I have two days left in my beloved Istanbul, and I'm getting melancholy. When Dana left, I went to the airport with her to try and extend my stay, change my flight to a week later, but I acted too late and apparently all flights through Lufthansa from Turkey/Germany to the States for the next three weeks are booked. Which is pretty hard to believe, disappointing, but apparently true.

So yes, the weekend after my Capadoccia adventure, Dana came to Istanbul! It was a momentous occasion, the first time we'd been together abroad without Mom and Dad, which, however much we love our parents, was nearly unbeatable. We walked the tourist path so well - I even stayed in Sultanahmet with her at a hostel which was tight and full of backpackers, but still a good experience. The view from the top of the hostel was one I'd never seen before - looking southeast over the Bosphorus as it opens up to the Marmara. We did Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia like I had done three weeks before, but we also got into the Basilica Cistern, which I had to refer to Wikipedia to explain:

The Basilica Cistern, also called the Yerebatan Sarayı or Yerebatan Sarnıcı, is the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that still lie beneath the city of Istanbul, former Constantinople, Turkey. The cistern, located in the historical peninsula of Istanbul next to the Hagia Sophia, was built during the reign of emperor Justinian I in the 6th century, the age of glory of Eastern Rome, also called the Byzantine Empire.

There you go. Couldn't have even tried to do it myself. It's my roommate Sarah's favorite tourist attraction because it's a few floors below the city and 15 degrees cooler on any given boiling day in Istanbul. Oh, and it's incredible - the stone pillars are in such rows with such lighting. I'm not being very poetic today, but it's worth a visit. That was definitely a highlight of our sightseeing.

Another enormous highlight, not just of Dana's visit, but of my entire trip and definitely my life thus far, was that Saturday, which consisted of a boat trip on the Bosphorus supported by ARIT (American Research Institute in Turkey), the program based here that is basically the sister-program to CAORC, the people who sent me here. Whoo, that was complicated. Anyway, the short of it was that this day-trip, which consisted of two small, chartered boats that took us up from Bebek (already about a third of the way up the Bosphorus) to the mouth of the Black Sea. Along the way, we stopped at a Genoese Castle that was originally used to control the entrance of boats from the Black Sea to the Bosphorus and has been used by the military until about 20 years ago when the Soviet Union stopped being a threat to Turkey. The view was incredible, definitely worth the climb up. In one direction was the very top of the Bosphorus and the Black Sea and in the other you could almost see to our university campus several miles away.

Once we got back down to the boats, my time came. The director of the program, a 60-something ex-pat who swims daily, invited anyone who wanted (but warned us of the long distance) to swim with him for his annual cross-Bosphorus triumphant journey. And I did! About 15 of us jumped off the boats swimming from about 100 meters away from Asia to a closer distance to Europe. It took us just around 30 minutes to cross, and we did so after the last tanker passed us going south towards the Marmara. How was it? Incredible, beautiful, not chilly at all, full of huge waves. For the first ten minutes I was completely freaked out - the waves were much bigger and the current much stronger than I could even try to compete with, but it turned out I was just struggling against what in the end helped me get by. We ended up being caught so much by the current that the boats picked us up by the European side probably half a mile farther south than when we started. But it was incredible.

After the swim we took the ferries up to what on the map I'm seeing as Anadolu Feneri (but I'm not sure if that was the place), probably the very last town on the Bosphorus on the Asian side. Dana was lucky to experience probably the very best Turkish meal I've ever eaten (though closely followed by the meal at Cumhuriyet last Saturday that you may have seen in my most recent video): first, and most importantly, the meze, which I like to think of as Turkish tapas. A variety of stewed vegetables (onions, tomatoes, eggplant), stewed/fried eggplant, salad, hummus, yogurt, white cheese, canned fish, and probably more things I don't even remember. All in little plates for each to take a couple bites from and pass along. Then came the fish and meat: a plate of fried calamari, anchovies, and mussels and another plate of the Turkish food börek, which can come in different forms but is usually baked filo dough stuffed with meat, cheese, spinach, or a combination of the three. Delicious. (On Saturday came another course - the real main course - some of which I think was shown on the video. After all those "appetizers" they brought us the main dishes: whole grilled fish or basically a separate plate of sausage meatballs. Way too much, but incredible nonetheless.) Finally, and this is after an hour, hour and a half of eating, drinking, talking, gazing at the beach/Bosphorus, we had dessert. A large piece of homemade baklava, the bottom layer soaked in honey, and a large plate of colorful fresh fruit. After all the food was cleared, we washed down the meal with either a glass of çay or a cup of Türk khavesi, Turkish coffee. The only disruption was that we were sheparded back into the boats before our over-turned coffee cups could cool down enough to have our fortunes read.

