I think I have a tendency, at times, to focus too much on negative aspects of life, but of course this in and of itself is a negative self-judgment that involves ignoring the positive within myself. I bring this up because I will complain about several things in this post, a result of my promise to structure this post around ideas/reflection/analysis more than events. I will balance these complaints with celebrations, but I won’t have time tonight to write about what I’m celebrating. That post will come later.
In this post, I will complain about two things:
1. money
2. womanhood
In my next post, I will celebrate two things:
1. learning
2. beauty

First complaint: money. Traveling is quite expensive. (Of course, I won’t realize how good I have it here in Turkey until I get to Spain, a much more expensive country which uses the Euro, a currency more powerful than the American dollar and MUCH more powerful than the Turkish lira.) These first few days since leaving my aunt’s house and coming to the dorm, I’ve wanted to go out all the time both to explore Istanbul and to get to know people better, and my wallet has felt the consequences. For example, Taksim on Friday night was ridiculously expensive: 22 TL for a durum that you can normally get for less than 5 TL. However, when I complain about this kind of thing, I have to check myself. Not only did I get the $5,000 Undergraduate Language Grant from Northwestern to attend the TLCP, but I also got another $5,000 NU grant, the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Grant. (Keyman only gave me 3 of the $5,000, though, because I told them that the program and all associated costs should total to about $8,000.) So, yes, I got $8,000 to do this program, and what right do I have to complain? But then I think about how the $8,000 estimate I gave to the university was based on the amount of money the program directors thought that students spend on travel and food, which turns out to have been quite an underestimate. I think about how I am on a full scholarship at Northwestern, and how most people around me (both at Northwestern and here at the TLCP) have just a bit more wiggle room when it comes to spending money. BUT THEN I remember that a) I won’t go to an expensive neighborhood like Taksim every day, b) I have savings that I specifically allotted for my summer in Turkey and my fall in Spain, and c) I have generous parents who want me to enjoy myself (within reason) and who have comfortable savings themselves.

Second complaint: womanhood. For a long time, I have identified as a feminist and believed that women in all parts of the world, even the most progressive parts, are still not treated as well as men. However, never has the unfairness of being a woman struck me more than it has these past few days, as a 21-year-old woman living independently in Istanbul. In my opinion, Turkish culture is rather patriarchal. The men think they deserve more respect, just by virtue of being men, and women are allowed much less freedom to roam around on their own than they are in America, because of both the controlling men in their lives and the necessity of avoiding the danger of going out alone. Recently, gender inequality has been condoned by the current, non-secularist ruling party in Turkey. Of course, not all Turkish men buy into this patriarchal culture, but enough do to make me feel unsafe. Here is a good, short article on the topic:
http://www.todayszaman.com/anasayfa_men-don-skirts-in-istanbul-march-to-protest-violence-against-women_373266.html

Here are examples, just from this past Friday and Saturday, of times when I felt unsafe as a woman: On Friday night in Taksim, after the three other girls and I broke apart from the larger group, I felt kind of unsafe. It was 11pm in a crowded, popular, touristy neighborhood, yet still some men gave us strange looks. OF COURSE this is partly because it was obvious that we are foreigners, but this is also partly because we were four women alone. In my previous post, I mentioned the street with many noisy bars that competed for patrons. Well, in Turkey, this kind of competition involves a man standing outside each bar, walking up to passerby and trying to corral them inside the bar. These men do this to everyone who walks by – men, women, native Turks, tourists, etc. – but of course they are more persistent and less respectful with women and tourists alike. This street was not the only place where this happens – on most side streets off of İstiklal Caddesi, and even sometimes on the main street itself (and all throughout Turkey), bar and restaurant employees (always men) follow people and try to corral them in. When I was walking with my three girl friends, one man followed my friend Michelle for way too long, at least two or three minutes. I am pretty sure he never would’ve done this to a man, even an American.

