Some Turkish Things

I live in Istanbul, Turkey. I am an au pair. Both of these statements have been valid for exactly one month now.

Things I like about Istanbul: The food, the buildings, windy street

s, mosques, islamic

prayers/chants heard projected from the mosques at prayer times (5 times a day), old people, the old men with hats and mustaches, the old ladies that shake blankets out of window, laundry being dried outside, all of the stray cats and dogs, the fact that I laugh whenever I go out from watching the cats do funny things, speaking- well trying to speak- turkish, hearing people speak turkish, not having to know what everyone is talking about all of the time, the Bosphorus, the Bosphorus at night with lights shining on it, salep, ice cream with a knife and fork, hazelnut flavored vodka, the crazy neat antique stores, the weather.

So basically I enjoy most things here. I am liking the family I am living with also. They moved here from Sweden this past summer. The mom is Turkish and the dad is Swedish so the crazy children know swedish, turkish, and english. Very nice. I hang out with kids a lot. Specifically a 5 year old girl and a 7 year old boy. They cry frequently, especially the 5 year old. Temper tantrums or something. That is not that much fun. But when neither of them are crying we do fun things like play with a ball, listen to music and dance around and play card games. They are fun half of the time and naughty the other half.

Ooo I have seen some pretty wonderful things here so far. I have been trying to get out during the days and hit up the must see places of Istanbul. I have been to the Blue Mosque, several of the Bazars, and definitely the most amazing of the places the Basilica Cistern. The citern is this underground chamber with 336 columns that was used to hold water. There is still water on the ground with fish in it and it is very sparkly because people all throw coins in to make wishes. It felt like a place that you saw in a dream once but can't really remember. Well either a dream or a video game. It is definitely on my list of most beautiful places that I have seen.

I have also gone to several mosques. I have really

enjoyed them. They are very refreshing to go to after seeing so many roman cathedrals in europe. The architecture is different and it is carpeted. You get to take your shoes off, that always seems fun, and I get to wear a scarf over my head. I enjoy all of the arabic writing and all that I have seen have great chandeliers in them as well.

I have also tried going to this one Jewish cemetery near my house. Old cemeteries are always interesting and a Jewish one seemed more exciting than christian ones I've seen before. Unfortunately I got denied because I am not Jewish. It was sad. I probably could have lied and gotten in but I felt bad. I peaked over the walls when I was walking back. It seemed very run down and would have been great to explore. I also saw stray dogs that got to be there. They must have been Jewish dogs so I guess it was okay.

What else have I seen? Oh I went to this very cool fort built during the ottoman empire in only 4 months! Which is crazy because it was quite large. I went with my wonderful new american friend that I met, Maureen. We explored it and walked very carefully- no hand rails or ledges in very high up places. It was a gorgeous day when we went and the bosphorus looked amazing. It was a fun place to see because there weren't too many restrictions on what you could do and where you could climb. We enjoyed it, çok güzel.

I started volunteering at Jinemed hospital as well. They specialize in In virto fertilization treatments and get many foreign patients, a lot from the UK. I hang out with the lady that helps all the english speaking patients. I've been learning lots about fertility drugs and hormonal cycles. Very exciting. This is the first time I've actually applied things I've learned at University. Hooray for education! They let me see a lot of really neat things as well. I have gotten to put on scrubs, a hat and a face mask thing and watch egg collections and embryo transfers in the surgical rooms. The coolest thing I think was being able to see the live embryos before they did the transfer. Funny 8 cells of potential human life. After learning all about development and seeing images in text books of embryos it was pretty neat. It's also good because it gets me out of the house and gives me something different to do. It has made me sure of what I've already known as well, I don't want to be a doctor. Hospitals are a weird place and people are definitely in very vulnerable states and loose some of their dignity I think. People need to have things done in hospitals to get better sometimes but I think I want to stay away from that and not have to think about it. It might have to do with having spent time in the hospital myself, I am not sure. I do really like learning about the medications that the patients are taking and how they are effecting them. That is neato in my book.

The grandparents of the kids came the other week and it was great. Turkish old people are so very nice. Their English was probably about as good as my Turkish so it was a bit difficult communicating with them but we managed to get points across. I learned new turkish words which was good the grandma made amazing food. I felt extremely Turkish when she was here because all of our meals were big authentic Turkish ones. I love the breakfasts here. It's usually olives in olive oil, tomatoes in olive oil, hard boiled eggs, toast, walnuts and honey, and tea. It's so great. I will miss that when I go home. The grandma also read fortunes from the coffee ground of the turkish coffee you drank. It was so exciting. I watched her read the house keepers fortune and it was so neat. Although I couldn't understand any of it I was very enthralled. She read mine later in the week with the mom translating for her. It was my first fortune telling experience and it just seemed right. A wonderful turkish grandma on the couch reading my fortune after we all drank coffee. Apparently it's very common here for people to do that. I think it's a neat thing for sure.