From the very top of the Bosphorus, the boats took us about halfway back while we sunbathed on the deck, trying to sustain ourselves from the waves rocking the boat and attempting to digest before we swam again. This time the boats stopped in what I assume was a boat-free zone. Other boats were teathered to the same spot, and most of the students and adults on the trip (all of us made 30, I think?) jumped in, even those who didn't cross the Bosphorus the first time. The fun generated into a diving competition off the side of the boat, which ended in the trip's visitor, the supposed "daddy" of our program here, Tom Farrell, the State Department "Deputy Assistant Secretary for Academic Programs" dove from 20 feet up into the Bosphorus. Wonderful. The boat took us all the way back to Bebek at the foot of Bogaziçi University, where Dana and I caught a bus back to our hostel. Phew.

There is more that has to do with Dana's visit, a trip to the castle right next to the university's campus and the biggest Starbucks I've ever seen (with a deck that literally SITS on the Bosphorus), but I've got to move on.

What else?
I leave in about 30 hours for the airport, and something feels so wrong. When I was in Spain (which begins so many different sentences...), I felt some kind of accomplishment, completion of what I'd come to do. I knew Spanish so well, I felt comfortable in the country, speaking the language, being with my friends. I felt so home, though I knew I was ready to come home for real, but here that entire feeling has hardly begun to develop in me. In fact, I'm only understanding 20-30% of what I hear in full-on Turkish conversation. Now coming from nothing, I do feel accomplished, but there is still such a long way to go. Earlier today I was checking out Turkish classes taught by the director of this program at Georgetown and unfortunately they majorly conflict with not only my current class schedule but also with crew... I'm going to try to continue with Turkish, but I know I just want to stay here, in Istanbul, and really FINALLY just get inside the language. This program was a wonderful stepping stone and I made incredible, amazing friends, but we're almost all Americans if not all English-speakers, and that was the one disappointment. I wish I had been more immersed in the language than I was, but that certainly doesn't mean I didn't have the most incredible summer of my life, because I did. I know I sound so sappy right now, but I feel really incomplete leaving Turkey in a day and a half and knowing that if only I stayed, I could learn the langauge. For me, that's the hardest part.

Swimming the Bosphorus:


Basilica Cistern:


View from Genoese castle:

For your enjoyment (and until I actually sit down to fill in the gaps of the last two weeks), a very pleasant night at Cumhuriyet, an extremely old meyhane (men's coffee house) transformed into a restaurant on Nevizade Street in Istanbul last Saturday night.

the real Cappadocia

Yesterday is a story in itself, which is why I wasn't able to finish my update, but I'll get to that.

As I said, Amasra was absolutely incredible. I guess I've been in the city for too long, but this was a much-needed vacation to the country. The Black Sea region is famous in Turkey for good fish, nice, country folk, and beautiful, untouched-by-tourists villages and beaches. That's pretty much what we found. There were tourists, but they were all domestic, and many of them there for the same reason as us: just a free weekend and a relatively short bus trip. Most of the weekend, wait, the WHOLE weekend we just wandered around the town, usually followed by a stray dog or two, looking for views, sometimes stopping for a few minutes or hours to take in the sights by sitting, reading, drinking çay (chai), playing backgammon, talking, or any combination of those. Though there were a couple other girls from the program who came on the trip, my main company consisted of Katie from Montana who goes to school in Wisconsin and is studing geography and I can imagine has been missing the country/open space quite a lot since arriving in Turkey, Yochai, an incredibly enthusiastic and interesting Israeli who is probably the most well-traveled person I've ever met in my life and who also speaks six languages nearly fluently, and James, a San Diego native who hasn't lived in the States since he graduated undergrad 4 years ago. Also incredibly well traveled, multi-tounged and totally chill. Yochai and James are probably two of the most interesting people I've ever met. So you can imagine how much fun it was just to sit by the water and listen to Yochai regaling us with stories of "that time when I was in Kazakstan" or how he got out of Israeli military service. Etc. We also ate some pretty amazing and fresh fish in Amasra, as you may have seen (or should check out) in my pictures. Also, the produce up there was just insane. I've never had fruit that tasted CANDIED. And to think that only years ago the only fruits I would go near were apples, bananas, and grapes. We reluctantly got on our bus to go back to Istanbul, calculating in our heads the career path to take that would allow us to spend much longer amounts of time in Amasra.

