Right now, I am sitting in a four-story Starbucks in Bebek (a ritzy neighborhood close to the university) with an amazing view of the Bosphorus. The last time I posted was Thursday night, I believe, and now it is Sunday night. Much has happened since then!
We had our first day of classes on Friday. We had four 50-minute blocks of class from 9 to 1, and for me, it went by surprisingly quickly. There are nine people in my class, and we stay in the same room the whole time while the teachers rotate and come to us. Most of the time we have the same teacher for two blocks in a row, but sometimes we have 3 or 4 different teachers each day. (I only know this because we’ve been given the schedule for the first two weeks of class.) We have the same TA for all four hours, and the TA runs the lab hours. About 3 times a week, one of our 4 hours is taken up by lab, meaning we go to a room in a separate building that has headphones and other such fancy equipment, and we practice listening and speaking. On Friday, we had two hours of grammar, one hour of lab, and one hour of writing. In between blocks, many students went down to the main building’s first floor, where there is a little stand with snacks, candy bars, coffee, and tea. It’s a mix between a café and a vending machine – a person sells the stuff, but there is no separate room; the stand is just in the middle of the hall. It’s so interesting – something I’ve never seen in America!
After class most of the 58ish students in the program went to the student cafeteria for lunch, where you can get a three-course meal for 6.75 Turkish Lira, or TL (less than $3.50). After class, we watched a new Turkish movie called Unutursam, Fısılda (If I Forget, Whisper) from 2-4pm. Like most Turkish movies and TV shows, it was overly dramatic (that’s an understatement), but I still enjoyed it. Afterwards I went back to my dorm and napped from 5:30-7. This is a big deal for me – as I tell my friends, I nap approximately 3 times a year. But I’m still not over jet lag, obviously. People say you need one day for every hour of time change to get over jet lag, so I’ll need about eight days – by Tuesday I should be fine.
After I woke up from my nap, I went with a big group of people to Taksim, a neighborhood in Istanbul with a famous street called İstiklal Caddesi (Independence Avenue). My dad says it’s like 5th Avenue in Manhattan, but with more restaurants and less shopping. It was a short ride on the metro from the university to Taksim. The metro in Turkey is very new and quite a bit below street level. The tunnel at the university metro station is lined with rainbow lights that are constantly and slowly changing colors, and it’s pretty trippy. Once we got to Taksim, it was so much fun to just walk around and take in the sights. In May/June 2013, Taksim made international news for the protests in Taksim Square that began in response to the urban development plan for Taksim’s Gezi Park and ended up addressing larger issues in Turkey, namely the government’s encroachment on freedom of press and assembly, and on the separation of church and state. There are still large groups of policemen hanging around the square, which is a strange sight to see.
As we walked to dinner, we saw a smaller protest, unrelated to the 2013 protests. From what we could gather, it was a group advocating for women’s rights. One of the students who was with us actually joined the protest and met up with us at dinner later! After she left the group, we went to a döner kebap place for dinner. (My friend Michelle and I took a quick detour to watch the sunset at the end of a picturesque alley.) At dinner we all got dürüm, which is a wrap with thin strips of lamb (shaved from meat rotating on a stick – see picture below) and vegetables. It was delicious – I’m so glad I stopped being a vegetarian for my current trip to Turkey and upcoming fall study abroad in Spain. (I still haven’t decided whether I’ll go back to being a vegetarian when I get back to the States.) The funny thing is that while walking down the streets of Turkey as a young girl on my family’s trips to the country, seeing the rotating sticks of meat (döner means turning/rotating in Turkish) – and specifically the discs of fat that are clearly visible on the meat – actually made me cry. It’s no wonder I became a vegetarian. But Friday night, I didn’t think about those childhood images and chose to enjoy the taste of the meat. (Unfortunately, I didn’t take pics at dinner, so the döner and dürüm pictures below are from the internet.)
Then we got dessert at Mado, one of the best (chain) dessert places in Turkey. My dessert of choice was pistachio and chocolate ice cream. I have so many fond childhood memories of eating pistachio ice cream in Turkey, and it’s wonderful to be able to do it again. I also got Turkish tea (çay), which, because it was Mado, came on a fancy silver platter with a tiny cookie and real flowers in a mini vase. Even though it was 9 or 10pm on a hot night, in Turkey it’s perfectly acceptable to drink tea and coffee so late and in the summer. I honestly think most Turks drink more tea than water, even in the hottest months. Some other people at our table also got tea, and some got künefe. Those who got künefe (pic below) kindly shared with those of us who didn’t get it. Künefe is hard to describe – it’s basically a large disc of hot semi-melted cheese coated in crunchy, fried slivers of wheat which are in turn coated with sweet syrup. I used to hate it, but now I think it’s amazing.
After dessert, we went to a side street lined with a ton of open-air bars blasting live music and competing with each other for patrons. This whole time (dinner, dessert, drinks) we were being led by two or three girls in the program who did this same Turkish Language and Culture Program, just at a lower level, last year. Apparently they knew and liked all the places they took us to, but I didn’t enjoy the street with the bars. After my group chose a bar and sat down, three other girls and I left and just walked around Taksim. We went back to the dorm earlier than everyone else and got home around 12:30. Because of jet lag, though, I didn’t fall asleep until 3am.
To wrap it up: In this blog, I think it’s important both to provide a snapshot of my days and to engage in deeper reflection and analysis of my time abroad. This post was mainly a summary of events, but the next post will be structured around ideas, reflection, and analysis more than events. Thank you for reading, and iyi akşamlar!