college life

Today was my first day of classes at Bogazici University. The university, considered Turkey's best, is located on the hills above the Bosphorous, near the ancient Rumeli Hisari fortress, built by Mehmet the Conquerer during his conquest of Constantinople, and is above one of the richest neighborhoods in Turkey, Bebek. While the University is public and the vast majority of students and professors are Turkish, the classes are all conducted in English (with only a few exceptions). I moved into the dorms about a week and a half ago and have spent the time getting to know the other exchange students and the campus. I've met students from all over the US and much of Europe (especially from the Netherlands for inexplicable reasons). I have yet to met very many Turks, because most have only moved in the last few days. Because very few of the exchange students speak Turkish or have been to Turkey before, I've been often acting as guide and translator. It's a little funny (and a little nice) because three months ago, newly arrived, I was in the exact opposite position.

I'm currently living in a dorm on campus--the Superdorm. It is set up in apartment style suites, with two, three, or four singles set up with a shared kitchen, common room and bathroom. While the facilities are nice, and it's always good to get your own room, there's a bit of an enforced sterility to it. Putting decorations up in the common areas is banned and the Superdorm seems like it was built to echo any sound. My room also faces an interior courtyard, so when I have the window open I can see into any of the other rooms on the interior courtyard. While this is convenient--if you want to talk to someone you can just yell at their window--it also limits the privacy significantly. Anyone could be looking into your room at any time, especially annoying because most of the room can be seen from the window. As of now, I have one suitemate, Ross. He's from Arizona and is studying history. There is one unoccupied room, which might end up being filled by a Turk. But with each passing day, that gets more unlikely.

I've heard that Superdorm is one of the nicest dorms in Turkey and one of the most progressive--the buildings are all co-ed. It is, however, very expensive and a bit draconian. No overnight guests, for example (despite the ample room on the couches in the common room). I've also heard horror stories about the manager of the dorm. After her heart was broken by an American lover, it is said, she eternally seeks to make the lives of Americans terrible. All of this has given Superdorm (humorous enough anyway), the name of Superprison. It makes you wonder what the worst dorms are like.

We'll see how this week of classes go. I've had two today and I'll post again after I've had them all.

the last of the vacation photos

Bulgarian countryside

train station in Romania

view of Budapest

St. Stephen's Basilica, Budapest

more photos

hydrofoil from Vienna to Budapest

me at the top of Galata Tower in Istanbul

marvelous fish stew in Istanbul

my parents at the Rumeli Fortress in Istanbul

Bosphorous cruise

pictures, pictures, pictures

Moved into the dorms at Bogazici on Wednesday, my home for the next four months. Right now it's only really exchange students (whom I've met a lot of!). The Turks will be coming closer to the start of classes. Tomorrow I register for classes.

I'm going to pictures five at a time, over the next day or so. Unfortunately they're out of order, but it's either that or I'll never get them up...

on the grounds of the Belvedere Palace in Vienna

Wienerschnitzel!

Grounds of the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna

whirling dervish outside the Blue Mosque. part of the nightly Ramadan festivities there.

the beautiful airport in Slovenia.

dispatch from the hostel

While a little less personal than the last hostel, my current place of residence has still provided plenty of conversation with other travelers. Interestingly, this place seems to attract infinitely more Americans (actually by my calculations 1500%) and with all those Americans, who by the way are still dwarfed by the population of French basketball fans here, the conversation topic of "where are you from" usually occurs. And with that a couple of curious coincidences have come to the fore. A couple nights ago I was chatting with a women in her late twenties, who, after going to Berkeley for college, lived in Oakland for six years, before moving to New York City and attending Teacher's College at Columbia, meaning she's lived in both the cities that I've lived in and attended the same university. This morning, I discovered another one of these geographical coincidences, this time even more unlikely. Chatting with a guy from Seattle this morning, I discovered he grew up in a town near Augusta, Maine and then lived in Missoula, Montana before coming to Seattle. That means that he had lived very near to the places that my two maternal aunts do! I'll keep you posted on any exciting new developments in the coincidence front.

one family vacation later; or, a travelogue of countries you couldn't place on a map

As I write this entry, I'm in much the same position I was when I wrote my last blog entry in Istanbul--sitting in the lounge area of a hostel, typing on my computer. The last two and a half weeks have been, however, anything but uneventful. As you might remember, I was, as of August 24th, set to fly to Vienna, meet up with my and dad, stay a few days there with my cousin Jennifer, take the boat to Budapest, and after one night take the train back to Istanbul via Romania and Bulgaria. Well, we did all that and it was quite the adventure. Finally now, a day and a half after my father's departure, do I have the time (and a trusty enough internet connection) to go about blogging on the experiences.

I'll outline the trip now and I promise (which I do mean to keep) that in the next several days I'll have pictures posted. Leaving for Vienna at six in the morning on the 24th, I had to take a cab to the airport. While I had a pleasant conversation with the cab-driver, it couldn't quite make up for the inconvenience of, well, having to go on a 60 TL cab ride at three in the morning. My flight, on the Slovenian carrier Adria Air went smoothly, with a transfer in Ljubljana. As the Slovenian EU entrance passport stamp attests, I can say that I have officially been to Slovenia. The airport at Ljubljana, in the midst of mountains, was quite beautiful by the way. Arriving in Vienna by late morning, I waited several hours to meet my parents who were flying from Chicago by way of London. Taking a hired car to Jennifer's apartment in the 18th district of Vienna, we relaxed, going for a walk in the magnificent local park and meeting Jennifer when she returned from work. The next several days were filled with vpalaces (Schonbrunn, Hofburg), museums (the Belvedere, the Museum of Applied Arts) and fine dining (Wienerschnitzel, blood sausage). We had a great time. Vienna is truly a beautiful city, probably the most elegant I've ever seen--like Paris but with a Germanic efficiency--and many thanks to Jennifer and her husband Pauli for letting us stay with them.

