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!