Getting Settled by the (Black) Sea

Greetings from Bartın, finally! Sarah and I arrived this past Saturday and are currently settling into an interesting limbo. We have very kindly been given temporary housing in a hotel next to the ötögar (bus station), approximately 10 km from the center of town. Though Saft Otel is perfectly nice, and our host, Emrullah Bey, a post-graduate student teaching English at Bartın Universitesi, promised us that the housing would be "for a week," Sarah and I have placed bets on the day that we will step into our permanent housing, and neither of us expects to leave Saft anytime before October 9. What are the many upsides to living out of a suitcase for another two weeks, you ask? For one, we are pretty sure we're the only guests at the entire hotel. The staff are incredibly friendly and generous (they even did our mountain of dirty laundry for, what we can only ascertain, no charge whatsoever). Secondly, itching for physical activity, Sarah and I very luckily discovered a back road that starts right next to our hotel and goes for miles into the lush Black Sea countryside. As many of you know, over the past few months, living in Washington really weighed on me. The wailing ambulances, hoards of obese tourists, and boiling pavement made leaving the city less heartbreaking than it would have been. Well, I feel that I have finally arrived in green, outdoor bliss. The two of us have encountered unexpected friendliness by the villagers we've seen along the way; rather than just greeting us a with a Good Evening ("Iyi akşamlar"), we get a friendly (and curious) "Hoş Geldiniz!" (Welcome!). Though it's quite obvious we're not from around there, I do believe they think we're still Turkish - any attempt to speak to them on my part is met with fast mumbles and then pauses in which it's assumed I've understood. They can't quite believe it when we tell them we're Americans teaching at the university for nine months. I've promised myself that I'll return once my Turkish is conversational (shooting for December...) so that the verbal exchange won't be totally for naught. (There was also an amazing interaction during last night's walk that I did not include in this description... but Sarah discusses in her blog. It involves a very nice stranger and corn on the cob.)

So we're actually quite comfortable in our temporary abode - looking to unpack and cook, but otherwise, no serious complaints. The dolmuş (small bus) stops across the street from the hotel and takes us into the center of town (çarşı) for less than one US dollar. Bartın is surprisingly bustling! A town of around 50,000, it is the capital of a Turkish province by the same name. Everyone we're met who is not from here is decidedly unhappy to be in Bartın, and does not have a problem telling us, but Sarah and I think we will like living here very much. We've had plenty of time to wander about in the commercial area and get ourselves all but lost in the charming residential neighborhood surrounding "downtown." We stumbled upon Bartın's ethnography museum that we're pretty sure not one local "Bartınian" is aware of. Once again we had the kind of lovely interaction with someone I can only presume is the owner that made me swear I'd return when I had a better grasp on the language.

When we tired of the city itself, we took another dolmuş (approx $2.15 and 30 minutes) to beautiful Amasra, a small coastal town that I visited three years ago. In a post in this very blog about my trip there three years ago, I wrote that Amasra made me contemplate potential career paths that would allow me to spend long periods of time on the Black Sea coast. Not that Fulbright is a career path (or could it be...?), but I've certainly been lucky to be placed in such a wonderful region. My return to Amasra was heavy with expectation: this was, in fact, the place where I exclaimed to my parents in a panorama post card that I would spend the rest of my life. Did it live up to my projections? Even on a cloudy and sometimes rainy day, the view was glorious. The small town, situated on small green cliffs dropping down to a stunning Black Sea, is full of fresh fish, small Turkish children, and views. Sarah and I began a list of activities that would fill all our free time in the coming months including, but not limited to, sunning on the beach and piknik-ing at the highest perches of the peninsula with fresh goods from the old ladies at the market below.

What, do you ask, is the progress with regards to why I'm really in Turkey? It's not all long walks alongside cows and dinners of fresh fish with a view of the sunset, I suppose. Emrullah Bey, as I mentioned before, is our incredibly kind contact person at the university. While many other Fulbrighters had some issues getting in contact with their uni (and even more have had communication issues regarding their responsibilities since arriving), Sarah and I have been truly lucky with our placement. We're told that we will begin speaking classes with "hazırlık" or preparatory classes for students who want to improve their language skills by taking only English classes for a year before they begin classes for their major. So far, most of our questions have been answered in the best possible way. Our classes should be around 25 students each, and it turns out the hazırlık is optional for students this year - we hope this guarantees that our students will be as motivated to learn conversational English as we are to teach them. Today, Emrullah Bey graciously allowed us to sit in on some of his English grammar classes with first-year students who chose to forgo hazırlık, and their spoken English was pretty disastrous given they've been studying the language for at least a few years. This observation has further fueled my motivation to teach English. Sarah and I are brainstorming, but if anyone reading this has any ideas about games to play with real English beginners... please share.

This week-long vacation between arriving and beginning classes has been a welcome hiatus. I admittedly didn't plan very well in the weeks leading up to arriving in Ankara, and it's been a mental struggle to keep everything in perspective without having the time I needed to reflect on my trip. These days off have given me time to read, explore, and prepare goals and expectations for the months ahead. I'm also just trying to enjoy my surroundings as much as possible. Here, I'll show you: here's this morning's breakfast...
See, Mom and Dad? Reading AND staying hydrated. Photo documentation to prove it.

Love to everyone from a tiny Turkish village. Hope this finds you happy and healthy.

Orienting in Ankara

I'm baaack! On this blog, and in Turkey. I haven't quite decided how to utilize this space other than for its main function - Hi Mom and Dad! Yes, I'm alive and staying hydrated - but I suppose we'll see how it evolves over the next 9 months. Thank you for following my journey!

