Üşüdüm, dammit

Day four in Istanbul and the temperature is declining as rapidly as my competency. I finally got my room to be warm and snuggly enough that I don't have to wear a beanie and mittens to bed, but we just got back from dinner at a restaurant that was actually a docked boat and my little toesies are still thawing out.

I've been trying to absorb every word of Turkish that comes my way, down to the "çekiniz" and "ikiniz" on the doors. My vocabulary now consists of approximately 50 words and maybe 5 sentences. Still relying on pointing and flapping and yelling singular words like "SU" and "KARDI?" to get what I need.

  

Here are my initial assessments  of Turkey/Istanbul/Koç:

THINGS I LOVE:

• Turks are much more aware of their surroundings. No one talks on the Dolmuş, they just kind of stare out the window and stare at the ground and stare at you and then don't look away when you look back. They are curious about things. They like to know things. 
• The exchange rate. 1.80 TL for every $1? Don't mind if I do. I can't remember the last time I got a three-course meal for four bucks. I say, "Super!" which in Turkish, is "Super!"
• There are no serving spoons. Everyone just kind of eats off the same dish with their own utensils like germ-oblivious family. This is how we do it at the Lalli household, so it feel just like home.
• The water pressure in these showers is incredible
• Attitudes towards alcohol. Maybe it's only because I don't drink that I notice that American kids get plastered just so they can be even louder than they already are and do stupid things without feeling responsible for themselves, whereas in Turkey, people drink as a social thing. And instead of getting drunk and doing dumb shit, they get drunk on Rakı (some kind of really potent crap that tastes like black licorice) and ponder life's serious problems. Kids drink with adults. The program staff actually bought us Rakı  on the boat/restaurant and everyone was merry.
• The public transit system. In LA, it takes an hour to get somewhere that's 20 minutes away. In Istanbul, it takes 20 minutes to get somewhere that's an hour away. And you don't have to sit around and wait in a sketchy dirty bus stop for a half hour and then get accosted by schizophrenics and sit in puddles of homeless person urine and/or syrup and/or two-shot caramel macchiato frappucino with extra whip spilled all over the seats.  
• The tunnels under the school that connect all the buildings. Students are actually encouraged to use them, and every few strides there is a brilliant piece of graffiti on the wall like "I used to blink, but then I got shot in the knee with a bow and arrow," and "Nope, Chuck Testa."

THINGS I DON'T LOVE:

• The unseasonably cold weather. The sun hasn't made an appearance yet and it has snowed every day (the snow doesn't really fall, it just kind of blows around). They said this is the coldest winter in 30 years, which reminded me of first-year orientation at Oxy when it was 110 degrees and the hottest summer in 30 years or something. Either way, it makes you not want to do anything, and during orientation, YOU HAVE TO DO LOTS OF THINGS. 
• This campus is large. Large=more walking distance in the snow in inappropriate footwear. 
• All the labels are in Turkish, so I can't tell which one is the shampoo and which one is the conditioner. I took my chances and bought an upright bottle and its upside-down friend. I was right, but heaven forbid next time they both face the same direction.
• This is allegedly an English-speaking university, and technically it is because the students and the faculty all speak English. But most of the cleaning staff, restaurant staffs, baristas, facilities people, cashiers, etc. probably couldn't tell if I was speaking English or Zulu. Which is a shame, because I really want to speak to them and know their stories, but all I can say is "ÇAY LÜTFEN?"

But as always, it will get better. It has to get better. Tomorrow's another gün, and I accept the challenge.


İyi geceler, Amerika

A strange and foreign land, wrought with magic, mystery, and subzero temperatures

Merhaba from a blustery and wintry Istanbul!

I imagine that this is the coldest country on our Mother Planet Earth right now besides like, Greenland, but I have prepared myself for the day by putting on two pairs of pants.

 It's about 9:00 am here in Istanbul, which means it is roughly bedtime in the states. My biological clock has no idea what is going on. I slept four hours last night, twelve hours the night before, and about five minutes the night before because I was on a plane and the only people who can sleep on planes are celebrities and wizards. 


This is my third day hereabouts and I am a slimy floppy fish out of water (speaking of which, yesterday I almost trudged through a puddle of sardine carcasses in the middle of the sidewalk).

Things that are different between Turkey and the U.S.:

• in the U.S., dorm facilities provides you with toilet paper and paper towels. In Istanbul, you have to weirdly take your own TP into the bathroom with you.
• In the U.S., you can drink tap water and not die. In Istanbul, they "strongly recommend against it."
• In the U.S., people obey traffic laws. In Istanbul, people have never heard "traffic" and "law" in the same sentence. 
• In the U.S., people speak English. In Istanbul, ACTUALLY NOBODY SPEAKS ENGLISH.

