A bit of a mismatched title to this post, I must admit. I was not going to talk about my body image “issues” in this blog, but as I’ve said before, I want this blog to pretty accurately reflect my experiences this summer in Turkey. But no worries – I will talk about body image stuff AND fun adventures, too!

For those of you who don’t know, when I was in the 8th grade I developed anorexia. I would say its severity level probably hit the middle of the spectrum, closer to the less severe side. I dropped from 110 pounds to 82 pounds at 5’2” in just a few months, but the numbers are not really the point. The point is that something like that – something that messes with the way I see food and my body – doesn’t go away for a long time, and perhaps will never really go away. Though I gained the weight back before graduating 8th grade, I struggled with bingeing and restricting in high school. Things got better junior and senior year, worse freshman year of college, and then better again to the point where it’s the best it’s been since eighth grade.

I must admit, one of the things I was most worried about when coming to Turkey was how the trip would affect my eating, or even just my thoughts about food and my body. Transition periods, even something as simple as the start of a new quarter at Northwestern, always make my “issues” flare up a bit. Being lonely is also a big trigger, and though I have family here, I don’t see them every day (far from it), and I’ve had to make a whole new set of friends. Much to my delight, for the first week and a half in Turkey, it seemed that my food and body thoughts/behaviors weren’t much affected. However, last Monday I for some reason ate to the point of discomfort at lunch and dinner. I think I might’ve been a bit lonely, especially at my solitary Monday dinner, after coming back from a lovely weekend with my family and an eventful Sunday night with friends. I also think I didn’t eat enough Saturday and Sunday, which is never good. There are numerous other reasons, of course and as always, but I won’t get into them. Unfortunately, even one off-kilter day kind of threw my whole week off. I feel much better now, and it could’ve been much worse; I don’t want to forget how far I’ve come since the eighth grade! However, I also don’t want to ONLY talk about the fun things I’ve been doing and leave out some of my more private struggles. In other words, I don’t want to paint a false picture of paradise.

So, how did I make the journey, which for me is still hard, from feeling terrible around food and about my body to feeling much more “normal”? My first step was going out with two friends for dessert in Bebek after dinner on Monday. I almost didn’t want to go out because a) I wanted to get ahead with my hw, b) feeling like I ate too much = feeling bad about myself = wanting to isolate myself, and c) wouldn’t eating MORE food just make me feel worse, not better? But I decided to go out because a) I didn’t have that much hw actually due Tuesday, b) the times when I want to isolate myself are normally the times when socializing would do me the most good, and c) no, actually, what would make me feel worse, not better, would be to let something as stupid as how much I did or didn’t eat in a day stop me from a nice evening out with friends.

So I went out for dessert in Bebek on Monday night. I told my friends about the famous Bebek Mini Dondurma place that I had just gone to on Saturday with my family, and we all went there. Then we went to one of Bebek’s many dessert waffle shops, a magical place where you can top a warm waffle with any imaginable combination of fruit, syrups, jams, candy pieces, and other confections. As you can see in the picture, the three of us shared one amazing waffle – and suprisingly, the best part was the candied chestnuts! I went to bed rather uncomfortably full but pretty happy.

On Tuesday night, I took another step to combat my loneliness and the off-kilter feel of my week by going out again with friends. This time we went farther than Bebek, all the way to Sultanahmet. As I might have explained before, Sultanahmet is also known as the Old City and is the oldest part of Istanbul (who would’ve guessed?). It’s a famous, touristic neighborhood home to the Ayasofya (Hagia Sofia), Topkapı Palace, Kapılıçarşı (Grand Bazaar), and Sultanahmet Camii (Blue Mosque), among other attractions. It was already evening, but it was okay because we didn’t want to tour the interiors of any of the sites – we just wanted to eat dinner, walk around during iftar (the nightly fast-breaking meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramazan), and go to a rooftop bar for a glass of wine. We successfully completed our missions and had a wonderful time. In the picture I’m in, we were in Gülhane Park, which is right next to the Topkapı Palace. From there we walked to the main square that is bordered by the Blue Mosque and Ayasofya and arrived just in time for iftar. I had no idea that so many people would set up picnics to break iftar on the grass and benches in the square, but so they did. It was amazing to be in the center of everything when the Blue Mosque’s imam started his prayer and so many groups of families and friends broke their fast. A while later, we experienced a somewhat-less-reverent kind of wonderful when we found a rooftop bar and shared a bottle of wine. (Of course, we were still reverent of the amazing view, which included the Blue Mosque and a large chunk of the Boshporus.)