On Saturday evening, I felt unsafe again. My friend Kelsey and I met up with another girl, Elyse, around 8pm and decided to walk along the Bosphorus until we felt like stopping. We ended up walking 4.8 km, practically 3 miles, all the way from Bebek to another neighborhood, Ortaköy. It was a lovely nighttime walk with the lights of boats sparkling on the dark blue of the Bosphorus and the lights of buildings sprinkled among the hills on both sides of the water. However, the later it got, the more unsafe I felt in a group of just three girls. Yes, part of my anxiety came from my parents, who warned me in the clearest terms before I left the States that crime had risen in Istanbul (both in general and against women) and that I should always be in a group of at least three people and, preferably, at least one man. And yes, part of my anxiety came from my natural tendency to worry. But I am sure that a large part was fully justified by the environment I was in. After we had dinner and walked around Ortaköy, Kelsey and I took one bus back to Bebek while Elyse took a different bus to her off-campus apartment in a different neighborhood. On the bus, almost everyone was male, and they kept giving us strange looks. (Once again, partly because we were obviously foreigners, but even if we had been Turkish, I’m sure we still would’ve gotten strange looks.) I felt safe because the bus had many windows, was well-lit, and was traveling on a crowded street, but I still felt pretty uncomfortable. One guy tried to talk to us in a confrontational tone, but luckily he gave up after Kelsey and I ignored him.

After getting off the bus, Kelsey and I were just about to walk up the steep hill from Bebek to our dorm when we decided to stop at a nargile (hookah) place to smoke hookah, play backgammon, drink tea, and talk. We were there from 12am to 2am, and I can’t think of a more Turkish way to spend a weekend night. The streets of Bebek were crowded, noisy, and alive for the whole two hours, and we had a lovely time. However, when we walked up the dark hill at 2am, I thought to myself, I will never do this again. Walking with just one other girl in Istanbul at 2am is not enough for me to feel safe. (When my parents read this, I am sure they will be horrified and perhaps even angry at me, but I am not going to censor my blog just to spare me from their wrath. Besides, I already promised myself I would never do that again.) BUT THAT IS THE POINT! I should be able to do that again. It was so fun. So so fun. I much prefer hanging out with someone one-on-one to hanging out in large or even small groups. Why shouldn’t I be able to safely stay out in Bebek until 2am on a Saturday night with just one girl friend? Why shouldn’t I be able to safely walk three miles at night to an adorable neighborhood for dinner and then take a bus back? In a fair and just world, I should be able to do all those things. If I were a 21-year-old American man spending 7 weeks alone in Istanbul, I wouldn’t blink twice while walking the streets at night with just one friend. And therein lies the extreme injustice of womanhood.

That’s it for now! I am sorry for an entire post of complaints. And I apologize for my lack of pictures! In my next post I will celebrate, with positivity and pictures, everything I’ve been learning about the Turkish language, Turkish culture, and who I am as a person, as well as the beauty that is all around me. Thank you for reading, and iyi akşamlar!

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!

Today we had our placement exam in the morning. As we were taking the fifteen-minute walk from the dorms to South Campus, where classes are held, it began to rain. Of course I didn’t bring my umbrella. As I was packing, I thought to myself, I don’t need the extra weight! It hardly ever rains in Turkey in the summer! Maybe my memory is flawed, or maybe this week is an exception. Either way, it’s been pretty rainy. But the view was beautiful nonetheless. Here are pics of the walk back to the dorms after the exam:

The written part of the placement exam lasted from 9:30 to 11:30, and it was pretty hard. There was multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, reading comprehension, and a writing prompt. We got to chose from one of several prompts, and the one I chose was, “Tell us the plot of a book you like and why you liked it.” I chose The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold because it’s the book I’ve read most recently, and because I know the Turkish word for murder, a central plot point. The book is about a woman who murders her elderly mother, and the exam graders probably thought I was crazy – I was trying to explain in Turkish why I like a book about a woman murdering her mother, and I wasn’t very convincing! Besides, I chose the book mainly out of convenience, although it WAS pretty good, but of course I couldn’t say that in my essay!

A side note about daughters and mothers: it seems to me that in Turkey, grown women have less independence, from both their husbands and parents, than they do in the U.S. I’ve noticed this mainly through firsthand experience, but Tuesday, while watching the season finale of a popular Turkish TV drama called Kaderimin Yazıldığı Gün (The Day My Fate Was Written), I realized that this pattern holds true in pop culture. Based on what I could gather from one episode, this show centers around two grown women who have serious problems with each other. The extent to which these women’s mothers are involved in their daughters lives is unbelievable. Imagine Sex and the City with the womens’ mothers in every episode, every other scene! My knee-jerk reaction is to think that this is a terrible thing, but that is unfair of me. I can see how having one’s mother around often, even in adulthood, could have its benefits. But of course, to me, the beneficial nature of this relationship presupposes that a degree of independence is still granted to the daughter, and how does one measure or judge the ideal amount of independence? That question is not for me to answer here.