Things that are similar between Turkey and the U.S.:

• .......
• ...........
• ..............
• pretty much nothing

On the agenda for today, we are going back to downtown Sariyer to get some cellular telephones and other necessities. I'm pretty stoked to get a hair dryer because yesterday I walked outside with damp hair and it immediately turned into icy hair-cicles. Sariyer is the neighborhood just down the hill from Koc University (my current location), and it is the most incredible place I've ever been. It's right smack on the coast of the Black Sea and looks kind of like a hybrid of San Francisco and Santorini. You have to take a teeny weeny bus called the "dolmus" to get there from the University. "Dolmus" literally means "stuffed." There is no capacity limit. I don't think personal space is really a thing outside the U.S. 

Anyway, we spent most of the day in Sariyer yesterday in an Arctic blizzard completing a series of tasks, which proved difficult considering LITERALLY NOBODY SPEAKS ENGLISH. One of the tasks was to go into this bakery and buy cookies, and fortunately one of the dudes in there knew what "half kilo cookies" meant. The rest was just a lot of blank stares and awkward flailing gestures, which I was left to interpret as the rest of my group inched slowly out the door. 

My appetite finally came back sometime yesterday with the force of a thousand well-bodied men. A few of us went back to Sariyer for dinner, and by some miracle managed to find a restaurant, get seated, order pizza, eat pizza, and pay our bill without any verbal communication with the staff. After that I decided that I MUST learn Turkish and learn it REALLY FAST. I'm already a little bit ahead of the group as far as grammar due to a few 15-minute Youtube tutorials, but I'm still pretty much limited to greeting, thanking, and asking where the toilet is. 


In a minute I am going to go get ready for this action-packed day. "Getting ready" in this case means piling on all my clothes (which isn't a lot of clothes, I decided to "pack light." Terrible idea) and applying my mascara snuggled up next to the "radiator", which I also put in quotations because it does a poor job of actually radiating anything. 
 


Iyi geceler (good night) America.





 

Pearls of wisdom cast freely before ye swine

Greetings from St. George, or as I call it, the Palm Springs of Utah. 

It’s 4 AM in the desert and I’m busy not sleeping because I thought it would be a really good idea after being completely sedentary for five days to drink lots of Dr. Pepper right before bedtime.

Anyway, I hope everyone has had a blissful holiday season surrounded by family and old friends. Myself, I made some new friends this winter break, all of whom are contractors and/or construction workers invading and destroying my house like metastatic cancer.

There’s Chatty Cathy, a nice man who drives a Lexus and ropes you into painfully long conversations like a boa constrictor strangling its helpless prey. 

And there’s Vernon Dursley, whose face is roughly the color of an eggplant. So now I kind of have a visual basis of what J.K. Rowling was describing.

Then there’s Silent Killer, who doesn’t say much, but his eyes say “I have body parts in an ice box in my garage.”

And of course, there’s the legions of strange foreign men who listen to really bad Latin pop and set up their scaffolds RIGHT outside my bathroom window. We’re all such good amigos that they want to make sure I don’t fall in the shower. 

Fortunately in two weeks I depart for a semester abroad in ISTANBUL and I couldn’t be more anxious and excited and scared. I’ve had a lot of time over the break to wring my hands in apprehension and reflect on my past two and a half years in college. I’ve assessed the most important lessons that I’ve learned in college so far, none of which pertain to that science-for-non-scientists baloney (bologna?) I’ve been busting my ass over.  I think I have a pretty solid compilation so far.

Valuable lessons I learned in college that don't have much to do with academia

LESSON ONE: PARTIES ARE NOT FUN

The first fatal flaw of most parties is that the word “party” implies that there is something to celebrate, and there is rarely anything legitimate to celebrate besides having bullshat our way through another week of classes. Then there’s the fact that campus safety doesn’t allow any party to survive past midnight, so you spend more time GOING to the party than actually BEING at the party. Towards the end of the semester I purposely dress down for parties because I don’t ACTUALLY plan on ever getting there.

 I go to fewer and fewer parties each semester, I think because it is gradually dawning on me that there is actually nothing to do at parties. You can get absurdly drunk and then doing nothing is really fun, but if you don’t drink, doing nothing is pretty much as fun as it sounds.  The real Friday night fun happens in my room, where between a paper about metabotropic receptors and the next episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I like to yell out my window at the drunken frosh stumbling by dressed to the nines stuff like:

“WHEREVER YOU’RE GOING, IT’S NOT GOING TO BE FUN!”

“YOUR FATHER ISN’T PAYING FIFTY GRAND A SEMESTER SO YOU CAN LEARN HOW TO SUCK MORE AT BEER PONG!”

