Yeni ve Eski arkadaşlara! (ve diğer konular....)

My blog, my blog, how I've been neglecting you.
It's been a week without a post, right?
Which means I obviously must have done enough things that I'd be front page news in a newspaper....
Speaking of which....

But I'll get to that in a bit.


Şerafe! Yeni ve Eski arkadaşlara!
(Cheers! To new and old friends!)

Thursday I got to check out some book stores, and sit in a cafe for a bit, and somehow have a long conversation in Turkish about unemployment, Marxism, and economics with a friend of a conversation partner. Hooray!

Picnic music.

Friday of last week was celebrated with a picnic with our host conversation partners, which was great because I got to talk about stuff like Çannakale, and Stalin deporting Turkic people, and whether or not I wanted to catch one of the chickens that was running around. Friday night, briefly hit up a bar with Uğur and co because Ramazan was beginning. Ramazan would entail no longer be drinking alcohol for a full month, in addition to fasting from sunrise to sunset, including no smoking or drinking water.

It's a pun!

Hopped the ferry to İstanbul on Saturday morning with some amount of confusion, but thankfully there was no more of that for the rest of the trip. The purpose of my trip wasn't really sight-seeing, but instead just to see friends of mine.

Clem and his older brother Joe, who I went to high school with.

Including these two, who I gezzed around with in Gezi park and Taksim and around some touristy spots, endlessly spouting random anecdotes about life in Turkey, and somehow not being an object of intense hatread as a result of those anecdotes.

Taksim Square

Gezi park, for being the site of massive protests only a year prior, was surprisingly small and dinky. Taksim, pretty touristy and cool, though I don't think the description of "like a larger Kızılay (Ankara neighborhood)" described it well at all.

Zach & Kendra

Additionally, I also visited to see these other two friends of mine, who you may remember from last year's program. They live in a really cool part of  İstanbul, and they showed me around Boğaziçi Üniversitesi and Bebek (another neighborhood, which is quite nice.)

Boğaziçi Üniversitesi

Kankalar

Also got to hit up Rumelihisarı, or Rumeli Fortress, which was constructed by Sultan Mehmed II when he was conquering Constantinople. For details on that, see a irrefutable scholarly source that is constantly used without citation in academic papers.

Going to any castle in Turkey necessarily entails climbing lots of staircases like this.

After that, it was waffle time! Depending on how well you know Zach/Kendra/myself, see if you can guess which one of us ate which waffle.

 Gezzed around Bebek for a bit... If that was where my mother wanted to retire to, I'd be totally behind it.

Return was uneventful. I may have spoken less Turkish that weekend than I should have as a result of my company, but I'm overjoyed at any opportunity to see friends!

I love knock-off children's rides. These are in Kabıtaş.

John and his "canım" who he spent the weekend with.

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Uruç Tutmak
(To fast)

Monday I made a brief but dedicated foray into trying out fasting for Ramadan. (Minus the fact that unlike people on the program who actually fast, I took a nap for lunch instead of going to a restaurant with people and not eating.) Not eating nor drinking from sunrise to sunset for a single day wasn't bad. I wasn't running around, so I wasn't getting too thirsty. At the very least, it certainly impressed my host mom. However, host grandmother more or less ensured that I wouldn't be able to continue trying it out, mostly by say, forcing me to eat cake earlier in the day on Tuesday.




Tuesday we had a class trip to the museum in Bursa, and that was nice, though the museum was rather small so I finished a bit ahead of time. I might possibly maybe have accidentally maybe ignored a few non-essential directions that day. No idea what.

Nothing like learning about Bursa's Tarzan!

Seems like they really want you to know that the Ottoman empire was chillin in the Balkans for a really long time

I believe I may also have returned home a bit earlier, and met some of host mom's friends, one of whom was Greek, and asked me if sets of brothers and sets of sisters got married together in the US. I missed the word 'marry' in there, so she declared I hadn't learned any Turkish since I came here. This is quite obviously not actually the case. At the very least, I actually remember the phrase "uruç tutmak" unlike last summer. I'm pretty sure that's enough to raise me like ten proficiency levels.
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Hep biz merak edecek değiliz ya... Amerikalı gençlerin zor soruları

(All of us wonder, don't we? American youths' difficult questions.)

Wednesday though. Wednesday was the best!
So Mesut is totally the man, and he's very proud of the fact that at CLS Bursa we offer additional optional outside of class cultural activities that he tailors to students' interests. The first of these was meeting with Ahmet Emin Yılmaz, a columnist who is quite high in the ranks at Olay, a local Bursa news corporation. In addition to having a nice Q&A in his office, he also gave us a tour around the building, which included offices, a radio studio, and television studios, including a cooking program that was in progress of being filmed. Really cool.

Rad.

Cooking show kitchens look way faker in real life than on tv.

Does he resemble the picture?

Not only that, but two days later, we took up quite a bit of space in the newspaper. Interesting, especially since Mr. Yılmaz stated that there was so much always happening in Turkey that finding information to fill a newspaper with was not a problem. Joking aside, it's a good write up, though with a bit of a political bent. (Not that I myself don't stick to a fairly neutral, mostly opinion-less demeanor on here that doesn't effect my own portrayl of events and conversations on here...) I'll translate the article into English for your benefit soon.
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Bağımsız Günümüz Kutlu Olsun!
Thursday was the day to paint some pottery. That is, Çini dersi günü. As I have no patience for following directions on art projects, and to this day do not hold a pen properly, let alone a paint brush, it was rather difficult for me to get the hang of painting really thin black lines. In fact, I'd wager to say I failed at displaying any sort of technical skills. Nevertheless, I wanted my art to be my own, so I did my best to experiment with it. At the very least, it stands out from the crowd, and I learned a lot about how this type of art is made.





I must also say I had an excellent conversation on the metro with a Turkmen man from Afghanistan and his daughter. They were so cool and nice, and his daughter was of the exact age where asking me to add numbers together was totally the thing to do, and I totally summed them up in Turkish.

This is my favorite kind of art.

After that, I meandered around a bit, acquired a ukulele (always ask for a student discount), and returned home, where I discovered it was host grandmother's birthday! If only I had known (or payed attention to the sheet with host family information that has the birthday on it) then I could have done something other than just play my traditional slightly-wrong ukulele rendition of "Happy Birthday to you." Ah well.

There was cake, and there were friends, and it was a good time.
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Friday was the fourth of july. Independence day. And, although my day did not star Will Smith, I did (unlike last year) eat a hamburger. Rad.

Menu there. You can guess what the decor was like.