meşgulum..

I know its been another century and a half since I posted and I've prolly lost some fans over it.. but my life is sooo busy! As we move into the last couple weeks we realize how much of İstanbul there really is.. how much we haven't seen and really want to see, how much time we don't really have to see it all. So, I've just been out so much recently and am barely keeping up on my homework too.. I think I'm one of the few who isnt behind yet, but that's just because I never really liked sleep anyway... heh.

I'm on a school computer so unfortunately no pictures this time, but soon I hope. I have lots of good ones too. We had another looong walking tour through some pretty sweet buildings Saturday and a very small one from Eyüp on Tuesday. We made some friends, spoke some Turkish and ate some food. My foot is mostly recovered, for those of you who cared. I've been out just about every night. The attack was quite far from us, and I still feel like I can't speak a word of Türkish. My greatest struggle has become writing class because I can never think of what to say.. not because I dont know how to say it. See, I can express myself in writing generally, though with many a mistake.. but I really cant speak. But someday...

Some foods for the fans who requested it..

So at long last.. I'ma show you some foods I eat.  Unfortunately this might be boring for those of you who know about Türk yemeği already.  Ok well, it will either be boring or really funny, depending on how wrong I am about what this stuff really is, Ok so actually it will either be funny or just horribly and painfully yanlış (False!)  Alright, here we go...

So this here is ahh, well its a meat, kebap of some sort I suspect.  Look! tomatoes and rice, ooh my favorites!  We're off to a good start, huh? I dont even know what the first food I posted here is... to be honest, I ate this thing a long time ago at Ezgi Pide, where our friend Ufuk works.. I think this was the day he tried to explain to me what Urfa kebap was.  Alright, I'm sorry about this one, all I know is that it was DELİCİÖUS.. Moving rapidly along..

This is menemen from the hostel in Selçuk, and its sooooo good, I must learn to make it. Apparently its not difficult.  So its mostly eggs and some tomatoes and oil and such, sometimes you can get it with other lovely things, like sucuk!  Its best on bread I think.  Its cheap too.. muahaha.

Another wonderful wonderful thing, mantı.  I've heard it called Turkish ravioli too, to give you an idea.  These epic little packages of noodly goodness are smothered in yoghurt!  Sounds so so strange, but they go amazingly well together.  I think the orangy stuff is just seasoned oil.  I once had a mantı with tomato sauce in addition to the yoghurt, yummm. 

So this is my average, everyday school-bought sucuklu pide (mostly like pizza without the sauce).  I know that the sucuk looks deceptively like pepperoni, its not.. I greatly dislike pepperoni actually.  The school ones are kinda.. soggy? I dunno, there are much better... Ezgi Pide is pretty good for it...

Here's a gözleme, sucuklu of course, but they also come in other exciting flavors such as potato, mushroom, spinach, uh some sort of ground-meat I dont know the English word for, beyaz peynir (cheese that I also dont know how to say in English) etc etc etc...  Its like bolanee of Afghan cuisines.

Look, a dude making some gözleme in Ortaköy! (Ortaköy = pretty expensive district on the European side of the Bosphorus, its cool to be there at night..)

Yey baklava!  I hope you know what this is... because I cant describe the wonderfulness...

Sucuk... with rice and some shredded carrots, a pepper, tomato and some sort of delicious, vinegary/pickled? cabbage, which is that reddish stuff up there.

I regret that its hard for me to remember to take pictures of my food before its half gone.  I mean, I really should take pictures of like.. simit and such.  I'm still working on it anyway, there'll be more additions of food before its all said and done :)

Ohh here we go! I forgot this one the first time I posted this thing.. this is super important...

This is the bowl of Mado ice cream that harbored the glass shard threatening to ruin my trip and possibly my life (see last post for details)!  See how delectable and innocent it looks? it had lots of fruit, like apples and such in it.  There was chocolate and VIŞNE ice cream, along with two other flavors I dont know... those are prolly pistacho crumbs on it.. dunno.  Mostly the only important thing was the vişne and.. the glass shard, which got my ice cream and türk kahvesi free.. almost at the cost of my life.  The manager wasnt thrilled either...