And

“YOU’RE FOOLING NOBODY! THAT IS NOT VITAMIN WATER!”

…

So basically I’m just a dick.

LESSON TWO: WOMEN ARE PASSIVE LEARNERS

Cue feminist uproar.

The statistics speak for themselves. Seven out of ten times, the loudmouth dummy making poorly-thought out comments and shouting out poorly-thought out questions is male. Two out of ten times, the class gets tense and quiet and watches some poor girl timidly ask a simple question with judgy-face expressions that say something like “Dumbitch doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” The remaining ten percent of the time, there is a girl with some balls. This in no context should be a good thing, but is somehow refreshingly awesome. 

I’m sure there are a zillion ways to explain this phenomenon, but I’ll just wait for a man to do it and in the meantime sit here and look pretty and submissively accept the way things are. 

And while I'm at it, I may as well make you a sandwich, wrap my feet, and make out with another girl while you and your friends watch

LESSON THREE: ONCE AN EAST COAST PREP SCHOOL DOUCHEBAG, ALWAYS AN EAST COAST PREP SCHOOL DOUCHEBAG

The ECPSDB can usually be seen:

• Smoking a cigarette
• Wearing suede footwear
• Reading the business section of the New York Times
• Casually hanging out and shooting the breeze with an esteemed professor, administrator, or other authority figure
• Trying to dictatorially head too many student organizations at once
• Playing lacrosse

And I’m pretty sure the only way to get a Mass-hole or upstate New York hipster to express human emotion is to insult his hometown.Then they just can't be tamed.

Like Miley Cyrus in her creepy XXX music video "Can't Be Tamed"

LESSON FOUR:  PEOPLE DON’T DRINK COFFEE BECAUSE IT TASTES GOOD

It’s expensive and makes your breath smell like shit. But I think I get it now.

LESSON FIVE: COLLEGE BOYS CANNOT DRESS THEMSELVES

Basketball shorts are for basketball.

Running shoes are for running.

Football jerseys are for football.

Baseball caps are for baseball.

The fact that the sports industry is male-dominated does not (should not) give college boys a four-year pass to avoid civilian clothing. 

And o ye gods, please send a plague that will destroy all men’s plaid shorts, as well as plaid quilts and Scottish kilts for good measure. 

Because better safe than WHAT THE !*#@ IS THAT

LESSON SIX: DON’T TELL PEOPLE YOU HAVE A CAR, BECAUSE YOU WILL BECOME THE SUBSTITUTE FOR AN ADEQUATE LOS ANGELES PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM 

This one was kind of intuitive for me, so I avoided telling anyone but my close friends that I had a car for the better part of a year. But people started figuring it out. It might have been that my car is stupidly red in a sea of silver Priuses (Prii?) so it was bound to get noticed, or the fact that it is the only car at Oxy with Utah license plates and I am the only kid at Oxy from Utah. Or word of mouth. Or seeing me drive it. Or whatever. At any rate, I’ve been able to avoid people deliberately getting plastered to make me DD by default (the whole vow of sobriety thing) by simply not ever going out (see lesson one). So now all I use my car for are trips to CVS and Trader Joe's for conditioner and Puffins. Someone else who is not so willing to sacrifice their social life might to well by just not mentioning the car.

LESSON SEVEN: DORM BATHROOM ETIQUETTE

Thou shalt not leave wads of thy hair in the shower.

Thou shalt not occupy the stall directly next to another occupied stall.

Thou shalt not take up multiple sink areas with all of thine crap.

Thou shalt flush.

Thou shalt not enter the bathroom and stomp all over it with thine soiled boots whilst the cleaning women are cleaning.

Thou shalt make deliberate attempts to speak to thine hallmates in the bathroom, lest the electricity should go out and one of thy hallmates be required to hold her iPhone light over thy sink while thou finishest brushing thine teeth, and thou shalt feel like an asshole for not knowing her name.

Thou shalt not steal toiletries from the cubbies of thine hallmates, and if thou must borrow, thou shalt leave a note explaining the borrowment in humble and ironic tone that shall not be understood nor appreciated, and thou shalt offer to pay back the borrowment in full with friendship or fiber tabs. 

LESSON EIGHT: YOUR REAL FRIENDS ARE THE ONES WHO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE WITHOUT ASKING, STOP WHAT THEY ARE DOING TO COME SIT WITH YOU WHILE YOU EAT EVEN THOUGH THEY JUST ATE, AND INSTEAD OF ASKING “WHAT ARE YOU DOING TONIGHT?” ASK “WHAT ARE WE DOING TONIGHT, SLUTFACE?”