Well that is all of the Turkey things I feel like talking about for the moment. I will try to be a better blogger and talk about other things soon. Until then.

Rome, Portugal, Madrid- oh my.

Finally.

So I did a bunch of traveling last month and had such and amazing time. I think I will do a somewhat condensed version of my travels.

First of all I was in Rome for New Years with my friend Christine. We spent 5 days there and 4 nights. It was a really great experience and we got to eat a lot of gelato. Mmm. We saw all the wonderful things one is suppose to see. The coliseum was by far my favorite of the old roman things. It was really amazing. Those Romans had their stuff together. I had so much fun traveling around with one of my friends. We ate a lot, laughed a lot, and took way too many pictures- so all the great things’ traveling is suppose to be about happened. We even managed to go see a movie in Italian in a very small cinema with snacks. It seemed to be an okay movie from what I understood of it. The city was beautiful and I loved the streets and the balconies and the cats. ALSO I loved the fact that there were orange trees all over the city. We continually tried to pick them and after a few attempts realized you shouldn’t eat them because they are horrible and sour. But it was exciting nonetheless succeeding in picking roman oranges. Hooray. We had a few wonderful days weather wise and then a few rainy ones as well. We still managed to walk around constantly and had pretty sore feet by the end of the trip. New Years itself was so much fun. It ended up pouring down with rain so our original plans of seeing concerts at piazzas were nixed. We went out with some of the people we met at our hostel and tried to find some bars to go to instead. We ended up getting lost (I’m not sure how because I had a compass and I was using it) and came to bars that were all closed for private parties. This one group decided to let us come into their private party because it was so close to midnight. They liked us and let us stay, which was wonderful. There was tons of great homemade Italian food and lots of champagne plus an openbar. The people were all really great and interesting to talk to. I was able to practice Italian, Spanish, and then test out my beginner’s Turkish. It was such a random night but really turned out quite wonderful. It was also nice to ring in the New Year for the second time with Christine. It was meant to be. Then the next day after eating, having coffee, eating some more and a 5 hour delay we headed back to Madrid.

From our 24 hour stop off in Madrid we headed to Porto, Portugal. We went there with two of Christine’s wonderful friends, Jem and Tom. We stayed for three nights and four days I believe. I really loved Porto. It was slightly run down and had really great windy streets with a lot of splendid character. Also there were occasional old people hanging out of their windows just looking around which is always good. All the houses were tiled there so it gave the town this great glossy look. We walked around a lot and saw all the things to see and ate a tremendous amount of bakes goods. Most of the baked goods there were tinted orange. I’m not sure why that was but it was something special and I liked it. We tried the Portugal specialty the franceshinia too. It was basically a sandwich with every type of meet (including hot dogs cut in half) and then covered in cheese and this special sauce. It was interesting to say the least. We should have stopped after we all split our first one though. On one of the days we went to the beach. It was really great. It rained all day but cleared up and had an amazing sunset. There were Portugal surfers there as well. I didn’t even know they existed but they do and were at the beach. On the last day we did two Port wine tours. It was really interesting. I learned a lot about port wine and that I don’t really like to drink it that much, very sweet. Maybe with snacks it would have been better.

From there we headed back to Madrid. I attempted to do some sight seeing but I managed to catch the worst week in Madrid probably out of the whole year. It was cold and rainy and then cold and snowy. It really put a damper on exploring. I did get to go and see the Guernica though. It was really amazing seeing it in real life because after learning about it. Not being an art buff I appreciated the fact that it was so big. Who knew?

After Christine’s family that she stays with offered us one of their vacation houses for the weekend Christine, Jem and I headed to Salamanca. The house we stayed in was very nice and we spent the first night bundled up in blankets and watching tv episodes on the computer. It was cold out. The next day… my birthday… we made it out and explored Salamanca. It is really a beautiful town. I think it would have been more enjoyed again if it was a bit warmer but at least we got sun. The sky was so amazing there. It had really wonderful and crazy sunset-ness going on. I really enjoyed that. That night we went out because it was MY BIRHTDAY! Hooray. We celebrated the fact that I turned 23. Before heading out I got birthday flan and champagne. I was in Spain and flan with a candle was definitely called for and it was amazing. It was a nice night out and great to celebrate with friends. The next day, after nearly getting snowed in, we headed back to Madrid.

I ended my 3 weeks of traveling in Madrid and followed Christine around, visiting her life for a while. It was nice. Madrid seems like a really fun city to live in for sure- a lot of tapas, bakery, and drinks. Plus they get naps during the day, so that is nice. I managed to get most of my sight seeing done despite of the cold weather. I had an amazing time traveling with Christine. It was really sad to go but I love that I had the chance to travel with one of my friends from University and get to bond even more in foreign countries. We had a lot of good laughs and I didn’t even get annoyed at her once! What a successful trip.

After coming home from Madrid I had less than 24 hours in Dundee to pack up my life and move to Turkey for my au pair job in Istanbul. BUT that is another thing to blog about. THE END.