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.