We arrived in Izmir very early in the morning and quickly found our hostel and got our rooms figured out.

    Most people planned to take the day off and catch up on sleep, but a few of us had been able to sleep fine so we headed out to explore the city. We found a park that was quite close by so we walked through it. It was a large park with lots of fountains, statues, and orange trees. We picked some of the oranges but they turned out to be very sour. We looked around for a bit more and then headed back to the hostel.

                                     Crowded apartments with stores underneath.

                                                        A park by the sea.

   We called these outdoor gyms. They were quite common and fun, but had no resistance or weights so they seemed kind of pointless. They had a great view though.

                                            Getting in our morning work out.

    Later that night after dinner we went to a prayer house that was going to have an late night prayer time. I guess it started around 8pm and was going to go until midnight. We arrived around 7 and had time to talk with the couple that were running it. It is the only prayer house but they told us about a fairly large church that we could go to.We ended up only staying until around 9pm and then decided we need to go since a lot of people were feeling sick and others were starting to fall asleep.
    The next day we met as a team to discuss what we would be doing. We knew we would be returning to the house of prayer at least a couple of times and that we would also visit the church. We would only be in Izmir a little over a week but we would have two Sundays so we were glad their was a church we could visit. We also planned on visiting the 7 churches from revelations so that would mean at least two days we would be gone all day traveling. It takes three days to see all the churches but the last day we would go straight from the churches to the next city were we would be staying. We also wanted to spend some time just prayer walking and trying to meet people. We didn't know much about the city but hoped to be able to meet people and get to learn a little more about the history of the city and about the people lives.
    We were told to seek God and pray about where we should go and then we divided up into groups to head out. We found a lot of cool things in this city. We ended up doing things like taking long prayer walks, having worship times in local parks, visiting a hospital, and a museum.
                            We saw many impressive statues most without any explanation.

  Shopping for scarves was one of our favorite past times and a great way to meet store owners.

 

       I really enjoyed going to the hospital. We were just walking by when we decided to go in and see if we could visit the kids. We told them we were interested in the history of the hospital and that we would also like to visit some kids. They quickly got us some info on the hospital and then said we could visit the kids that were in the hospital school. We were surprised to learn that they had a school for the kids but we were excited to be able to visit the kids and see it. We had a really good time and the doctors and teachers that work there were really welcoming and excited that we had come to visit. They could speak pretty good English and they happily told us about the hospital, the school, and about how they had come to work their. They said they would love it if we would visit them and one guy even brought up pictures of his home town and said we would love the area and invited us to visit it. Sadly we would not have time to visit any of them and most of them had come from far away towns.
                                                  The hospital school, staff, and kids.

                                            Two girls we met while visiting the hospital.

     We also spent a day visiting with the family that runs the prayer house. They took us to their house and we spend the day hanging out. They had three kids and we had fun playing with them and praying for the family. They had some of the other local missionary's come by. We enjoyed our time in this city and the time went by quickly. We were amazed by the ruins of the seven churches and soon found ourselves heading on to our next destination.