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.
- .......
- ...........
- ..............
- 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.
If you ever figure out the miracle of sleeping on planes, let me know.
ReplyDelete