Heyecanli!

So as our last days in this city are winding down, we’re still managing to rock pretty hard. I just read the news about the UK terror thing, so that apparently means I won’t be buying any raki to bring home, and Judd won’t be getting the rose kolonya that I bought him like six weeks ago. Damn. Well, I think I’ll let you know what we’ve been up to since Sunday (fun!).

Monday night we hit up Taksim again with Doruk, Michelle’s Turkish friend. We ended up eating at Ara Cafe for…what is it now, the fifteen thousandth time? It’s always delicious, of course. Our purpose that night was to help Michelle work on her cookbook. I won’t go into the details, but I will say that I want to see the finished product. I saw a Mevlevi in my coffee, and snapped a photo, which I will eventually post, with Michelle’s permission. Her camera is amazing. It’s a cheap digital, but the photos look to same as a really trashy old Soviet camera that allows light to leak in. Some of the coolest pictures I’ve seen here have been taken by that camera. After dinner we headed to a record store to try and find the Wet Hot American Summer soundtrack, but it totally yoktu. We weren’t defeated, and instead indulged in some touristy craft shopping in a narrow shop full of Spaniards and nazar (evil eyes). I think the best part of the night (aside from waiting 40 minutes for a bus that I found out wasn’t going to come) was this:

Doruk: “There are so many Arabs here!”
Me: “[Laughing, knowing what was coming next.] What’s wrong with Arabs?”
Doruk: “I hate them! They are all dirty!”

That’s not the first time a Turkish friend of a friend has expressed a deep-seated hatred for Arabs. I think the Turks are jealous of the Arabs’ glorious past in the maths and sciences. But really, they have no reason to be jealous, because Atatürk discovered the moon. And invented baseball.

Tuesday was largely a relaxing evening of the “sit and chill” variety. I had two essays to write, and after a delicious dinner with Kent, Dane, and Michelle at Popular Restaurant, I managed to write maybe 400 words in about 3 hours. This is quite impressive, given the fact that today, on my final, I wrote 200+ in 20 minutes. I guess I’m better under pressure, or maybe when I don’t have a bunch of really awesome, fun people to dick around with. I do seem to recall taking a power nap, and having Michelle try and convince me to get out of bed. I tried the power nap strategy again last night while studying for my final, and it really didn’t work too well.

Wednesday was a blast, actually. After our classes ended, we were sitting outside waiting for Michelle, and then Michelle started doing cartwheels. Apparently she was an Olympic silver medalist in gymnastics in 1996. I wasn’t really following the Olympics that year, so I was pretty surprised. I joined her on the grass and did some aikido rolls, which are pretty uncomfortable when you roll over a patch of Turkish soil that’s recently been dug up to lay some pipe. Dane then decided to teach us Irish stepdancing, and so now I can make a fool of myself trying to leap. My friends are so talented! I think we’re all going to get married and have a hippie commune tent in the woods of Yildiz Park here in Istanbul. If you can get over here, you’re welcome to join us. It’ll be pretty crowded. We decided to try going to Michelle’s gradeschool again, and this time we were allowed in. It was pretty cool, the woman in charge spoke English, of course, and she had the security guard take us on a tour of the campus, which was much larger than it looked from the street. Michelle didn’t remember most of the stuff, because half the lot had been sold and a bunch of new buildings built since she went here back in the early 90s. I asked the guy how old the “indoor recess” building was (you have no idea how excited I was when I realized what the guard was explaining to me in Turkish, seriously. Indoor recess? It has rained twice this summer. Once was earlier this week, and it hailed!!) and he said it was 3 years old. It still had the new wooden floor smell, though. I guess the housekeeping staff takes good care of the place, or the Trunchbull forces the kids to. Either way, well done!

We left and tried to get down to Bebek because we wanted to go BACK to Asia to get some more yogurt. We ended up coming through Bogaziçi’s backdoor to campus after wanding the backstreets near the castle and being pursued by the worst watchdogs ever. They seriously walked a quarter of a mile with us up some steps and hills and things, probably mocking the fact that we don’t walk on all fours. Or they wanted to devour some kittens, which they could have done easily, because we saw some cute ones as soon as we got back to campus. After a rest on the benches overlooking the Bosphorus we headed down the stairs to the Bebek gate, and walked to the pier. The whole area smelled like waffles for a minute, and I have to admit, I got a little excited. We waited at the pier, in the shade, for about a half an hour, listening to this really stupid Turkish woman speak very loudly while asking the guy in charge when the boats were coming. She then proceeded to talk on the cell phone like any old person does in America: she screamed.