Last week wasn't anything extremely special (besides the norm of waking up every morning and seeing the Bosphorus), but Wednesday my roommate Sarah and I took a trip that was partially planned by the university to Kanlica (Kahn-lih-jah), a city a little north of us and on the Asian side of the Bosphorus that is famous for its yogurt. Seriously. Really the best part of the trip was taking the ferry ride from Bebek (the town below - not south of but BELOW - Bogazici University that is right on the water) across the water. Even on the hottest days this ride is fabulous, breezy, and just exploding with view after view of the water, the coasts, and the beautiful Ottoman masions built right along the Bosphorus. The yogurt was good but honestly nothing special compared to Turkish yogurt in general which is fattier, thicker, and a little more sour than yogurt in the States. Sarah and I walked along the coast from the port at Kanlica to a little cafe overlooking the water with a view of half a dozen fishermen out to catch those oh-so-clean fish that come out of the Bosphorus. I took a few dozen pictures. Sometime soon (or maybe at the end of the trip) I'll compile an album of the different faces of the Bosphorus, because it never fails to impress. Most people I know voice the same feeling I have - I will never take advantage of having this view so often. It's always changing, always interesting, always filled with action of small ferries, huge tankers, rowboats, swimmers, sailboats, you name it. Jellyfish! Waste. Everything.

I should probably get to Cappadocia before I leave for Araf, the gypsy bar. When we got back from Kanlica we found out that after 60 days of attempting negotiations with Hava Is, the workers union for Turkish Airlines (Turk Hava Yollari), the union declared that it would go on strike. That was last week. And still no strike. Nonetheless, we had no knowledge of the future and of course freaked out and went to the THY offices the next day, thought up alternate plans, how to get our money back, etc, and after two days of worrying, the nine of us (yes, nine!) got on our plane and departed for the smack-dab middle of Anatolia. We staying in a hostel in Göreme, which is in the Nevsehir region of Anatolia - I came to find that Cappadocia is merely an unofficial area in this region famous for its rock formations and churches carved out of solid rock from the 6th and 7th centuries. Again, if you haven't seen my pictures, I encourage you to see my last post for the link. My stories and descriptions are maybe 2-3% of the attraction of the region. Saturday we hiked around our hostel which was in walking distance of the Göreme Open-Air Musuem, the main tourist site around. The hike over was our first look at the mushroomed rock formations and so-called "fairy chimneys" for something having to do with Paul from the New Testament. From what I understand, these formations are a result of volcanic erruptions, so the rock itself if quite soft and therefore easy to hollow out, and voilá, we have the caves and churches that I have pictures of. So the Open-Air Museum was quality, with almost a dozen churches right next to each other, not just carved out of solid rock 1500 years ago, but with their frescos still intact! Or at least in tact enough for them to be restored in the past 30 years to look how they look now. Later in afternoon we hiked to Rose Valley for the sunset (which, as you can see, was almost to the Amasra caliber). Sunday we took a guided tour with our own minibus (dolmus) around to sites out of walking distance. A few incredible highlights: Derinkuyu, an underground city for early Christians escaping the raids on their above-ground villages by the prejudiced Romans; Ilhara Valley, an incredible gorged valley with trails and a stream and again, views up the wazoo; and Selimle Monastery, which is carved into (out of) the side of a huge rock formation and is climbable and accessible to tourists everywhere. Which there were. Tourists EVERYWHERE. The city of Göreme, I'm convinced, is made of almost entirely of tourists and Turks who own stores and work in hostels and restaurants that cater to tourists. Speaking of hostels, the one we stayed in was adorable, pretty nice, and extremely cheap - 10 turkish lira (which is like 7.50 USD). So if you're going to Cappadocia sometime soon...

Wow, it took me much longer than I thought to write this post.
And there's always more to say. I hope tomorrow I'll be able to write some more about how Turkish is going and general observations of the culture. You know, idiosyncracies of Turks.
Oh, and the election. Can't forget about that. Now off to Araf! Goodnight!
Insallah, iyi aksamlar, adios!

Cappadocia / everything I've missed in the past three weeks

Oh, I've been such a bad blogger. It hit me just in the past week how fast this summer has gone. Not too long ago I was at school, finishing up crew, and soon after at home for a little, itty bit. But now I'm somehow almost done/5 weeks into my program here in Turkey and in denial that school starts in another 5 weeks. Scary!

So I've missed telling you about a lot. I don't remember what the last weekend I filled you in on was, but I think I still haven't filled you guys in on my Being a Tourist in Istanbul weekend, which is still pretty fresh in my memory. If you haven't yet seen the pictures, there are links below in my previous entries. I've been doing an OK job of mini-blogging through the captions of my pictures in order to avoid a big long post like this one may become, but I think it's pretty necessary to get this stuff down in writing or typing or somehow recording. I'll try to fill in some of the gaps or provide additional interesting information...

