you everyone for your comments, thoughts and prayers.  Here we are the night before the big event, of sperm finally meeting egg!   Tomorrow is the day of our egg retrieval and fertilization.  We will know tomorrow how many eggs we really have, and hopefully Sunday we will find out how many eggs fertilized and have begun growing into embryos.  We are excited and nervous at the same time, as well as a mixture of other emotions.  Please continue to pray for us.

Today, we took a shuttle into Suadiye and Bostanci.  It is a part of town (closer to the hospital) than our other ventures.  It is on our side (Asian / east side) of the Bosphorous.  This area is where we usually caught the ferries to go over to the other side of the Bosphorous.  We took it easy, we didn't want to walk too much.  We took a casual stroll down one of the main streets that was less populated street and we admired the unique shops along the way.  The streets were decorated with trees, providing shelter from the hot sun.  It was a little more peaceful than the other places we have visited.   We have pretty much gotten to where we can ignore the incessant honking from taxis and cars.  At times we would get a nice breeze which helped to cool us some along with the nice shade of the trees that outlined the sidewalk.  It was nice to just take it at our own pace and not be worrying about cramming a bunch of stuff in.  At a few intervals, we sat on a bench to watch the people passing by. It's definitely fun to people watch here!

We found a small street that led down to the Bosphorous.  It was nice to be next to the water.  The water was dark blue and beautiful as nature intended.  It was quite peaceful.  As we walked along the water some parts were sandy beach, while other parts were adorned with rocks being hit by waves.   Adjacent to the short / almost absent beach was a wall with a bike lane and a park of green grass.  There were some palm trees of a short nature along the sides of the walkway.  There was no shade down here, so we lasted only a little while...but there was a nice breeze blowing which helped take the edge off from the heat of the sun blasting down upon us.  After about a half hour of walking by the ocean, we walked back to the main strip to catch the shuttle back to the hospital.  FYI:  These people here must like to be hot!  They are always shutting windows on the buses, and they rarely open the windows or turn the air on in the shuttles so it's always stifling hot!!  Today, it was just miserable on the shuttle ride back.

So when we returned to the hotel,  the air conditioning  in our room was so welcomed and needed.  For the rest of the afternoon we relaxed in our room watching movies, reading books, and playing games on our iphones.  For dinner we first checked out the cafeteria, but nothing there looked recognizable or edible!  So we had dinner at the restaurant in our hotel.  Glen had salmon and Staci had steak. I wasn't too bad, considering we have had A LOT worse since being here!  LOL  In fact, it was pretty good!  Surprise, surprise!  We said we just might order it again!  Oh, and we found out we can order Dominos.  So we are thinking we will try that out next week. Hopefully it's like in the states, and not like here where they put a bunch of weird crap on it like mussels, and corn, and other disgusting stuff!

Staci goes in tomorrow at 9:00 am, so I guess the middle of the night for you all, but please say a prayer for her before you go to bed! They are going to put her under and then take all the eggs!  Thanks again for all your prayers they are definitely being answered!

Lots of love,

Glen & Staci

Picture time!!!

The main street

Another one of their crazy window displays!

We're not really sure what they were trying to sell in this store?

It isn't unsual to find street vendors selling beautiful looking and smelling flowers along with these bagel looking things called Simits

This is the street we walked down to get to the ocean!

Pictures from today's walk along the ocean