Now that's different...

After all the meetings I went to last week in Istanbul, I felt inspired to get more immersed in the culture here. My roommate took me on a brief tour of her favorite section of downtown, which just happened to include the posh shopping street with Nine West and Tommy Hilfiger (maybe that part didn't really immerse me in the local culture.) This picture is of the train station we passed downtown. If you look towards the lower part of the picture, you'll see a man sitting at a stand with a sign that says "salgam." Salgam (pronounced SHAWL-gom) is a cold beverage made of beet juice. I think it includes vinegar because it tastes like pickled beets. It's unique to this part of the country. It reminds me of an expression I heard once. Someone was explaining that if you have children and move to a different culture, that your children will learn from your attitude towards the culture. So, if you see something that shocks you, instead of criticizing the new culture in front of your children, you should just say "Now that's different." I had a few of those moments this week, such as:

Live music blasting from a party a block away at 11 pm on a Wednesday night. I thought it was probably a wedding, since there are a lot of those with loud music here. My roommate said that when she walked by the party, all she saw were people sitting outside in lawn chairs. I took a video so you loyal readers could here what it sounded like from our balcony, but I'm not blogging-savvy enough to figure out how to post a video. If you think about what you would imagine the music for a belly-dancer would sound like if it included a guy singing his heart out to the dancer, you might get an idea of what it sounded like.

A man peddling vegetables in the street. As I walked to class, a truck full of produce stopped in the street, and the man got out of the truck and started yelling something that sounded like "Produce for sale! Fresh lettuce! Tomatoes! Cucumbers!" Then a lady walked out onto the balcony of her apartment and shouted to the man, "how much are the tomatoes?" I guess that's an effective way to sell tomatoes.

My friend's blunt honesty. I have heard before that your local friends in this culture will tell you, without blinking an eye, "you've gained some pounds since you arrived." Well, I haven't personally experienced this because I don't have a lot of local friends and I don't really gain weight. But, I was talking with my friend who's a cashier at the local market, and she said in Turkish, "you have a zit on your chest." I wouldn't exactly call us close friends either. Of course, I didn't really understand all the vocabulary, but with enough charades I figured out what she meant. That she really just wanted to point out that there was a large zit somewhere in the area between my neck and my shirt collar. Now that's different...

Not Constantinople

I was back in Istanbul again this week. Yay for paid vacations! Of course, this trip wasn't much of a vacation. They kept us busy with meetings and lectures. We learned about history, culture, learning language, etc. But it was nice just to be in the city and enjoy some of the amenities in our off time. Just the ferry ride across the Bosphorous every day to get to the meeting place was worth the trip. Oh, and the picture is of a mosque that gets blown up in the movie "Armageddon." Never seen the movie, but I think it's a lovely mosque.


The best part was seeing friends from other places. It made the world seem a little smaller. This picture is of UF and UCF students that came to Istanbul for an international intramural sports competition at one of the major universities. I love my new home, but it's still nice to see people (and flags!) from my real home. It was just really neat how it worked out for us to be in Istanbul at the same time. It was such an encouragement to me.

Kittens!

The kittens arrived yesterday! They're so cute! It seems like they only have 2 modes: sleep and play. And when they play, boy are they hyper. They chase each other around our living room and fight with each other for hours. Other times, they'll randomly attack a shoe, a wire, or the couch. They climb the furniture with their itty-bitty claws to get on the couch with us. Hopefully, we'll buy or build a scratching post before they're big enough to do any damage.


They are both girls. One we have named Boncuk (pronounced like Bone-Juke) which means "bead." It is a common cat name here, and the name of a cat in a story in our textbook. We are still trying to come up with a second name. We can think of lots of good boy names, but few good girl names. We want it to make sense to our friends. Neither my roommate nor I has ever really been responsible for a cat before, so we're still learning. But so far, so good!

Life in the Village

My neighborhood has the structure of a city, but the atmosphere of a village. This picture is taken on the main boulevard, somewhat close to our apartment. When you first arrive, you may see it and think "I'm in a bustling metropolis." We have 1.5 or 2 million people in our city after all. If you spend much time here, though, you quickly realize that many people still have the mentality of the village their family came from. Here's the corner store by our apartment.


True to village life, we met some of our neighbors this week. By "meet," I mean we exchanged plates of food and sat and drank tea in their apartment. Fortunately, my roommate knows much better Turkish than me because our neighbors so far don't really speak English. We've been given kisir (a kind of bulgar salad) and stuffed grape leaves. We've given chocolate chip cookies. The neighbors across the hall are 6 university girls. It was very exciting to hear about their lives. We hope to have them over for dinner soon. We met a lady who lives upstairs from us when she met my roommate on the elevator and invited us over for tea promptly. She then called her sisters who live nearby and a neighbor downstairs to come meet the foreigners. Her teenage daughter also came home from school while we were there. I guess there are sometimes advantages to looking strange. I typically prefer to blend in in life, but I'm learning that there are advantages to not being able to. It's nice to make friends this quickly.

I need to leave to go to dinner with a friend! But I'll leave you one more picture from our village--the local "goldfish stand." I guess I know where to buy entertainment for our kitten we'll be getting soon!