Ara sınav ve ondan sonra... UPDATED!

Yet another million years has passed since my last post and so much has happened... so here's a short excuse for my absence online.. ARA SINAV! that means.. midterm exam.  So yes, last week Thursday was our ara sınav and I was busy pretending to study, plus every single night something seems to pop up.. and I get back home late and have tons of homework or something.

So last week was lovely, I forget most of what happened, but there was a storm for the first time since I got here and it was amazing! rain, lightning, hail, everything!  And to think I'd been whining about it so much back in SD..  One night we went to starbucks.. ><  I know I know, but it was right on the Bosphorus and we wanted to watch the boats, we went with Josef (from another, more advanced class)..  I think I'll stick to normal coffees.  no, çay, I'll stick to çay.  So anyway, after the ara sınav Thursday Alyssa and I and Josef went out to Taksim to relax for awhile.  So Taksim is where I finally crippled myself on the treacherous streets of İstanbul... for all you facebook people and whoever else has been wondering.  Its only a sprain, but honestly with how much we walk here, its plenty annoying. (plus by now its all bruised and mosquito-bitten! yessss :D)

A few hours after (at about 9:30 pm), I jumped on the night bus with some friends and classmates and left for Selçuk for our long weekend.  It was a strange bus ride, more like a flight than anything.  They fed us ice cream, fruit juice, instant coffee and slightly hard, packaged pastries.  We arrived at about 7:30 the next morning. We got a Turkish style breakfast then went across the street to visit some ruins in the city....

Pillars! we first thought this was the Temple of Artemis, but it wasnt.  We dont really know what it was.. Pillars!
Ruins! ohhh they're my favorite! I forgot what this was called actually, it was definitely a church though, of St. John or so, I believe... I'm the worst tourist ever..

more views of it..
nice floor! I want...

This is a view of the surrounding area.. taken from the churchy ruins.  It was beautiful, very home-y :) Later we went to a down there and...

Ok ok, after about 3 guesses, we finally found the REAL Temple of Artemis! So here it is... what's left anyway.

Not much left, ne?

The goats of Artemis.  One kept sneezing, just constantly.

The one pillar left, reconstructed of course. Sooo, after all these ruins we showed up at our hostel...

Our room looks like this... AND!

There was a scorpion in it Saturday morning! Arthur pummeled it to death with a flip-flop and it looked like this after... Although I'm from Arizona these days, this is the first time I've seen a scorpion not through glass.

Here's the bar area of the hostel..

The pool of it..

Just another view.  It was quite a nice place, super friendly.  25 a night with shuttles to Selçuk and Efes and breakfast and dinner included, included and delicious, especially the menemen, an egg dish for breakfast here.

Just a view from the hostel. So, after we lazing around for awhile there we went to Efes (Ephesus!!) and it was incredible.. Picture time!

Despite my generally annoyed attitude toward Greek, I wanted to steal all the millions (literally, I swear) of things with it engraved.. I settled for pictures however, this is one of many!  
Ancient Greek toilets! gotta love the communal feel of it all.  Devrim and Arthur demonstrate the proper usage, reading material and all :P

ahh its soooo awesome!

At first I was thrilled to see pillars, remember?  But at some point, one questions... when is enough just too many?

Yes I climbed to the top of the stands, even with a crippled foot!  It wasn't half as treacherous as the Aztec pyramids, however, Tyler almost died on the way down, ironically, he slipped just as he was commenting on the shoddy workmanship, the grievously uneven stairs.. nahaha

So... after the Efes trip we returned to the hostel and chilled out for the rest of the night.  Strangely, they were having a cross-dressing party but we didnt participate because I didnt really have any man-ish clothes on us really.  We couldn't help any of the guys out either, because we didnt have woman-ish clothes with us either.  One wonders what we did have...