Anyway, after the written portion of the exam, half of the 40 or 50 students went upstairs for the oral exam, and the other half of us (me included) took a campus tour and ate lunch. I met a lot of fellow program participants while touring and eating, which made me feel much less lonely. So many interesting people are part of this program! I met a girl from Raleigh, like me, who goes to UNC-Chapel Hill, like many of my high school friends! I met a guy from Duke who also knows my hometown area. The girl from Raleigh, Amanda, spent her last year of high school in Samsun, Turkey, through the US State Department’s National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y). (I am 99% that’s the program she did.) I met several grad students, two of whom did Fulbrights (the English language education one) in Turkey. I met a guy who’s trying to do this program and an internship in Istanbul at the same time! And I met another guy who’s had a book review published by the New York Times. Most participant are undergrad or grad students, but some are middle-aged, and one man looks to be at least 65! I met one man, maybe 50-ish, from Germany who came to Turkey to open a business and is taking 7 weeks off to do this program. I met a PhD student from Stanford whose goal is to be able to read Ottoman Turkish, and her path to that goal involves learning Modern Turkish first. I could go on and on, but I should move on!

At lunch, stray cats tried to eat our food. It was amusing and annoying in equal measure. I should mention something that anyone who’s been to Istanbul, or anywhere in Turkey, really, already knows – there are stray cats and dogs everywhere! I wish I’d taken a picture to post here, but there will be plenty of opportunities for that in the future. After lunch, I went back to the building I was in earlier (Anderson Hall, The Faculty of Arts and Sciences Building) to take my oral exam. They made everybody in the second half show up at 2pm, but they did the interviews in 10-minute segments, and Amanda, who went last, had to wait until 3:30! Although I was done by 2:45, I and this other guy, Eric, waited for her because it was pouring outside and I personally was so tired I didn’t want to walk anywhere. (My jet lag isn’t completely gone yet.) After Amanda finished, she, Eric, and I found a grocery store in a cute square in between South Campus and the Uçaksavar campus. Here is a picture of the square:

Getting food here is not hard, but it’s not what I expected. I expected there to be more dining halls on campus, but there aren’t. There’s one student café where you can get a 3-course lunch for 6.75 TL (Turkish Lira), which is less than $3.50, but the other cafes on campus are pretty much like normal restaurants. Although my suite has a kitchen, it doesn’t have a stove or a microwave, so I think I’m going to be eating out most of the time. Turkey is cheap for Americans because of the conversion rate from USD to TL, but I still don’t want to eat out ALL the time. At the grocery store I bought yogurt, bread, a special brand of Turkish crackers that I love, a Turkish candy bar, fruit, vegetables, and Turkish hazelnut spread (it’s both like and unlike crunchy peanut butter, and it’s absolutely amazing!). After shopping, I went back to my room and crashed – I slept for 1.5 hours. I woke up a little after 7pm and waited for my cousin Ayçe, her husband Bülent, and her mother (my aunt) İdil to come and take me to dinner. While I waited, I found out I placed into upper intermediate. I’m excited because I thought I would be in lower intermediate, but upper has a greater focus on conversation, which is the skill I most want to improve. Then George and I read A Dance of Dragons, the fifth book in A Song of Ice and Fire series (aka Game of Thrones):

When my family arrived, we went to a mantı place for dinner. Mantı is in my top five favorite foods of all time. It is basically Turkish ravioli, but instead of cheese inside little pasta pouches, there is the tiniest bit of meat. The pasta is then covered in yogurt and hot tomato sauce, and you can add oregano flakes and crushed red pepper if you want. It’s delicious! At dinner, the fact that Ayçe Abla (abla=older sister in Turkish, but it basically means any older female relative or close friend who is not old enough to be your mother/aunt) and Bülent Abi (abi=male equivalent of abla) can speak English made the conversation much easier. I tried to speak to İdil Yenge (yenge=aunt, aka father’s brother’s wife) a bit in Turkish, but mostly I just happily stayed in the world of English. İdil Yenge complained to Ayçe , “Ayla’s here to learn Turkish, why are you speaking to her in English?!” but she was (mostly) kidding. İdil Yenge also got excited because she had seen a Turkish TV program all about Chicago, and she was describing to me in Turkish famous Chicago sites, like the Bean, the Marilyn Monroe statue, and the SkyDeck of the Sears (Willis) Tower. It was so cool that she knew about all those places!

After dinner I came home, and I’ve just been blogging and wasting time online. Classes start tomorrow (which is why today was “sort of” the first day), and I don’t know how much time or energy I’ll have for blogging once I have homework, intensive language instruction, etc. But we’ll see how it goes! İyi akşamlar!

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!