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: