Week One: Hoş Bulduk

This mosque is one of the most beautiful I've ever seen,
and the first in Turkey to be designed by a female.

I arrived in Turkey the 26^th of June after traveling for hours? Days? Weeks? At some point in between Seattle and Istanbul time just became arbitrary. My roommates, Şenay and Eren, gave me about two hours to nap and shower before taking me out to Taksim, which besides being the location for the protests is also the most common place to go out. My roommates are fantastic. I owe Josef Burton a thousand Efes for getting me in touch with his old friends who happened to have an open room. Both went to Boğaziçi University but have since graduated. Şenay  is an English teacher at a middle school and Eren is getting his masters at another university while working as a TA. Our apartment has four bedrooms (we're still waiting on a German girl that is moving in 9/1) with a balcony overlooking other apartments and a freeway. While it is very close to campus and will be fantastic when school starts it is a bit of a jaunt to get to the center of town, especially since after the protests a lot of public transportation is still off. I get along well with both of them but Şenay has been on vacation and spends a lot of time with her boyfriend so I see her much less than Eren. He is such a good sport about bringing me along to meet his friends or coming to hang out with mine. On weekend days we'll often just find a cafe to sit and study or he'll take me to some part of Istanbul I haven't seen.  At the apartment we all speak Turkish together; however, Eren has already started keeping a list of all funny mistakes I make. Language learning is probably the greatest way to decease your capacity for embarrassment.

Black Sea beach

One of my favorite days was the first Sunday after I arrived and a friend invited me and Eren to a beach on the Black Sea. The beach was jam packed, but for good reason, the water is the perfect temperature and because the Black Sea is basically a big lake it's less buoyant but doesn't sting your eyes. Also, the sand is the finest and softest of all the land so I brought a bottle home with me. I'm sure my family is already looking forward to transporting my accumulation of stuff back to the states when they visit.   

The first week was pretty much a blur of getting back into speaking Turkish, dancing and starting to explore Istanbul—an activity that can never be exhausted. According to the Wikipedia page, Istanbul is the “country's economic, cultural, and historical heart” and with the population of Istanbul proper at a mere 13.9 million, it is the second largest city in the world. The historical/geographical/economical/political climate of this place will be something for future posts, but the more I look into it the more fascinated I am.  And I get to live here! For a year!

Let’s see, I also started Turkish classes thanks to FLAS funding and they have been very useful. I still have a ways to go but there are few things better than learning something in the morning and then applying it to your conversation later in the day. 

Yine Türkiye'de

The Istanbul silhouette shot from a ferry boat on the Asian side  

I’m having a bit of trouble comprehending that fact I've already been in Turkey for a bit over a month. The time has sped by which is certainly indicative of how much fun it has been living in Istanbul. Here is a bit of how I ended up here. 

I just finished my third year at the University of Washington with a major in international studies and a minor in Near-Eastern languages and civilizations. My fourth year will be spent at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. I first came to Turkey nearly 10 years ago with my mom and siblings to backpack around for close to a month. I couldn't have guessed, at the ripe age of twelve, that I would end up coming back again and again and then again to study the language but I can say that the country was mesmerizing. After graduating from high school, I was searching around for an alternative to going straight to college when my godmother, the wonderful Jane Burton-Bell, suggested (insisted) I apply for an NSLI-y scholarship to study in Turkey. I ended up in Adana, the mid-south, living with a host family and attending high school. Obviously I enjoyed t because I ended up coming back last summer, this time to Izmir, to study with a CLS scholarship for two months. The acronyms I've been throwing out have all been affiliated and funded by different branches American government but until now have come with no post-program stipulations.If you are a young person, or any person, do a quick Google search and see if one might be for you. There is no better, or cheaper, way to see the world. However, NESP Boren is the scholarship I'm here with this year and for that, sometime in the next four years, I will have to find a job in the U.S. government. Though for now that’s just a future thing I’m filing with getting a big kid job, paying off student loans and not being on my mother’s cell phone plan. 

A month is a hard thing to put into words, let alone in one post, so to make this manageable for myself, and my loyal readers (I’m looking at you, mom) I am going post the the best, and worst, from each week of moving to Istanbul. 

*This blog will most certainly contain grammatical, and probably historical and cultural inaccuracies because if I become too nit-picky I will never put anything up. Also, I'm still not completely clear on comma usage.