Next day after breakfast and stopping at the Selçuk pazar for some cheap fruits, we went to the beach at Dilek Milli Park (Dilet National Park). Took awhile to get there, a little more than an hour.  There were all these large boars wandering around in the trees by the beach, scary!

All sorts of people were feeding and taking pictures of them. They didnt seem particularly vicious.

The beach was rocks, not sand.  That just makes it less messy though :) 

Devrim, Arthur and Tyler, who looks kinda like he's flinching.. feeble Arizonans.  Yeah, he's from Arizona, UA even.. and to think I never knew 'im...

Some view of the beach and the other people on it.

After the beach all day, we were pretty wiped out and we just went back to the hostel, to laze about all night again :P

Sunday we went to a little mountain town called Şirince, known to tourism for its fruit wines.  Most of it was too touristy for us, but we wandered up the windy little streets to escape.. It was quite pretty actually.  I guess a little less than 1000 people reside here, miş...

The hill we walked up despite being lazy American tourists..

The gorgeous view from up there.  

Yey, the group I came with! (That is: Devrim, Alicia, Ruth, Arthur and Tyler(l->r)) This is all? whaaa, I should've taken more group pictures... ugh.

Later, after a strange experience with a little hostel or restaurant or something on the edge of town, we braved the more crowdy areas again, to try a few wines and eat Gözleme, which the town is also known for.

The busy main drag, where all sorts of wines can be tasted, and check out that awesome sign!

Tyler bargains with the peach man.. haha...

Ok, so after Şirince we went back to Selçuk, looked at the Efes museum and then hopped on a bus to İzmir.  We got there around 6ish maybe probably and went down to the oceanside immediately, to hang out until our bus was to leave, at 11.  It was way way too hot and way way way too humid, making me long for İstanbul again :P  Actually, it was the best, since my sensei was there... and lovely experiences like driving backwards down a highway because you missed the turn, which is apparently not cause for chaos, panic and death in this country.  Now, since I'm an awful person, I dont have pictures from the restaurant, where we ate fish which was NOT 95 YTL per kilo, uh, thanks to Seçkin...

Ok, it realllly wasn't a lie when I said I dont have pictures of İzmir and group pictures in general.  I didnt until I stole them from Alicia's Facebook..  

The last picture of the +1 traveling party (sadly we left the +1 in İzmir).. before we got on the bus to class and homework and places that aren't so hot that even in the evening they make you wish for the hottest day in İstanbul.  I will never again ask "why, whyyyy did people settle in Tucson?"

Soo, after another night bus ride, we arrived in İstanbul about 8:45 am.. class was supposed to start at 9, but we were so disgusting from being in İzmir and the bus that we decided... well, showering was more important and we were an hour late to class.  Oh well, I never missed before and I prolly never will again... I was exhausted though, I fell asleep briefly during our weekly movie later that day.

Yesterday, our normal lecture was cancelled so our TA's instead took us to the Kadıköy pazar in Asia for a frantic shopping experience.  It was thrilling and crowded and I bought some cheap clothes :P.  Alyssa and I stayed around longer than the others then we took a ferry to Karaköy (which is back in Europe) and had a slightly less strange dinner experience than last time with the fruit and the plates and the Spanish and the oddness everywhere...

I'm still tired from the vacation today, still my foot hurts, I still have a cough... but mostly I'm still thrilled to death to be here!  Its so great. :D

NEWS FLASH- İstanbul, Turkey.  The city is still trying to kill me!  Most of our class went to Mado for ice creams with one of our teachers this evening and I ordered a vişne thing (naturally), only to find that at the bottom of it was a massive shard of glass (about the size of a quarter.. or a lira), which I didnt notice until I almost swallowed it and died.  Luckily it was big enough that I questioned what was in my mouth before that!  I didnt have to pay for my ice cream and they gave everyone at the table a türk kahvesi in remorse.. or at least because they didnt want to lose our business. I also discovered that selling produce is my true calling, whereas before I only suspected it was my purpose in life.