Wednesday and Thursday evenings I focused on homework – don’t worry, I am spending more time studying and attending class than I make it seem in this blog! Friday I went to Sultanahmet again, this time earlier in the afternoon and with a different group of people. We went to see the Yeni Cami (New Mosque), which is not as big as the Blue Mosque but is still breathtaking. Then we walked around the Mısır Çarsısı, or Spice Bazaar, the smaller version of the Grand Bazaar. After exiting, we aimlessly wandered the streets until stumbling into the Kapalıçarşı, or Grand Bazaar. We walked around and had tea before taking a ferry back to the dorms. (Warning to any future travelers to Istanbul: the ferries are the city’s most confusing form of public transportation, but if you love boats like I do, it is so worth it.)

That is all for now. I already wrote the blog post about the Fourth of July weekend, which I spent with family, but I will post it in a couple days. Thanks for reading, and iyi günler!

As I begin this blog post, it is the Fourth of July! Happy Fourth to all my family and friends! However, if this post goes according to my most recent ones, I will not publish it until a couple days after I begin to write it. Such is my life as a blogger, haha.

I am sitting on the balcony of my dorm room right now, enjoying the cool Saturday morning. (74 degrees Fahrenheit is indeed cool for Istanbul in the summer.) I’m waiting for my dad to come pick me up and take me back to my uncle’s house in Kadıköy, an Istanbul neighborhood where I will spend the night. Last weekend my dad, that same uncle, Ertuğrul (silent g), my aunt Arzu (Ertuğrul’s sister, not wife), and her teenaged daughter Elif came to my dorm early Saturday afternoon. All of us walked the 15 minutes down the steep hill to Bebek, ate pide for lunch (the Turkish version of pizza), and had double dessert: badem ezmesi (literally almond paste, aka marzipan) and dondurma (ice cream). My aunt and cousin Elif were like tourists in Bebek – they wanted to go to the neighborhood’s most famous places: the fancy candy shop that sells badem ezmesi (it really was the best marzipan I’ve ever had!) and an even-tinier ice cream shop called Bebek Mini Dondurma, outside of which I see a very long line every time I walk by after 8pm.

After touring Bebek, Ertuğrul went back to his apartment in Kadıköy and my dad, Arzu, Elif, and I drove back to Arzu’s apartment in Bahçelievler. We had a very relaxed late afternoon wherein I mostly read for fun and did a little bit of homework. At one point my dad and I walked a short 5 minutes to a giant mall-like shopping center so he could buy clothes hangers and an umbrella for me and baklava for Arzu Hala and this nice bank he went to a week or so ago. (Is it customary in Turkey to bring gifts to a bank if you had a good experience there? I don’t know, but I certainly find it amusing – in a good way!) My dad was just going to go alone, but I’m glad I asked to go with him. As many questions as I in my endless curiosity have asked about my father’s past lives and extended family over the years, I still feel like there’s so much I don’t know. I couldn’t even remember how old he was when his family moved from his birthplace, Kars (in Eastern Turkey, near Russia), to Istanbul! (It turns out he was 14.) I asked about my father’s sibling’s educations because I couldn’t remember if all had gone to college. (Only my father’s oldest sibling, my Aytaç Amca, didn’t go.) Then my dad started talking about how Elif’s dad, my Atilla Amca, wants her to stay in Istanbul for college. I know families in the US who really want their children to stay close for college, but the whole concept of keeping children (especially daughters) nearby is much more prevalent in Turkey, much more a part of the culture. My dad said he was truly an outlier for having left his family, at first to go to military boarding high school in Istanbul and military academy in Ankara, and then, even more extremely, to move to America with my mother in the early 90s. I asked if he ever regretted those decisions, and he said no. I was surprised – as much as I value my independence, it was quite hard for me to be so far away from my family for the first half of my freshman year at Northwestern. But, like my father doesn’t regret his choices, I don’t regret mine. Of course, it would be a different story altogether if I chose to spend the rest of my life outside the States! But I should never say never. The point is, though, I am so glad I got the chance to talk to my dad one-on-one on Saturday.