So that Saturday I went to three main tourist attractions - the ones everyone sees in any typical tourist trip to Istanbul: the Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmet Mosque), the Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofia), and Topkapı Palace. My favorite of the three was definitely Aya Sofia. The Blue Mosque is beautiful and massive, but many other students on the program agree that some of the lesser-known mosques I saw the week before (Suleymaniye, Sehzade, and Fatih) were comparable or even more beautiful than the Blue Mosque. I mean, when you get to a certain level of beauty, it's hard to compare. The Blue Mosque is definitely a "must-to-see" as one tour guide put it. But Aya Sofia was just magnificent. It's impossible to fit its size in one picture, and even when a fourth of the main dome was in scaffolding, it was enormous. One of the coolest things about it in addition to its pure size was the combination of Christian and Muslim religious symbolism side-by-side. There would be excavated Christian tiling partially covered by a huge wooden shield with Arabic lettering on it and the Muslim version of a pulpit where the Christian one would have been. Very odd. Because I was alone (which was faaabulous), I just sat down in a corner of the church/mosque/museum and read my guidebook and stared.

After a bit in Aya Sophia, I grabbed a simit (sesame-covered bagel delight) and sat down in front of the Hippodrome (or the Washington Monument as I like to call it) to write some postcards. I was soon approached by a Turk who asked, "Tourist?" to which I responded, "No hablo ingles, soy Española" just because I was tired of people trying to speak English to me. We're in Turkey. Honestly. So I practiced my Turkish, struggling a LOT, especially since this guy knew some English but no Spanish and I as a Spaniard didn't know almost any English myself. I'm an awful person for lying, but I honestly didn't think it would get back to me. I found out some basic stuff about my new friend Hassan. He's a student at Istanbul University and he lives in Kayseri near Kapadokya. When I told him I was going to visit Topkapı, he said he'd been there before and did I mind if he came along. So, in the middle of thousands of tourists with more English-speakers than Turks, I agreed and Hassan was my tour guide for the rest of the day. By the end he had asked me some things about myself and I realized I really couldn't lie to him anymore and told him that I actually was American but had lived in Spain for a year. He was very good about it, realized it had all been a joke, but probably pretty frustrated that we had struggled in my terrible Turkish all day when we could have been speaking English. Oops. I met up with him a couple days later in Taksim Square under the conditions that we'd speak more English, and it turned out that that way was actually much more helpful for both of us. His English really wasn't that good, and I could supplement in some of my Turkish to help, and he was pretty helpful and patient with getting me to make coherent sentences in Turkish. Oy.

The next day I got a late start but saw Dolmabahçe Palace - an amazing relatively very, very new Palace build by a sultan who saw Topkapı as too Eastern and old and therefore bad, and so he build Dolmabahçe mirroring the styles of the French and English palaces like Versailles. The palace itself was incredible - the whole empire went bankrupt just from its construction - but the deal was that I couldn't just wander around the palace: I had to go through on a tour, and unfortunately the tour was pretty huge and uninspired. Still a worthwhile trip.

And in the past few weeks what have I been doing? The week after my Istanbul adventure we had a mid-term, so I spent most afternoons learning my verbs and conjugations and getting to those really trivial vocabulary words like "to whistle," "to excavate," "leek," and my personal favorite, "bugging device." And "Damn" in Turkish. Swear words in my vocab list. How positively Turkish!

The mid-term went well, and several hours after the test ended I boarded a bus to Amasra, a sweet little village on the Black Sea coast. Look at pictures! They explain a lot. Not much more to elaborate on except for the fact that it remains (though this past weekend was a close second) the most amazing weekend of my life.

Now I have to do work and learn what I missed in class today. We got back this morning and were just too pooped to make it to school, so I slept and read, and probably should have been updating this in a more disciplined fashion, but please forgive me. Will have to continue with Amasra and Kapadokya tomorrow

Meanwhile, enjoy the pictures!

Cappadocia pictures:

Click here please, click here

New photos, new videos, new travels

I don't have time right now to fill everyone in on my most recent travels, but I thought the closest I could get would be to post links to more photo albums I've made. I went into some depth with the photo captions to be able to give some background and explain my trip at a very basic level.

Last weekend I basically was a crazy tourist and did all the majorly touristy things that I'll probably do again when Dana comes. I just added more pictures to an album you guys may have seen already, so just keep clicking through the photos you've seen and you'll get to some new ones:

Oh to be a tourist in Istanbul

And then this past weekend we had a three-day weekend after our midterm on Thursday. A few friends and I bused up the coast to a small village on the Black Sea (Karadeniz) called Amasra. As you will see in my pictures, I pretty much want to spend the rest of my life there.

Amasra is beauuutiful

And finally, because I didn't think my pictures could REALLY get you to Amasra, I took a video.
Hope you enjoy!

videos!

let's see if this works - I'm going to try to make it so that you don't have to copy and paste the link into another window and all you'd have to do is click on the link.



This is from last weekend when we stopped by an old Byzantine church (that is attached to a working mosque). We were outside waiting and the prayer call was played and I caught part of it with my video. The audio is more important than what you will see (the other people in the group and the outside of the building which is not nearly as nice as the inside).




