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!

The Stress Begins

It's been a little hectic the past couple days. The internet not working well at the house or school, not having the programs I need on my laptop for studio, and the saga of getting my new debit card mailed here after my account was hacked has all added up to a good bit of stress.

Other than those things, life as a student in Istanbul has been great. Tuesday morning we had Urban Morphology; a grad student lecture class taught in English. We all packed into a tiny classroom for the first part of class. Apparently none of our names were on the list, so they expected to only have about 24 Turkish students; our group doubled that number. After the general course introduction we moved to a larger classroom to begin the day's lecture, which was given as a powerpoint presentation with one of our two professors reading the slides in good, but somewhat choppy, English. After the first couple of slides, the power went out. Lucky for me, I was in the front row and could therefore see the laptop that the powerpoint presentation was on and take adequate notes for the rest of the class period. The course seems like it could be interesting: the study of city form, mostly coastal European cities like Istanbul; however, it was hard to comprehend the whole of the lecture. I don't know if it was how the slides were written or not having my ear keyed in on our professors' accents yet. I looked up issues of the Urban Morphology journal online when I got home, literature our teacher mentioned in class. I found an article on Istanbul's urban morphology, written by an I.T.U. professor; I read the first part of it and took some notes. It helped me understand the idea of the course a lot better, and it was really interesting.

After class on Tuesday I bought some drafting supplies at the school supplies store, came back and ate lunch, then went back to school for studio work-day. We have three potential sites in Mardin for our project: a family house, an inn-type building, and a bazaar. Our task is to design the interior space, keeping the existing building's shell and interior walls, with whatever proposal we want. That is my assignment for tomorrow: come up with proposals of what could exist in these sites. Two of the sites could become really great museums, I think, but museums can be tricky because there is a certain amount of restraint needed on the part of the architect so that the artwork is given a perfect background. I also thought about a mixed-use hostel or hotel and visitor's center. Anyways, I'll quit brainstorming here, and get back to my account of the past few days.

In studio I spent most of my time figuring out a software I could download (for free) to view .dwg files, which is the format of all of the documents we've been given on the sites. Most people have autoCAD, but OSX (mac's operating system) isn't supported by autoCAD, so I turned to AutoDesk's free student downloads, but got lost in the many options. Eventually, I realized that Adobe Illustrator (which I have) opens .dwg files for viewing. Today I found out that I can download a free student version of VectorWorks, similar to autoCAD; this eliminated a good bit of that stress I mentioned in the first paragraph. I just need to scan my student ID (which today I found out I can do at school) and e-mail it in.

This morning we had architectural contexting, taught by one of the assistant professors who is helping Tarik's studio class. This seems like it will be a lot of fun. Each week we are given a place (assignment) in the city to go explore and document. At the end of the semester we will make a video of all of our findings. Today we explored our campus. Our professor took us to see the two libraries, computer lab, and supply store.

After class I waited by the door downstairs for two hours on the FedEx man. At 11:30 am I decided to call it quits and went upstairs to enjoy my two lira sandwich from the restaurant across the street.

^ complete with chicken, french fries, lettuce, green peppers, and tomatoes

Tonight I cooked lemon spaghetti for Jamie and Cameron. It turned out well for eyeballing all of the measurements. Here's the link to the simple and good recipe. :)

Someone outside is making a noise every 15 seconds that sounds like a loud cough, although I'm sure it's a word; it can be a noisy night-time (and day-time) street that we live on.

Time for me to continue work on these proposals due for studio tomorrow. Instead of having class at school we are traveling to Koleksiyon, a trendy, upscale interior design shop that may (if we make a good impression) fund our trip to Mardin. www.koleksiyon.com.tr