Weekend wanderings..

Well, its been awhile since I got to post, yet again.  Some things have happened, some good, some bad.  Overall I'm still thrilled to be here.  Sometime in the middle of this week I got sick, sorta.  Well my throat hurts and I cough some.  Alyssa and I made a friend at the pide place by south campus, we went to celebrate Devrim's birthday with pide and a cake from the pastane... mm, what else happened during the week.. not much other than class I guess.  We have midterm exams and a long weekend this coming week! Scary..

The weekend was pretty exciting though.  Alyssa and I were mad that we didn't get to go to Edirne with the school trip because we didn't pay our fees before it filled up.  We didn't know that signing up wasn't enough to actually secure a place on the list, so we missed it.  We decided to fill our Saturday with other things.. but really we started on Friday.  One of Alyssa's friends from here (the one who got married last weekend) recommended her favorite restaurant.  It was kinda far away, but we had a night to kill, so we went.  We had to take several modes of transportation to get there, but thats the beauty of the akbil!  You can use it to pay for all of the different buses and ferries and trains, and you get discounts for transfers if you have it.  The restaurant was really nice though, sorta expensive for here, but for restaurant that nice, nowhere near what it would be back in the states... so anyway, here's some pictures...

It's called Develi and its pretty on the outside :D

I ate the Urfa kebap... because the translation said "urfa kebab," which didn't explain a whole lot.. sooo I was curious.  I still don't really know what it means.  To me, it just means delicious.

This was our dessert, Alyssa ordered it because the translation said something about "tiny nosdles" and again, we were curious about what that meant. The thing on the right is my türk kahvesi (turkish coffee) and there is turkish delight on the metal thing... yummm. 

So, the next day, which was the Edirne trip, we decided to go to a hamam.  We just left when we felt like it and went into the touristy regions of Istanbul.  First we wandered around and looked for a pleasant and cheap place to get çay.  I mean, you dont look for çay here, its literally everywhere.  You do look for a place you want to actually want to go to in order to drink it.  Besides some places really rip you off..  In our wanderings we stumbled across A. the hotel I stayed at my first night here! B. some huge museum and what we later discovered was the Ayasofya and the Sultanahmet mosque.  We actually visited Ayasofya before anything else important that day.  Well not before buying some cheap earrings I guess. Pictures ensue!

This is just the entryway.. nothin' big, compared to the rest anyway.

Beautifullllllll!
Insane amounts of  restoration!  Actually, I was kinda glad about this, it gives you an idea of how huge this place actually is.  Even when you're in there, its kinda hard to tell.. I think its too overwhelming or so.

Well,  I like angels... lots

A view from the second story.  I have practically a million more pictures from here..

After that, we went over to the Blue Mosque, which was also just plain incredible....

The big ceiling dome.

The windows are incredibly beautiful and there are sooo many of them.  Love the lights as well.  Anyway, we were only allowed into the edges of this one, which is good, thats the way it probably should be.  I wouldn't want tourists bothering me while I was there praying either.

They really knew what they were doing with this artwork.  All the domes and arches and everything about it.  Gorgeous.

Ok, I really, really love the lights... which are no longer candles, but electric lights.

And just look at the size of that pillar!  wow.  This building was amazing all around.  So, that was cool, we left and looked at a few gift shops/stands around it.  Afterwards we sat in a little park area because there was a band about to play.

We listened to a few songs and then made our way to the hamam.. The hamam was an experience all in itself, mildly uncomfortable, but overall I think perhaps I liked it.  I don't think I'll go into detail however..  

Today, I went back to Taksim to find a Catholic mass, and I did.  Actually, it was in English and only an hour.  I took more pictures of the inside before walking back outside and seeing the sign that said its um.. not allowed. So I felt bad.  I'm also sad that the only turkish mass there is on Tuesday during my classes...