This was when we went to a bar near Taksim for a gypsy band. Their first set was more of a performance (and this is during their first set), but during their break everyone got up and starting dancing. Recognize the tune?



And this is their original piece. I kinda like it!


Hope you're enjoying! I'm planning on some major tourist attractions this weekend. Get ready for lots of pictures of pretty things.

Photos from mosque and photography adventures!

http://gwu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101502&l=0558b&id=5319572

Also, re-check the link I listed for my first album - I put up a few more pictures.

New videos coming soon!

I guess I never elaborated on my first weekend in Istanbul. Since classes have been pretty calm and normal, I may just address my language ability development later on and just talk about my sightseeing for now.

Last Friday I took a bus down to Taksim Square (the central meetingplace/busiest intersection in Istanbul) with some guys who are here on the CAORC program with me. There is a main pedestrian street called Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Street) that is always absolutely teeming with people. It is a huge commercial street with big retail stores like Mavi Jeans (a Turkish company!), Adidas, and Nike, but also restaurants, cafes, book stores, and lots of ice cream stores (Turkish ice cream = "dondurma"). Narrower roads that intersect Istiklal Caddesi on the left and right expand it like a sponge, soaking up many swarms of people into smaller neighborhoods where more bars and clubs are, and several nicer restaurants. Friday we turned onto a street filled with fish sellers on either side, but kept walking, found a great restaurant and climbed up four flights of stairs to its rooftop, filled with Turks enjoying the night. Dinner could have been just main courses of fish or meat, but we just got meze, the Turkish version of tapas. For the cold meze, they bring out a tray with about two dozen small porcelain bowls of each possible meze, and as you point to the ones you want, the bowls just get set on the table directly. Quite a fast method of eating if you're particularly hungry. We ordered a bottle of the Turkish national drink "raki" (pronounced rocca"), which is essentially anis liquor. Apparently a good digestive, but a couple sips made me feel the opposite. Needless to say, I'll have to try raki again to let it grow on me, which I've been told by many people it tends to do.

After dinner we walked the length of Istiklal Caddesi and down steep hills to the waterfront of the Golden Horn. Below Galata Bridge, which traverses the Golden Horn, there are some restaurants and bars from which we enjoyed the scenic view of Sultanahmet, the old city across from the Taksim Square area (called Beyoglu). We then climbed ourselves back up to Istiklal and found a crowded bar on another rooftop to absorb the atomosphere.

Saturday our rented friends took us on a ferry ride about the Bosphorus. A sidenote on our rented friends: through CAORC, the organization that's in charge of the planning and scheduling of my trip here, we have been set up with peer advisors, who are just four Turkish women in their twenties who are to take us around Istanbul and talk to us in Turkish. We met them last Friday. They're all very nice, and when we met up with them Saturday, they all had brought another friend along to introduce to us. We arrived across Galata Bridge in Eminonu where there is small port for ferries. For some ridiculous reason, we all couldn't get on the ferry that was about to leave for a day tour, and so we were going to wait an hour for the next one, but they just ended up calling in a smaller ferry just for us. The tour was about 90 minutes: it first took us northeast along the Bosphorus on the European side and then turned around and took us back along the Asian side. Beautiful houses, incredible views, and the blue Bosphorus. Sometimes I forget that it's a straight and not a very blue, very wide river.

Saturday night I went out dancing with one of my roommates and a bunch of people from the advanced classes, many of whom have either been in Istanbul before or have been living here prior to the summer program. Sean, who's been studying at Bogazici on a Fulbright, took all of us to what seemed like a pretty local place. It was playing older Ottoman music and he even knew some of the people there. We came back to this place, Araf, last Wednesday, but that's coming.

Sunday was dreadfully hot. On Saturday we had all missed the heat by being on the water during the worst part of the day, but Sunday the air was still, humid, and about 45 celsius. A couple of us went back to Ortaköy, where we had stayed our first few nights, to grab some kumpir, their signature dish, and do some shopping at the weekly market. I should have actually written down exactly what was in the kumpir, but Wikipedia's a great help for now. Kumpir is "a popular Turkish fast food made from potatoes that are wrapped with aluminum foil and baked in special ovens." It's like a baked potato. Wikipedia also says that the baked potato is cut in half, and the insides are mashed and mixed with butter and grated kaşar cheese, then topped with any or all of the following (I had all except the first one): mayonnaise, ketchup, pickles, sweetcorn, sliced green and black olives, sausage slices, carrots, steamed peas, mushrooms and Russian salad. It was pretty unbelieveable. There is a picture in my album that only does justice the sight of the delicacy.We walked along the water north to Bebek where we ran into a music festival and a band performing a concert. Everyone was dancing in the center and the video I took of it happened just before I was pulled into the middle to dance, too.

