On the seventh day we rested. Sort of… Today marks the one-week anniversary of our arriving in Turkey.
We got up early and went to class. A weird thing about this school is that you get a 15min break every hour. The Germans in class don’t understand the need for breaks (which is to be expected), but the even our Spanish member thinks there are too many breaks (hurray for the Spanish work ethic). I personally need the breaks to reorganize my mind.
Pronouncing Turkish is extremely difficult. There are additional characters with sounds that are not typical of spoken English. This makes reading Turkish much easier than speaking/comprehending it. When the teacher is speaking I’m a deer in the headlights, but when it’s on the board I have a chance to recognize words and break down the sentence. I think it will be easier when my pronunciation of each letter becomes second nature, but this will take some time. Vocabulary is difficult; again I can visualize the word in my head better than I can say it out loud. If you could see Lee’s English writing you would understand his difficultly with attempting to learn another language.
After class we went home and rested. Patrick has been feeling under the weather, and everyone has been short of sleep. We all took naps, ate at the apartment, and did our homework.
Apartment Confessional: Did laundry for the first time today. This was my first time using powdered detergent, it was a learning experience. I initially poured it into the softener hole and had to scoop it out by hand (huge pain). Clothes came out soaking wet, but here’s the catch: NO DRYING MACHINE! NO CLOTHES LINE! After checking to see if we could hang the clothes in the dining room and the billiards hall, we decided instead to place them in the kitchen, which is also the everything else room. Now Pat and Will get the pleasure (and it is a pleasure) of cooking, cleaning, and living in sight of my Hawaiian Girl boxers.
It should be noted that although we complain about the apartment because the place is a real trip (and real small), we really love it too. Biz odada seviyoruz. Our location is great. We’re close to everything yet enough off the beaten path that there are no other foreigners for a 5-10min walk. No one speaks English near us and our neighborhood is working class. Everyone seems to own a small grocery, fruit stand along our block. Our surroundings do have parts that would remind one of an Upton Sinclair novel, but they are few and the main street of our neighborhood (Babil Street) is lined with nice little shops, bakeries, restaurants for locals, cafes, and tea lounges. We really like being here instead of the dorms. It’s a beautiful little neighborhood and it makes us love our apartment.
Our adventure of the day is to visit the Kız Kulesi lighthouse (Maiden's Tower, Leander's Tower) near the Asian side of the Bosphorus near dusk. The lighthouse supposedly predates the Ottoman’s conquest of the city in 1453. It was featured in a James Bond movie (of course they located it in Georgia and had a Russian nuclear submarine pull in underneath).
Unfortunately, Pat was unable to adventure with us, his stomach and the food don’t quite agree yet. The ferry across the Bosphorus was beautiful. The lights of the city make for an incredible backdrop. Spot lit mosques sit along side high rise towers all under the blanket of the largest bridge I’ve ever seen. Think the Golden Gate Bridge with color changing Christmas lights. Our plan was to go up in the light house and have a cup of çay ( pronounced chai), there is a small restaurant at the top of the tower. Alas, the tower requires reservations at night. We settled for some medya dolmesi (stuffed muscles) on the banks of the Bosphorus. The tower was gorgeous! Hopefully we will make it back sometime soon and get to see the view from the top.
03/08/2020
-Lee (finally Pat edits something, with some help from Will. We are currently considering Lee’s status as main blog writer. The editing is that painful.)
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