After he and I got back from shopping, we had dinner and dessert, and then I passed an evening as relaxed and reading-filled as my afternoon. I got to talk to my mom on the phone, which was lovely. At one point I felt a smidge of regret for missing out on doing things with my friends in the dorm. If I hadn’t spent the night at my aunt’s, I probably would’ve tried to go to the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus concert at the university. However, I found out two days later that although the program directors had thought we could just show up to the concert, it turns out non-university students and faculty had to get tickets (free, but only offered days in advance). Despite the fact that I feel like I should be recognized as a Boğaziçi Üniversitesi student for the duration of the program, I am not. But even before learning that I couldn’t have gone to the concert even if I wanted to, my tinge of regret went away. Spending time with my family, both immediate and extended, is a luxury for me now that I spend most of the year in Evanston/Chicago, so far from all my realtives. And intertwined with family time is the miraculous treat that is home-cooked food!

On Sunday morning after breakfast, my dad and I began the long public-transportation trek back to my dorm. First we took the metrobus (a bus that has a special lane in the middle of the highway to avoid traffic) and then we took the metro, the underground subway with the trippy rainbow lights. After about an hour, we arrived back at Uçaksavar Yurdu, my dorm. My dad bid me goodbye and then I did a bit of work before facing what was, for me, a difficult decision: to go or not to go to the Onur Yürüyüşü (Istanbul Pride Parade)? I knew that, for safety reasons, my parents wouldn’t want me to go. And I, independent of their concern, was also apprehensive for safety reasons. However, I decided to go because a) I wanted to be part of history, especially in light of the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage that had happened just two days earlier, b) I knew I would be in a group mostly with native Turks, so I’d feel safer, c) like I said in my previous post, when I have to choose between saying no or yes to a new experience/adventure in Istanbul (or anywhere) with friends, 99% of the time, I wish I had or am happy to have said yes, and d) I believe you should do something that scares you every day (as long as you are not in serious, serious danger, which I didn’t think I was).

So I went to the Pride Parade. Well, as most or all of you know, the Istanbul police used water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets to prevent the (peaceful) demonstraters from marching down İstiklal Caddesi (Independence Avenue), the street in the Taksim neighborhood where most of Istanbul’s protests occur. Allegedly their reason was that the parade shouldn’t happen during the Muslim holy month of Ramazan, though it’s happened without incident in this month before. (http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/28/world/turkey-pride-parade-lgbt-violence/)

My experience was this: getting off a crowded metro and entering an even-more-crowded Taksim Square, waiting around the square for about 20 minutes to be able to enter İstiklal Caddesi, and then watching in horror as a giant truck with a water cannon arrived and started spraying a huge, powerful stream of water at the protestors. Everyone started walking or running away, but luckily the people around me, myself included, walked calmly and didn’t even get wet. A couple minutes later, the unofficial leader of my group, Ömer (a PhD student in linguistics at MIT who is also my grammar teacher – it was fun but weird hanging out with my teacher!), asked us if we wanted to stay or leave. He said we could stay and “fight,” and although we’d be fine we might actually get sprayed by water or tear gas and it was almost certain the police wouldn’t let anyone onto İstiklal. We decided to leave and go to a bar in Beşiktaş, a neighborhood nearby, like the devoted activists that we are. As we were walking away, Ömer said that the only way protestors can “win” against the police is when really crazy leftists show up and start throwing Malotov cocktails and stuff like that. He’s probably right, I just don’t know enough to say. All I know is that it takes a special kind of person and/or situation to throw, or inspire the throwing of, Malotov cocktails, and I think I will always be privileged enough to never be in that situation and have to/want to be that person.

After a very lovely evening at the bar (pictures below), I returned to the dorm and finally did some work. I was right about one thing – I don’t regret saying yes to the opportunity to go to the Pride Parade. I was, however, wrong in assuming that the government would, like it has for over a decade, let the parade peacfully occur. Such is the state of things in Turkey. Not as bad as it could be, but not as tolerant as it once was.

That is all for now. I will try to post again soon since I anticipate a rather relaxed weekend. I have midterms on Friday, though, so I should probably catch up on my blog before then – I just finished what I wanted to say about last weekend, and already it is Saturday again! Thanks for reading, iyi günler, and Happy Fourth!

As far as I remember, the last time I posted was a week ago yesterday, and the last day I described was Monday the 22nd. Goodness, this post has been a long time coming. I feel overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to summarize the past week and a half, but I will just hit whatever comes to my mind first.