What's cool about our program with Bogazici is that it incorporates the study of Turkish culture into the classes and extra events. Mondays we watch Turkish movies (with English subtitles for us beginners), and this past week we saw "Organise Isler" which was really fun. It has amazing aerial views of Istanbul and a fun, comedic plot. Definitely a good movie to watch to get a sense of what Istanbul looks like! We also have lectures in English every other Tuesday. The first one was actually pretty disappointing - a tv personality who graduated from Bogazici lectured on the tourist attractions in Istanbul. She talked for an hour about the history of Sultanahmet, the Blue Mosque, and the Hagia Sophia. Unfortunately, probably half the people in the room had either a masters or was in the proccess of getting a PhD in Ottoman or Central Asian History, and he lecture was pretty bland. I did, however, find out that "turquiose" is actually named after the Turks and their love of a certain shade of blue. Interesting, huh?

Wednesday night a bunch of us went back to Araf and listened to a fabulous gypsy band play. The music wasn't that traditional (a few other people went to a different bar that also had a gypsy band playing more ottoman gypsy music), but it was a great atmosphere and everyone eventually got up and was dancing. I'm going to be posting a couple videos I took of their performance prior to when everyone was dancing.

Friday we explored the Grand Bazaar (I've only a picture or two of that in my album: I get paranoid taking out my camera in such a crowded tourist area!), which is insanely touristy and an assault on myself as well as on my eyes. I bet 75% of the customers walking around were foreign, and that may be an underestimate. And the shopowners are actually talented - after I bought a scarf I asked the owner how many laguages he spoke. He said he knew English, Spanish, French, and was learning Japanese. Everywhere you go in the bazaar, four men are calling to you to come in their stores, and in any language they know. In fact, I was spoken to more in Spanish than in English! Most of the items were the same from store to store: lots of know-off purses, tons of silver and gold jewelery stores, and then store that sold endless forms of the nazarlik (the protection against the evil eye) and hundreds of different styles of Pashmina scarves. There were tons of other typical items, too, but my point is that even in a bazaar with 4400 stores, probably only a fraction of them had items that were of extremely good quality, though they are there. They just take a lot of wandering and getting lost to find.
On the way back home from the bazaar I tried turkish ice cream (dondurma) for the first time. It's no Graeter's, let's just make that clear. If I can, I'll try to take a picture of the man who "scoops" the ice cream, because they get decked out in this traditional costume and actually get the whole hunk of ice cream out of the bucket and twirl it around on a long, metal rod they use to scoop the ice cream. What makes dondurma able to be completely removed from the bin and spun around also makes it chewy and kind of gross. I'd compare it to creamy, frozen taffy. Very odd!

Saturday the University sponsored a trip for us to go into old Istanbul, which was just a guided tour of lesser-known mosques west of the main tourist attractions. It was really incredible, though, and my first time in a mosque ever, or as far as I can remember. We visited Sulemaniye mosque first, which had an entire complex with gardens, cemetaries, and mausoleums for the sultans who built it. Our guide spoke a lot about the architecture of the mosque and what it said about Byzantine influence during that time, etc. I know very little about Byzantine and Ottoman relations, so his explanations and comparisons to other mosques and churches was not very helpful for me. The second mosque we went to was called Sehzade and the third was Fatih. I'll post a link with pictures to those when I get them up. We did A LOT of walking yesterday - we got off the bus around 11 and didn't get back on one until 6:30, and although we had some time to sit for lunch and at the sites, it was all a hike.

Getting from Sulemaniye was interesting because we had to walk through a neighborhood called Fatih to get to the mosque that bears the same name. Now here are some things about Fatih that I learned after walking through it for a half hour: it's an immigrant neighborhood which means a few things. First, most people have come from eastern Turkey and are poorer and much more religious than most metropolitan-Istanbulians (or whatever they're called). Almost all the women were wearing headscarves, long-sleeved shirts, and long skirts, which is fairly common to see around Istanbul, but most men looked just plain orthodox Jewish with long beards, scull caps, white button-down shirts, and black pants. They just lacked the peyas and they would have fit right in in Crown Heights. I happened to be wearing a tank top because it was such a beautiful day, but had brought my grand bazaar scarf to cover my head and shoulders inside the mosques. There WERE 40 of us, but we were getting such strong stares that I took out my scarf and wrapped it around my shoulders. Apparently Fatih, which is just a short walk away from the main part of Old Istanbul which is plagued with tourists, hardly ever sees foreigners. People were leaning out their windows to look at us and little boys were following us on their bikes. It was straight out of a movie, I swear.

Today my roommates and I wandered around the area near Taksim Square looking for one of the exhibits from some photography festival in Istanbul that has galleries all over the city. After a severe lack of luck with the public transportation and directions, we finally found an old tobacco factory that had been revamped and had three levels of photography - beautiful exhibits ranging from the Nile drought to photos taken of the Aral Sea, to profiles of immigrants in Istanbul taking literacy classes. We walked to another venue which actually took place in an alley. I'll post pictures or else I doubt you'll believe me. An art gallery in an alley.

