Preparations for Spring Break

Hey! So in about 30 minutes from now, I leave for my Spring Break trip. I think that most of the readers of this blog in the United States are actually getting out of school soon, so it's probably weird to know that I still have several weeks left!

Anyway, originally, my friend Brian and I were going to go to some different cities on the west coast of Turkey. However, at the last minute, we combined our trip with another trip that a group of our friends was planning, and now the trip includes places both in east and west Turkey.

We'll be gone from today (Saturday) to next Saturday - and I'll update you about it when I get back. Take care everyone.

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Sultanahmet Camii (Blue Mosque)

Hey everyone, here is another set of pictures that I've taken here in Turkey. This time, they're of the Sultanahmet Camii in Istanbul - here is a short description, adapted from a Wikipedia article:

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Turkish: Sultanahmet Camii) is a historical mosque in Istanbul, the largest city in Turkey. The mosque is one of several mosques known as the Blue Mosque for the blue tiles adorning the walls of its interior. It was built between 1609 and 1616, during the rule of Ahmed I. Like many other mosques, it also comprises a tomb of the founder, a madrasah and a hospice. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque has become one of the greatest tourist attractions of Istanbul.

You can read more about it here. And now, here are some pictures that I took while I was there:




You can see the full gallery here.

Blue Mosque is actually one of the places that my friends and I visited on the same day that we saw Hagia Sophia... so it's probably been nearly two months since I took these pictures. I'm still waaaaay behind in sorting through the pictures I've taken, but I'll get through them all eventually!

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General Update

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I updated this, but I want to let you all know what’s going on with me these days. In the past several weeks, things have gotten busy for me, but I’ve been having a great time. A lot of stuff has been going on, and I could probably write a whole novel about it by now. But instead of writing all of that, I'll just give you a summary:

School

One reason that things have gotten a lot busier for me lately has been the increase in school-work. Towards the beginning of the semester, the workload for all of my courses was pretty light. However, lately, the homework assignments have taken longer to do, more projects have been assigned, and thus, I’ve had to spend more hours per week doing work. However, I’m probably still spending less time overall on school work than I have in the past for Wash U classes, mostly because I’m taking fewer classes here.

This week is probably the busiest week for me yet. Here are the things that I have going on:

• I had an exam for one of my engineering classes (Mass Transfer Operations) on Wednesday, which went somewhere between OK and well.
• I have an exam for another engineering class (Engineering Materials) coming up tonight (Thursday) at 6:00 PM.
• I have a large project for another engineering class (Structure, Function, and Simulation of Biopolymers) due on Friday. Luckily, I completed most of the work for this several weeks ago.

Here are the things that are due next week, which I also have to be working on right now:

• A 5-page paper for my Philosophy of Science class due on Monday, which counts for a large chunk of the grade because it is one of the two assigned papers for the entire class
• Another large project for Mass Transfer Operations, which is due next Friday, and which my group and I have already spent about 8 hours working on

However, the week after next week is our Spring Break!

Traveling

For about half or more of the weekends since I’ve been here, I’ve gone on trips with other exchange students to various parts of Turkey. One trip was to Cappadocia, a place in central Turkey, which you can find out more about here. Another was to Edirne, a place in northwest Turkey, which you can find out more about here.

One thing I have noticed is that people are more curious about my race outside of Istanbul. In Istanbul, people will ask me where I am from sometimes, but mostly, they just treat me like everyone else. However, outside of Istanbul, I get a lot of people coming up to me. Sometimes they just want to meet me, and other times, crazier things happen. For instance, there was this old gypsy woman in Edirne that came up to me and touched my face and kept saying “Çok güzel” (which means “very nice!”) and wanted to dance with me and also, apparently asked me to take her home with me. You kinda had to be there to understand it… but it was the source of many laughs between me and the other exchange students, because we saw her about five times throughout the day as we were walking around.

Here is a picture of us together:

During my trip to Cappodocia, there was one night where we went to this place where there was a belly-dancer. Long story short, I somehow ended up belly-dancing in front of around 100-200 exchange students and native Turks (you can find pictures, and maybe eventually videos, on Facebook). That was surely exciting!

There will no doubt be more weekend-trips in the future. I will also be going to some other places in western Turkey for my Spring Break. I’ve been taking pictures, but I haven’t been able to sort through all of them yet. Hopefully I will get them up here one day!

Language

I’ve still been putting a lot of effort into learning the Turkish language, and you can read about my “strategy” for doing this in the previous post entitled “Language Instruction.” I’ve still been doing most of the things outlined in that post. However, I’ve been using a different textbook from the one that I talked about there.

I think that I’ve been learning very quickly, and I’m at the point where I can understand a lot of written Turkish, and write some very simple Turkish sentences. However, I’m not really at the point where I can understand too much spoken Turkish, or speak very fluently. This is something I will be working on.

I’ve found that I can understand Turkish grammar pretty well by now, but that I lack vocabulary. So I picked up a copy of Harry Potter ve Ölüm Yadigârları (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) and have started to read it. Needless to say, it is very difficult (I've had the book for a couple of weeks and am only on page 27). However, I’ve read the book twice in English, and if I have a Turkish-English dictionary, I can stumble through almost all of the sentences in the Turkish version. Reading this is helping a lot with both vocabulary and grammar – my ultimate goal is to finish the book by the end of the semester. It is a huge challenge, but I’m setting the bar high for myself!

In my efforts to learn Turkish, I have started to think about language and communication in a different way. Before, it always seemed like English was the only "right" or "natural" language, and that English was the best language to express complicated thoughts in. Of course, it seemed this way to me because English is my first language, and I haven't really learned how to express myself fully and completely in any other languages (except for Spanish, perhaps). But now I'm seeing that other languages are just different, and not necessarily "superior" or "inferior" overall, as far as their ability to express things.

Also, the main way that I'm learning Turkish is by learning the grammatical "rules" and how to apply them (and the same was the case for Spanish). I've always thought of foreign languages in terms of these "rules," but I've never thought about English in this way. In English, if I want to say something, I just say it, and usually don't think about the grammatical rules that went into producing my sentence. But more and more, as I start dissecting foreign languages in terms of these grammatical rules, I have been doing the same to English. This has changed the way that I see English; while before, it was purely a naturally flowing language, I now see that it is fundamentally built upon rules, just as other languages are.

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So, I have bought my plane ticket to fly back home on June 3^rd, which means that I have about a month and a half left here. I will try to make the most of it that I can!

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