Today I moved into my dorm on the Boğaziçi University campus! I was up at 4:30am because of jet lag and couldn’t fall asleep again until 7:30am. Embarrassingly, my aunt had to wake me up at 12:15pm! Such is the life of an American spending her first few days in Istanbul. I got ready and ate breakfast quickly, and then my aunt and I drove to pick up my other aunt, A) so she could see me for the first time in 2 years, and B) so she could help us find the University. (She works near there.) The first picture is the view from the car as we drove to Boğaziçi!
Driving through Istanbul is crazy – it’s a city of a little under 14.4 million people! (It’s the fifth-largest city in the world if you’re counting by population in the city proper, but it doesn’t even crack the top ten if you’re counting by metropolitan area or urban area. This is all according to Wikipedia, btw. See how hard I try when I’m not in school?) Most people probably know this, but it’s also the only city in the world that’s in both Europe and Asia. (The Bosphorus Strait separates the two.) So far I’ve only been on the European side; that’s where the city’s largest airport is, where my two aunts and several other of my family members live, and where Boğaziçi University is.
Anyway, we got to my dorm, Uçaksavar Yurdu, within an hour, amazingly. I learned today that Uçaksavar means flak (antiaircraft fire) or an antiaircraft gun. I don’t know why that’s the dorm’s name, but so it is! I’ll be spending the next 7 weeks in a room all to myself, although it has a bunk bed. I share a suite with one other girl, but I haven’t met her yet. We share a balcony, kitchen (which I don’t think I’ll be using much), a bathroom with a toilet and sink, and a separate bathroom with a shower and sink. This is my room, and this is me and George happy to be out of the heat!
After moving in, I went to dinner with the wonderful Alicia Stanley, the Associate Director of the NU Study Abroad office, and two other Northwestern undergrads who are doing a Northwestern-affiliated summer program at Boğaziçi that Alicia oversees. (My program is not affiliated with Northwestern.) After about 45 minutes at dinner, another NU undergrad who is a Turkish international student and is taking a regular summer class at Boğaziçi joined us. It was nice to speak English after 2 days with my aunt, whom I love but who doesn’t speak much English! We ate at a fancy restaurant right on the Bosphorus with an amazing view. I had to leave dinner early to make it to a 7pm orientation back at my dorm. When we had walked from the Uçaksavar Campus to Bebek, the neighborhood on the Bosphorus where we ate dinner, we took a longer, downhill-but-not-so-steep route through the University’s breathtaking South Campus. When I walked back to Uçaksavar for orientation, I took a more direct route up a very, very steep hill. I wish I could say it’s so steep that cars don’t drive it, but scarily they do! (Well, I’m not surprised. Driving is crazy in Istanbul). This is the view from the hill as I climbed up!
Orientation was short and sweet – apparently we’ll learn most of what we need to know tomorrow morning. I have to wake up early tomorrow and meet the TAs and other students at 8:30 so that we can walk to South Campus and be a bit early for our 9am placement test. I could be placed into one of four levels: lower or upper intermediate, or lower or upper advanced. I’m going to review my Turkish for a bit after I post this! The most interesting thing I learned at orientation was that you have to buy bottled water here – there are no water fountains, and although the tap water is not too bad, it’s also not advisable to drink it.
After orientation, some of the TAs invited whoever wanted to come to go to dinner. I strongly debated just going back to my room – partly because I get kind of shy around people I don’t know, and partly because I already ate – but in the end I decided to go along, and I’m glad I did. We went to a pretty nice restaurant that involved no hills to get to, haha. I just had a salad, but I got to meet some cool people. I met three people from Yale, two from Princeton, and one from Georgetown, which I have to say was rather intimidating. But of course Northwestern is a great school too! And why do we put so much emphasis on school rankings and reputations, anyway? They were all nice, humble, and interesting people, and that’s all that matters. Now I have to study Turkish and get some sleep before the placement test tomorrow. İyi akşamlar!