What else? Oh, there's so much. Thursday I met up with a friend of a friend - Lauren's friend Murat from Brandeis who now lives in Istanbul took me around (guess where?) around Taksim. He talked to me a lot about contemporary Turkish society, the politics surrounding the headscarf issue, and what it's like to go to school at Brandeis when he's Turkish and from a Muslim country. Fascinating! I still have much more to tell, but at this point anyone who is still reading should get a prize. Let me know if you have finished this post, and I'll do it!

Happy birthday to my dearest sister on her 21st! And happy 4th to those of you in the states. One of my friends is convinced that all the expats in the area are going to just appear out of nowhere on Istiklal Caddesi on Wednesday. I'm ready!

Oh man, I was going to update on my progress with Turkish, eh? In short, I've been learning a ton of vocab, I bought myself a dictionary, a children's book, and a book with stickers and more nouns. I'm starting to recognize words within Turkish conversation, but I still have a severe lack of knowledge of verbs, which we're apparently going to get to late this week.
Verbs, FINALLY!

Finally managed the uploading of videos!

I have two:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Sdelamancha

will take you to my first encounter with turkish coffee on Saturday. It was simply divine - thick and slightly sweet (I agreed to have the one where sugar is added).
Marvelous.

and

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2949150469883815506

which will take you to the Bebek music festival that my friends and I just happened to pass by. Really fabulous music, and the people in the middle were getting into the dancing. This was a particularly calm song, but the dancing definitely got more energetic.

Gule gule kullanin!
Enjoy!

I finally uploaded some of my pictures onto a facebook album. What's cool is that there is this new feature that lets anyone (on or off facebook) see the album, so here's the link:

http://gwu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2100600&l=5eb39&id=5319572

I've also taken some pretty cool videos (like when we wandered into a music festival in a neighboring city last night) and I'm going to see if I can get them on youtube.
Isn't the Internet just wonderous?

Merhaba, friends and family, Iyi günler!

I'm finally settled in Superdorm and have an hour to myself before anything is going on. It seems like between classes, homework, and additional activities that CAORC is providing for us there has hardly been enough time to complete an update about my first week in Turkey.

Needless to say, when you're in another country that speaks a language you're completely unfamiliar with, life can be quite frustrating. As I put it to a friend the other day, I'm getting very good at charades. It's not that Turkish is impossible, it's that it's been so long since I've started a language from scratch, I'm having a hard time not trusting my intuition with words that seem like they could be of a Latin root. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all.

Classes started on Wednesday. I'm enrolled in Bogaziçi (Bosphorus) University's Summer Intensive Language and Culture Program along with around 80 other students mostly from America, but a sprinkling from Israel, Spain, Belgium, Germany, and France. Most are graduate students or PhD candidates some of whom are, get this, learning Turkish to be able to read/translate documents that relate to their thesis. Isn't that incredible? The breakdown of the rest of them: lots are studying Ottoman or early Turkish Republic history, some are political science/international relations students looking to specialize in this area, and then there are the stragglers, who have various (quite fascinating) reasons for coming to Bogaziçi to learn Turkish. Only fourteen of us are sent here with CAORC (Council of American Overseas Research Center), and we're about half beginners, half intermediate level. Another dozen got their funding from ARIT (American Research Insitute in Turkey) and are at "advanced" level. Everyone else at Bogaziçi is either paying for it out-of-pocket or got alternative funding from other grants or organizations. I think I'm the youngest one out of all 80 people, but I haven't met everyone, so that may turn out to be false.

What I mean to say: Classes started on Wednesday. There are nine of us in my beginner class with Didar. We're all trying to be trusting of our professor that she has a method or strategy with which she will teach us the langauge, but the first couple days were painful at times. Sometimes we'd try to get through the book (which is completely in Turkish) and we'd just stop at every sentence and she'd translate the phrases word for word, or she'd try to give us simple directions in Turkish that we just plain didn't understand. So Wednesday and Thursday were both packed with vocabulary. I knew that would be an important part of learning the langauge, but Didar would wave off our questions concerning grammar and verbs, which we still have hardly touched upon, and are both also extremely important to learning the langauge. Finally, Friday we delved more into grammar, compound nouns, and making simple phrases yes or no questions, which was simply fascinating. At this point, that is really the most interesting part of the language that I've learned about, but we're moving quite quickly, and I can't imagine ignoring verbs for all of next week.