The boat reeked of diesel fumes because it runs on diesel. Stupid. The ride seemed a lot shorter the second time, and we got there in no time. The same guy was there feeding the pigeons (this is where I’ll separate the newbies from the longtime readers) and nobody pulled out their camera like last time. We sat down and each of us got some Kanlica yogurt. I went for the honeyed kind again (balli) and Michelle and Dane got the powdered sugar, which to me is ridiculous, because I can just eat the honey off the top of mine and add sugar afterward, which I did like a pro. I had a list of stuff to do before leaving, and I killed like half of it in Kanlica: I had apple tea, Apricot nectar, and got some gifts. They had some really cool cigarette lighters, but given today’s news, I’m glad I didn’t buy any. One of them was a horsedrawn chariot and you lit the flame by pressing the horse’s leg. Awesome. We thought the next boat came at 6:30, but I asked the pier worker, and it turns out his Turkish is simply unintelligible. I got “yediyi on geçe” out of a whole paragraph that he said, but fortunately that’s all I needed. Turns out the next boat to Europe came at 7:10. We sat around and Michelle started to depress us by pointing out all of the things we’d miss. She’s absolutely right, but I don’t want to think about it right now, because I’ll probably just end up crying about it some other time, so what’s the point in crying twice? Sorry if that last bit was a bit too emotional for you, but this seriously has been the best summer of my entire life, and will probably stay that way (but that’s not to say I won’t try to make the others awesome).

The boat that did come took us directly across the Bosphorus, and then the captain said “Last stop,” at which point we switched into “fuck it, it’s an adventure” mode again and hopped off the boat. I am a big fan of “fuck it, it’s an adventure,” and hope to think this way more frequently back home, and especially in Berlin (inşallah). Michelle hailed a cab right away and we ended up back on campus (from North of the castle) in maybe 10 minutes and it only cost us 4.60 YTL, which was cheaper than it would have been had we gotten off in Bebek. After the amazement wore off, we settled down to study. Dane and I eventually went and got dinner together at Ati cafe, the cheeseburger menü place. It was surprisingly unawkward, given that we usually don’t hang out together without Michelle. Afterwards, we stopped by Antep Sofrasi to get Michelle a lahmacun to-go, and I bought Dünyayi Kuturan Adam, or The Man Who Saved the World. It’s post-coup Turkey’s response to Star Wars, and actually steals clips from it and uses them in the movie, along with the music from Indiana Jones. It was filmed in Cappadochia. I look forward to showing it to all of you. I went to bed early and got up early to cram some more. The exam was pretty tough, especially the vocab. But who knows how I did.

Today we had some watermelon after our exam, and then my friend Brad sang his “Grammar” song for everyone (a big crowd). It was about our grammar classes, and Mine Hanim and Sumru Hanim, our teachers. At one point he mentioned “Mine Hanim on top of that table…” and I about shit my pants laughing. Brad’s a Mormon, too! They can have awesome senses of humor! He can also play Rage Against the Machine’s entire catalog on his acoustic. That gets an A+ from me. Afterwards a bunch of us went to this cafe that Kent discovered yesterday, and we regretted it because it was so awesome we wished we’d known about it all summer. It was air conditioned, cheap, had frosties, and big TVs. It was hidden on the third floor of a building we pass every day. Man, it was good. I had gözleme, which is essentially a Turkish quesadilla. Tasty as shit. We caught some cabs down to Arnavutköy and met at the ARIT offices for our exit interviews with Sylvia Hanim. Michelle, Dane, Tugçe, Peter, and I waited almost 3 hours to get interviewed, but it was okay because we just chatted the whole time about Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, falan. I realized during my interview that I’ve actually learned a ton of Turkish, and I can’t wait to use it again when I get back to school. We walked to Bebek from Aranvutköy and took a cab up the hill. Turns out our driver has been trying to learn English from the passengers he picks up, so when Tugçe found this out, we all chatted with him in English. It was amazing, he knew so much! He was able to actually have a conversation without ever having taken class. Awesome. So yeah, now we’re just prepping for a long night of karaoke in Taksim, and then we have another test tomorrow. We’re hopefully going to hit up Miniaturk, the children’s attraction that features Turkey in miniature. See you all soon.