Various Vistas and Taxi Troubles

It's been a long time since my last post again; the internet has been spotty both here and at school. I've been keeping busy with classes and exploring in the past week.

On Tuesday we had our Urban Morphology class in the morning. I spent a good chunk of the rest of the day frustrated in the computer lab trying to print autoCAD drawings for studio and pictures of Taskisla for my project due Wednesday. All of the computers seem to have some kind of virus, and for that reason, they are extremely slow and like to randomly restart. After two tries and with Chad's help, I got everything printed that I needed.

Tuesday evening Christine and I took a bus to Ortakoy. We went to a small pedestrian area she'd been to before on the Bosphorus with shops and restaurants. We got coffee and tea at Gloria Jean's Coffee, which has a terrace with wonderful views of the mosque next to it and the Bosphorus.

Once we couldn't feel our fingers anymore from the cold, we went in search of a restaurant to get stuffed baked potatoes that are popular in that area. We found them at the first restaurant we passed. They were so good! I wish I had taken a picture, but I'm sure I will go back. The potato was twice-baked and loaded with cheese, slices of hot dog, sour cream, a spicy red salsa-like sauce, and "American salad": carrots, peas, corn, and cabbage. It was so good and so filling!

Wednesday morning we had our Architecture and Design in Cultural Context class. It lasted from 8:30 am until 12:30! The lectures are interesting, but it's hard to keep focused for that long. After class Mandy and I decided to stay in studio to do some work. After a couple minutes I got up to go to the bathroom, and realized we were locked in! Our studio connects with the other half of our group's studio by a center door, and each studio has a door leading to the hallway. Our door had been locked and the last ones to leave from class must have locked the other hallway door behind them, not realizing we don't have keys yet. We were the only ones left after class cleared out, so we had to wait a couple hours for someone to show up so we could leave.

That afternoon Mandy, Chris, Casey, John, and I walked to the Golden Horn then took a taxi to Pierre Loti where we sat and drank tea at a cafe on a hill overlooking the best panoramic view of the Golden Horn. We stayed through sunset then took a cable car over a cemetery and down to the bottom of the hill where we caught a taxi home. We had dinner at Zencefil, where Walker and I had eaten on his last night here. The lemon pie there was amazing. That night I worked on a small watercolor of an area near the Bosphorus. We have to do one per week for Tarik's class.

Not sure why when ever I use photoshop to edit pictures, they upload with inverted colors... so I've included the pans and later I'll put up the pics they came from under them.

Thursday I spent my afternoon of studio upstairs in the cafe so I could use the internet (because the internet in studio has been broken for the past week and a half). I finally downloaded VectorWorks so that I can now do CAD work using the autoCAD documents we were given.

Friday Cameron and I went to Kanyon mall to go to browse shoes for the salsa dancing lessons we are going to begin this week. A group of us, all foreign exchange students, are going to start them on Wednesday. I found a pair I liked, but didn't buy them until we went back there for dinner yesterday. Cameron also got a very cute pair of shoes; both of ours were from Nine West and on sale, over half-off, just 55 lira!

Last night I went with Cameron, Jamie, Casey, Chris, and John to a house party pretty far north of here. They had met some of the kids who would be there at another party last weekend. It was so much fun! The best thing about it was that it was Star Wars-themed. Almost all of the people there went to Koç University. We headed home around 4 am, and because the buses stop running around 11 pm, we had to take a taxi the whole way back. The door on Chris's side was broken, so he had to hold it shut as the taxi whipped down curvy roads. Then, fairly close to Taksim, we were stopped at a red light and SLAM! We all jerked forward as a girl pulling up behind us slammed into the rear-end of the taxi. We sat there in shock for a minute while our taxi driver got out and called the police. While waiting for the police our cab driver finally got Chris's door to shut. About twenty minutes later, after seeing the police drive by once without stopping, we decided to just pay our fare and take another cab for the rest of the way. Quite a night.

Time to figure out what to cook for dinner. I'm trying to use up all my food in the fridge before we leave for Mardin on Thursday.