Several times over the past week, I have come so close to not going out with friends from the program, because of being tired or wanting to save money or wanting to get work done or something like that. But almost every time I nearly said no, I said yes, and I don’t regret a single yes.

On Wednesday evening, my friend Kelsey invited me on an aimless macera (adventure), just for fun. I was feeling tired and sad and I kind of just wanted to nap, but I’m so glad I said yes. Part of my tiredness came from my sadness, and part of my sadness came from loneliness. But although in retrospect it made perfect sense to spend time with a friend to cure both ailments, at the time my weary brain thought it made more sense to stay in. But I went out with Kelsey, and we walked along the Bosphorus until we reached an adorable café right by the shore. I was happy to rest by the water and treat myself to a dinner out, since I have mainly been relying on cold bread, cheese, and canned beans for dinner to save money. It was a rather Americanized restaurant, and Kelsey got a salad with smoked salmon. I got tost, which is basically the Turkish version of grilled cheese. Even though it was pretty much the same nutritionally as my normal cheese-and-bread dinners, I got it because A) it’s yummy and warm and B) I was saving money for dessert. For dessert we got Bailey’s Irish Cream lattes with ice cream, and they were perfect. Then, in true Turkish fashion, we ended the meal with a cup each of Turkish tea. We spoke Turkish about 75% of the time, and though we couldn’t say very complicated things to each other, it was lovely to practice. And it was even lovelier to spend 2 or 3 hours relaxing over dinner. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures that night, but here are pictures of the Bosphorus from a couple nights later, beautiful as ever!

I don’t think much happened on Thursday. On Friday, two things happened that I want to mention here: the TLCP hosted a 3-hour private boat tour of the Bosphorus in the evening, and the U.S. Supreme Court legalized marriage for EVERYONE, regardless of sexual orientation, in all 50 states. Because I don’t have data here, I didn’t hear the news until getting back from the boat tour to the dorm and wifi. Therefore, I will describe the boat tour first. We saw beautiful sites (obviously), and we had a tour guide who explained the history and architecture of many buildings, but the best part was socializing. It’s easy to only talk to the people in your 10-person class most days, so being on a boat with most of the program participants was nice. Picture explanations: The first picture is of the boat we took. The second is of the Savarona, once one of the largest private yachts in the world, and it belonged to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. The third is of Istanbul’s third bridge (all three connect the European and Asian sides of the city), not yet completed and quite controversial. Thousands of trees have been cut down already, the location is less than perfect, and many people in Istanbul oppose its construction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yavuz_Sultan_Selim_Bridge). The fourth is the Turkish flag, of course, and the fifth is the famous Ortaköy Mosque. The sixth is a picture of the Maiden’s Tower, one of Istanbul’s most iconic sites, and the seventh is of a boat passing in front of the Old City, or Sultanahmet, a touristic district of Istanbul that is home to the Topkapı Sarayı (Palace), Ayasofya (Hagia Sofia), and Blue Mosque.

When I got back to the dorm at around 8pm, I heard the news from SCOTUS. It truly was a historic day and moment, and amidst all the excitement, one of the things that struck me most was how much I can like a person with whom, on this issue, I so greatly disagree. One of my closest friends here, and the guy I spent the most time talking to on the boat tour, is a Catholic who does not support the ruling. Shortly after getting back to the dorm on Friday evening, he posted what was, in my opinion, a gracious and diplomatic Facebook post disagreeing with the SCOTUS ruling. This friend and I do not discuss our beliefs on these issues, which is perhaps why we still get along so well. And while it may be obvious that people who disagree on such issues can still be good friends, in the liberal/artsy/Northwestern/yuppie-bound college world in which I live, almost everyone I know holds values and beliefs quite close to my own. Therefore I have come to truly value this program, not only for the Turkish I am learning, but also for the opportunity to meet so many new people and be reminded of such simple truths as the fact that friendship can (sometimes) withstand ideological differences. Now, on a lighter note – here is a picture of George feeling accomplished about being ready to publish this blog post:

Alas, I only wrote about Wednesday and Friday. Now I must do homework, and I will post about my weekend and this past week soon enough. İyi günler!

Correction – In a previous post, I spoke of going to Rümeli Hisarı. The correct spelling is Rumeli Hisarı.