The next leg of our journey was a boat trip down the Danube from Vienna to Budapest. The six hour boat journey (a good hour and half of which was spent in locks) took us alongside another country I never thought I'd be seeing, Slovakia. After arriving at our hotel, we immediately took to the streets to start strolling. With only one night in Budapest (and 33 hours on the train ahead of us) we decided it was best to spend most of the time walking. While none of us had much of a conception of what Budapest would be like, within the first half hour we were left awestruck by what we saw. None of us had ever seen anything like it--there'd be on any given block, first a completely restored Beaux-Arts nineteenth-century apartment building, then an extremely decayed, though still majestic building from the same period, followed by an Art-Deco building and then finally a building built in the latest modern fashion. Rounding out the picture were homeless people, graffiti and plenty of extremely chic shops. It was a feast for the eye. We enjoyed immensely our strolling and half-day tour and decided that the city was too intriguing not to return to. In addition to the strolling, we also had a single culinary imperative: try Hungarian goulash, a specialty in my family, passed down to my mom through the (Hungarian) Neuwelt side. While I had had goulash in other places (made respectively in Ukrainian and Austrian styles), these hadn't resembled too much the stew I loved so dearly. We were all quite pleasantly surprised to find out that the goulash in Hungary is quite clearly the same dish that my mom (and her mother beforehand and her mother beforehand) makes.

After saying a premature goodbye to Budapest, we boarded a Romanian train for a quite different branch of our trip. Perhaps setting the tone was a remark by a fellow passenger as we failed to find our sleeping compartment, "those Romanian trains will do that to you." While our inability was later revealed to be due to a mistake on our part, the comment was still applicable. Those Romanians trains don't quite leave you in your comfort zone. The train, while in not bad condition, did not seem to have changed much since the Communist era. Nor did the route, which passed through some of most of desolate looking gray, concrete apartment buildings I had ever seen. Neither did the service, which included a conductor who seemed to willfully not understand our request to lower one of the beds so we could sit in the sleeper compartment and who raised his voice with at least half the passengers on the sleeper train. Romanian trains aside, the route was quite interesting, going through a variety of climates--from cold and foggy mountain forests in Romania, to plains and farms throughout much of Romania and Bulgaria and finally back to mountains in Bulgaria. In additional to the natural scenery we had plenty of time to see some rather dreary post-Communist cities, safely behind the protection of the train window. Of note was our train transfer in Bucharest. Surrounded by oppressively drab concrete buildings that looked on the brink of collapse, the train platforms, old and with not a hint of decorative imagination, bore a distinct similarity to some sort of industrial trash heap. Venturing out to buy lunch, our worries were not allayed by the currency exchange procedure which included the presentation of our passports and the signing of some sort of contract, unfortunately in Romanian. Thankfully, the McDonalds was newly renovated, and while the service was not quite with a smile, the Big Mac was still just as delicious. I should also mention that while some of the urban spaces along the train trips looked a bit frightening, the small towns in the Bulgarian mountains looked positively picturesque, though returning there is a little bit farther down my to-do list than Budapest.

After 33 plus hours and two nights in a sleeper car we arrived in Istanbul, tired and cranky. Sleep or lack there-of aside, it was nice showing my parents around the city where I had spent 10 days and the country where I had spent two months and I'm sure there were glad to see what this place on nearly the other side of the world from California was like. As I have focused most of this blog on Turkey and am at the moment a little bit tired of writing, I don't really feel like going into the minutiae of the 8 days in Istanbul, the first half with my mom and dad and the second half with just my dad. Suffice to say, we probably completed a good half of the tour book. A few meals deserve note, however: first, a full iftar fast-breaking meal, supposedly in the Turkestan (i.e. Uighur) style, accompanied by a folksinger singing about the glories of the Turkic peoples; an amazing fish stew made with a fish, that we had selected from an array of fishes, brought to us directly from the the fish market around the corner; and finally, a lunch of melon, stuffed with ground lamb, beef, rice, raisins and nuts and then baked (a recipe dating to 1539), at a restaurant specializing in the traditional specialties of the Ottoman court.

After my dad left yesterday morning, I moved into a hostel, about a block from Galata Tower, because it was near our hotel. While not as personal as the last one, it should be a decent enough to sleep and use my computer (the wi-fi works pretty well here), though the current abundance of French basketball fans here, in town for the World Championship, is a little annoying, especially given the fact that a few are a little too old to be staying at what is traditionally called a youth hostel. With a couple friends left over at the staff of my last hostel, I'll be spending at least a little bit of time over there too (I was there yesterday and I'll probably head there after I finish this post). I move into my dorm at the University on the 15th, a day I happily await. After nearly a month a of free time and vacation in a foreign country (and 9 different beds in four weeks), I'm ready to start the semester.