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:
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