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.

A Snowy Night in Istanbul

The party went well Saturday night. Halil, a Turkish I.T.U. student who is head of the Erasmus (international student) program, brought several French students over who are going to school here this semester as well. I put out some of my Tzatziki sauce and it was a big hit! :)

Sunday was spent in hibernation for most people. I didn't do too much. A little school work and a little relaxing.

This morning I went to studio around 9 am to work on my project. First thing, I went to the copy room to get copies of the floor plans I'm working from. At I.T.U. students have to pay each time they want to make a copy or print something off. At Auburn we have a ridiculous Professional Fee that we must pay in addition to tuition, allowing us to make unlimited copies/prints for the year. I arrived in the copy center with a few girls in line ahead of me. One student was working the copy machines. After the other girls left, I told the guy I wanted 5 copies (beş kopi). He replied with a string of Turkish words. All I could discern was "dört" (four), so I thought maybe there was a four copy limit, smiled, and nodded my head as I said "dört". He made a few copies, each time they were extremely zoomed-in and went off the page. I thought maybe he was new and wasn't sure how to do the settings correctly. Then he said another sentence in Turkish. I told him I knew very little Turkish (çok az Turkçe biliyorum). He sort of looked exasperated then kept repeating the same sentence, slightly differently each time. I just shook my head, and he looked annoyed. Eventually a girl came in who spoke English. She said to me "You cannot blow it up 5 times because it will be too big." Finally understanding, I replied, "Oh, no, I just wanted 5 copies of each." She explained it in Turkish to the guy who rolled his eyes as another worker walked up and made my copies for me. I hurriedly paid and left. They kindly did not charge me for the first blown-up versions.

I finally returned to studio and worked for the rest of the morning on diagrammatic floor plans. I ate the lunch I packed just before studio began. My professor seemed to really like my wine and cheese showcase idea. We travel to Mardin next Thursday, and he wants us to do as much work as possible before that so that we have plenty of questions that can be answered on the site visit. So, I have a lot of work to do for Thursday's class. I feel good about this project though.

After class, Christine and I went to the market in the Kanyon mall. I loaded up on these tiny marshmallow puff cookies I tried the other day. It's a cookie with a marshmallow on top, covered in either chocolate sprinkles or coconut. I love them!

Just a little bit ago, Casey came up to the apartment to let us know that it was SNOWING! We all stood outside enjoying the snow and taking pictures. The people inside the shop across from us were laughing at us all outside dancing in the snow and huddled on the sidewalk. I got a few pictures. The flakes were large!

An Extraordinary Dromedary

Friday morning I was greeted my a great surprise when I got out of the shower...my package with my debit card had finally arrived!!!

The weekend has been slow-going. Friday morning I met my professor at school to pay my deposit for the flight to Mardin. In the afternoon we were supposed to be going with some of the Turkish students to get our transit passes, but something came up and they cancelled. I spent the rest of the day around the apartment. I tried to understand my Architecture in Cultural Context assignment, vacuumed, and did a sketch of some of the furniture from Koleksiyon then began to watercolor it. Cameron was amazing and cleaned our bathrooms and got the drain to our shower unclogged. By the end of our showers we had been half-calf-deep in cloudy water. It was quite a treat to shower without wading around this morning.

Friday night Me, Cameron, Christine, Jamie, and Jamie's Polish friend (who lives here) went to a couple of bars. The first was the one I'd been to before, we sat one floor lower than last time which is more of a "sit-and-talk floor" than the top "dance" floor. We moved to the second bar after a bit, which turned out to be not-as-great as we had expected. It was extremely crowded, lots of shattered glasses on the floor, and pretty stuffy. I think they had to pay 6 lira for a beer too- moderate, but not cheap.

My fingers and toes have been tingly and numb all day today.

Right now I'm listening to Simon and Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock". It makes me want to see Garden State, the movie that introduced me to the soothing songs of Simon and Garfunkel.

Today Christine and I went to Kanyon mall. First thing, I went to get the camel bracelet I had seen. I love it! He is adorable. At 31 lira, it is pricy, but wasn't as much as I had thought it would be; definitely worth it!

We went to Starbucks where they spelled my name on my cup "Sera". I used to want to change the spelling of my name to that when I was younger to be different. 'A's have an "ah" sound in Turkish, so when I say "Sarah" the first 'A' has more of an 'E' (eh) sound in Turkish. My name would be pronounced "Sah-rah" here. Magdalena, an Auburn studio professor from Croatia, asked me when I was in her class how I wanted her to pronounce my name: the American way or the Croatian way (the same as it would be pronounced in Turkish, with long 'A's). I told her definitely the Croatian way; I love the way it sounds with the long 'A's, especially with a foreign accent.

After we got back and had lunch, Christine and I went to school to do some work in studio. We still don't have keys to our studio and couldn't find someone to let us in. We thought we could go home and borrow a key from someone in Tarik's studio then enter ours through the connecting door between the two, but as we left we found out the building closes at 7:00 pm on the weekends (it was already 5:30 pm), so we decided to wait until tomorrow.

After tortellini pasta for dinner from the grocery store, I fell asleep on the couch while waiting for Ugly Betty to come on. Now it's just after midnight and I don't feel tired...time to do some Rosetta Stone! The monotony of the same words being repeated over and over always puts me in the mood for sleep!

Successful Shopping

Today Jamie, Cameron, and I took the metro to Levent to go shopping at the Kanyon Mall. From the metro you can go directly into the mall. The mall is really neat. It's floor plans are very curvy. It feels like any indoor shopping mall, but it's not completely closed-in. From the walkways that take you past the stores, you can look up to the sky. I didn't have my camera with me, but here's a photo of the mall from Wikipedia.

Many of the stores were ones we have in America, like Steve Madden. There were also some Italian designers with stores there. There was a store called Mango that had women's fashion for very good prices. We found one great store with all these random objects: umbrellas whose handles are round knobs painted with faces, bike locks made to look like snakes, and cups with colorful wings for handles. My favorite item was a bracelet they had; it's a camel laying on its stomach, his legs straight out to his sides like he fell down in exhaustion or slipped on ice. The legs wrap around your wrist and hook to become the bracelet. I plan on going back to get that one!

The best thing about the mall was the large grocery store we found on the ground floor. We have small markets near our apartment that have the basic necessities, but lack good selection. This grocery store had everything: produce section, delicatessen, seafood counter, fresh bread, even a counter to get dried fruits and nuts. We also were able to find cooking utensils, tupperware, and hangers! We plan to go back there every couple of weeks at least.

When we got back from shopping Jamie made us delicious veggie stir-fry.

One of the two Finnish girls who will be living with us will arrive tonight.