My current location is Ankara, Turkey, specifically at the Ogretmenevi ("Teacher's House") hotel for the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant orientation that will be lasting almost two weeks. Upon arrival to the hotel on Monday, I was greeted by a panoramic view of the city from the balcony of my room, 13 stories up. The day was supposed to be rainy, but the wind that replaced the rain cleared Ankara's lower atmosphere of the layer of smog that usually blankets the city. After 24 hours of recycled air and 16-inch legroom, this view was refreshing and exciting.

Orientation has been generally a beneficial experience. Save the embassy security guards who scared the living daylight out of us (I may never again be able to walk on sidewalks here without imagining my impending gory doom), the lecturers and instructors have been informative and often entertaining. We've had a number of university professors who have spoken about the political and ethnic climate in contemporary Turkey and even had a pseudo-performance from Talat Halman, a Turkish poet, speaking to us about art and literature through the ages. Intermittently throughout, we've also had some Turkish lessons (much appreciated by many ETAs who have never had formal Turkish classes). One of the most helpful (and entertaining) sessions was one that explained the subtleties behind simple greetings and farewells, and few words in between. Very little Turkish can go a long way, our instructor assured us. Simple "please" and "thank you" can easily show yes/no, graciousness, and flattery. Apparently it is Turkish custom to offer house guests food/drink up to three times. We learned what to bring (and what not to bring) if invited into a Turkish household (one kilo of baklava, homemade, never store-bought), and how to greet the rectors of our university when we arrive.

Eight to nine hours cooped up inside all day for the past week has been tough. After the first day of orientation, a few other ETAs and I decided to walk until we were hungry, making turns when we felt like it, and stopping to take pictures at every opportunity. Having been without a camera for so long, I'm still adjusting to having the ability to take a picture. I'm actively trying to reverse this habit... but for now, I've only got a couple images from Ankara. We wandered into the floral neighborhood of Bahçelievler, where Kokoreç (lamb intenstines) joints and fancy clothing stores lined the streets, and finally collapsed at an Iskender Kebap restaurant in Kızılay. On our way back, we noticed a hookah bar just below Maltepe mosque, so we stopped to play a little tavla (backgammon).

Next Saturday we will be heading all over the country to our placements. There are 54 Turkey ETAs, and many of us have been placed in what I call the "Peoria, Illinois" of Turkey. We tell Turks we meet where we'll be teaching, and they respond, "Why are you going there?" I will be with another Fulbrighter, Sarah Lipson, in Bartın, Turkey, a town of 30,000 in the northwest of the country, 18 km from the Black Sea. Sarah is from Arlington, MA. On Thursday, the two of us wandered in a different direction from the hotel and ended up at a tavukçu, a chicken restaurant. The food was... divine. Fresh, spiced, and tasty. Although we were both fairly full from our meals, we ordered the "special" tatlı, dessert. An amazing bed of shredded wheat and pistachios soaked in honey and garnished with peaches and grapes. Needless to say, I'm constantly looking forward to the next meal in this country. Is this enough of a commercial for why you should visit me? I'll take that as a challenge to do better.

Writing about this is making me hungry... which brings me to Yom Kippur a la Turkey. Admittedly, it wasn't the safest decision - not to try to be a Jew in Turkey, but to take a taxi period. A few words on the traffic "laws" in this country: they don't exist. Lanes are optional. Red lights are optional. I think many who have traveled at all can empathize, but each time I'm faced with foreign driving, I'm frightened all over again. Turkish drivers have an incredible spacial sense of their vehicles and are able to come within inches if each other with presumably few accidents. But the few of us who decided to venture to the synagogue made it unscathed - shocking to all of us. As we expected, Turkish police had a large presence in the neighborhood around the shul, prohibiting the taxi from getting within a block of the entrance. We were so warmly welcomed to Kol Nidre, and since we arrived early, we talked for a while with a local Jewish woman and many Israeli security who had been placed in Ankara with the embassy. The building was built in 1906 - amazing to me that Ankara, a city that grew only after 1923 when it became Turkey's capital, had enough Jews at the turn of the century to start a synagogue. Today, the shul only operates when it can find a rabbi - this weekend one from Istanbul came so that they could hold services. The Jewish community of 30 people can hardly form a minyan since women aren't counted - the community in Istanbul is nearly 20,000 - so Sean, the only male of the ETAs who went, had the honor of holding the Torah. Though I found the service itself horribly boring (a mix of being unaccustomed to Sephardic chants and being unable to follow along in meaning in neither the Hebrew nor Turkish), I was pleased that because of the small attendance, the women were able to sit just across the small shul from the men, not banished upstairs as would be customary. There was one moment in the service, around 8:30, when I could hear around us, just below the forceful recitations by the rabbi, the call to prayer, and only then did it hit me that I was observing Yom Kippur in a Muslim country.

We are planning on returning to the shul this afternoon - hoping as well to look hungry enough after the service that we'll be invited to a Turkish breakfast. Turns out the Israeli Ambassador to Turkey was one of the 12 men attending the service last night, and the security around the building was for him. Shul-goers alone would not have been able to afford the appropriate security needed without his presence. I'm also hoping to take some pictures when I go back so that I'll have something to show.

Until then, all my love to everyone at home and abroad. Hope all is well. Feel free to email me sasha.frankel@gmail.com - I don't yet have my address (or living arrangements...agh!), but I will post them as soon as I do. Please share your address if you would like a postcard!

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!