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The Turkey portion was unique for several reasons. Physically, we were walking in Turkey in the summer, in temperatures of well over 40 degrees Celsius every day. We started walking at 5:00 in the morning so that we could finish by 10:00 at the latest, before it became too hot. The heat sapped all our energy and left us feeling drained most of the time. Emotionally, we had also started our romantic relationship. It had started at the end of Greece but intensified in Turkey. As in every new relationship, it brought out the best and worst in both of us. Culturally, we had left the Christian world and entered fully into the Muslim one. All of these factors combined made us turn more inwards, to focus more on ourselves and to only see only the negative in our situation. As a result, we attracted more negative experiences that directly reflected our beliefs. Because of judgments that we had about the Muslim world being more conservative and un-accepting of two single people walking together, we didn’t seek help in mosques, nor did we try to engage people as we did earlier in our walk. We were walking along the touristy Turkish coast, and felt that people saw us more as tourists than as pilgrims, and didn’t really care about our message or what we were doing. We felt they were more interested in our dollar value than in our true intentions. So of course, we attracted exactly the situations that reinforced those beliefs. It was an incredible lesson in watching how our thoughts and beliefs directly influenced what we attracting into our lives. It was exactly as we had been saying all along – we had the power to change the world through our thoughts and intentions. Once we saw what was happening, we could step away from it and try to heal the prejudices and misconceptions that we had about this world. It was when we did this that our experiences totally turned around and we were finally able to see the true heart of the Turkish people.