Compassion International, the Qur'an, and baklava ice cream

I was talking with an arab guy - another international student, and he was telling me about zakat. (for those of you who don’t know, it’s money you’re suppose to give to the poor as a muslim) I then told him about Compassion International and Little Mark and how compassion works. He seemed very happy about it. Then I said that I hoped to visit Little Mark one day but didn’t have enough money now cuz it was rather expensive. He replied with “you have done enough. You don’t need to visit him.” I was like, “oh! No! see I want to! It’s not cuz I have to, I just really want to.” He just seemed plain confused…it was interesting.

We’ve spent this whole week in my history class discussion the Qur’an (it’s a history of islam class) At least a third, thought probably more like half, of the class is international students, which makes sense. It’s been very interesting. Learned a lot. I love my professor for that class! She’s my second favorite professor now – my astronomy professor from WCC is still my favorite, but this teacher is pretty awesome. Incredibly smart so it’s fun to go to her lectures and you don’t mind that they’re 3 or 4 hours long a lecture.  Since we’ve been talking about the Qur’an, she brought in three copies of it today. Two of them she passed around for the class to look at but the third she only let me handle. It was the Qur’an that’s been in her family for generations and is several hundreds of years old. It was pretty cool to hold it and look at it and I was honored that she had let me handle it and no one else.

So one of my friends told me there was baklava ice cream in Ankara. At first I wasn’t sure if that was disgusting or brilliant. After giving it some thought, I decided on brilliant. Lol So I went in search of this in the part of Ankara where she’d seen it. I found a container of it at a store..and well…okay, first off Turkish ice cream isn’t really ice cream..it’s chewy…only had it once. So “baklava ice cream” was a container with a thin amount of vanilla ice cream around the sides and bottom of the container, and literally baklava in the center. Like they took several pieces and stuck it in the container. Lol so it was more like baklava with a small bit of chewy vanilla ice cream. I vote just eat the baklava, it’s the best part :D