Classes last from nine to one, but the Superdorm is about a 15-minute walk from campus uphill until we reach the entrance of the campus, which I think is one of the highest points around. The main campus is all on a steep downhill towards the Bosphorus, so descending it is not a problem. However, the ascention after class is always killer: it's been consistently 90 degrees and sunny for the past week and it's only supposed to get hotter, and the humidity!! I'm definitely paying getting used to hills after Ohio and GW. But the hike is always worth is twofold: for one, halfway up the hill is an INCREDIBLE view of the Bosphorus and the enormous Russian tankers traveling to the Black Sea and the entire Asian side of Istanbul. Two, a couple blocks away from the entrance of the school we've discovered a great lunch restaurant where the woman is always anious to help us practice our Turkish (since she has no English to practice on us). Also, it always takes a while to make the food, so she brings us random tea and salads and tomato dips to tide us over and then refuses to let us pay for them. I'm not complaining! My favorites dishes have so far been Urfa Dürma, a small shwarma-esque wrap with tomatoes, onion, and lettuce (2.25 lira), çorba domates, a delicious tomato soup served in a little saucer (1.5 lira) or çoban salata, which is essentially the Israeli salad that I'm familiar with: tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper (1.5 lira). Any combination of two of those three dishes is sure to satisfy. And always under 4 lira, or $3.

I have more to tell, especially about my first night exploring Istanbul and what is going to happen today (we're taking a ferry ride along the Bosphorus) and about a dozen other really interesting facts that I've been meaning to write down but am right now forgetting.

A few interesting facts to leave you with:
Turks are always drinking tea. As much as you hear about Turkish coffee, it's surprisingly not that typical of a drink. Çay (pronounced "chai") is the strong black tea EVERYONE drinks out of these teeny glasses morning, noon, and night, no matter the temperature. I still haven't acclimated myself to drinking boiling liquids in 95-degree weather without sweating up a storm.
Near the University, they're not all that impressed that I'm American and can greet them in Turkish. Because there are so many muulti-lingual students there all year round, I guess we (the summer students) really aren't that much of an anomoly. Really only the restaurant woman is impressed with my sparse vocabulary.
No one runs here. In Spain, it wasn't THAT uncommon. Here, if you're running on the street, it's an emergency. They actually made a new verb in the language that means "jogging" specifically to separate the excercise activity from the "running" that implies running to get help.
Interesting, eh?

Man, this has become like another of my infamous mass emails. Very sorry. I do apologize. Hope this reaches you wherever you may be.

Güle güle! Iyi günler! Hosça kalin!
Goodbye, good day, to your health!

Jet-lagged in Istanbul

Merhaba!

Blogger is suddenly, along with my life, completely in Tukish. Apparently "gonderme" means "update" in Turkish.

Anyhow, I'm here, arrived safely in Ortakoy, a small neighborhood north of Istanbul, but one of the southernmost towns on the Bosphorus. For those of you unfamiliar with what I'll doing in Istanbul, here's the short of it: I'm enrolled in Bogazici University near a town called Bebek about halfway along the Bosphorus on the European side of Istanbul where I'll be taking intensive Turkish classes for 4-6 hours a day.

And thank goodness for that. I can't wait to start classes on Wednesday because Turkey is right in front of me and I seem to be in my own American bubble, unable to talk to anyone besides the 14 other students who are in here with me. When we arrived last night, my roommate Katie, who will be a junior at Wisconsin - Eu Claire, and whose first time it is ever going abroad, figured out the awe of hotel rooms whose electricity doesn't work unless the room key is properly in the slot next to the door. We then proceeded to wanted about Ortakoy, a town with an incredible Barroque/Rococo mosque that sits along the Bosphorus so that the sultan could disembark directly from his ship into the mosque, and a synagogue from dating back to Byzantine times. Etz Ahayim. Starved, we each bought "Gozleme" for our first Turkish meal: a large crepe spread with cheese, potato, spinach, and tomato, and and assortment of meat, grilled on what lookd like an enormous rounded upside-down wok. Essentially a Turkish burrito. I think it goes without saying, the gozleme was delicious.

We also experienced our first taste of Turkish Islam: prayer calls. First last night as we were going to sleep and then just maybe an hour ago as I woke up. We're not sure if the prayer calls, which are a series of song-y phrases blasted through town by some kind of horn or projection device, are in Turkish or Arabic. Definitely one of the first things we'll be asking Sylvia Onder, the Georgetown professor who is the director of the Turkey program this summer and also a Turkish professor in DC.

My bags didn't exactly make it quite yet: a short one-hour layover in Munich meant 17 bags didn't arrive in Istanbul, and my theory was that the heaviest ones got left behind. I have learned my lesson about over-packing! But they're supposed to get here today, and I'm hardly worried because some students who are studying in Alanya this summer (a costal town along the Mediterranean) also lost their bags, and how the bags are going to make another flight to Antolia and a busride to Alanya, who knows?

For now,
Sasha