Hi, everybody! I'm still alive, if you were wondering, and still loving Istanbul. I haven't written for a while, mostly because I've exchanged the "doing something new and exciting every day" format of our class for the "do the same thing every day" plan more commonly associated with workplaces and I don't know how interested you would be in a play-by-play. I'm at the closest thing to a real job I've ever had, and so far I'm having a pretty good time. My coworkers are all very nice, and I'm learning how a Turkish office works. Basically you come in sometime within an hour of when you're supposed to, you go to lunch promptly at noon, and you drink so much tea that you need to start brushing with whiteout (disclaimer: I have not started brushing with whiteout, nor would I recommend that anyone reading this do so). Seriously though, the job of Guy Who Brings Everyone Tea is so important here that the ICI employs two of them. The result is that I drink 3-5 cups of tea a day. They're serious about their tea here. I've also learned from Mehmet, the Guy Who Brings Everyone Tea, that they're very serious about soccer. He asked if I knew about Fenerbahçe, one of Istanbul's popular teams, and when I said something along the lines of "Yes, and I've heard of Galatasaray" he laughed and turned away from me with a dismissive wave of his hand. I'm learning, though; he taught me how to say "Fenerbahçe is the greatest!" (the title of this post) and taught me their colors by pointing to my blue shirt and the neon-yellow lemonade on his tray. Fun fact: then I spilled lemonade on my pants. It wasn't too noticeable, but I hope it was enough to convince him I loved Fenerbahçe enough to wear their colors to work. At any rate, I think he's forgiven me for mentioning Galatasaray.
My only assignment thus far is to prepare a presentation on something related to the environment. After a couple days of sitting at my computer and looking for possible topics, I've now moved to phase two, which is sitting at my computer and looking into ecolabelling. Ecolabelling is basically when a government or NGO or something of that nature (like the Chamber of Industry!) sets a certain standard for environmental friendliness for companies. If the companies or, more commonly, individual products, pass the test, the companies then receive a label that they can put on their product(s) in order to boast that they are environmentally friendly, which leads to an increase in sales to people like my mother. I'm looking into how the ICI's ecolabelling program can be expanded and trying to think of ways that the government could help make it even better, maybe by providing tax breaks to companies that win the label or giving them "Get out of jail free!" cards or something like that. If you have any ideas on that subject, let me know. The most challenging part of the job so far (other than not knowing Turkish) is probably the stairs. The ICI building consists of two buildings (both of which, I think, used to be hotels) that have been fused into one mega-chamber. While I can get to my office fine, the fact that this building was once two buildings means that there are two sets of elevators and two stairways, each of which are very close to each other, although they are never quite level with one another. One set of stairs goes all the way to the entrance hall, while the other comes out somewhere around there, I don't really know. It's the closest I've come in real life to the staircases that "like to change" in Harry Potter. No sky-imitating ceilings, though. At least not as far as I can tell.
I won't try to describe the neighborhoods we're working and living in without he benefit of pictures, which I promise I will take one day, so for now I'll just say that they're both very nice. The walk uphill to Istiklal every morning is a great workout, and Katie, Jill, and I are confident that we will have some of the best calf muscles on campus when we get back. (Although probably not better than Don Cabral '12, who's currently at some sort of sports thing in London.) Our walk to work takes about ten minutes, which is not bad at all, and as we pass between the TRT television station and the Pera Palace Hotel we get a brief view of the Golden Horn, which is good because I've promised myself that I will see some body of water every day that I'm here, while I still can. In fact, from my office I can actually see right across the Golden Horn. The view of the water is blocked by some apartment buildings when I'm sitting at my desk, but I look right across it to the Beyazid Tower, which is possibly the tallest structure in Fatih, built at some point during the Ottoman period in order to spot fires. Basically a primitive smoke alarm, this tower was very important given that Istanbullus have a tendency to build things out of wood and then expose them to extreme heat (not unlike the COH). If I stand up from my desk, I can see right down to the Ataturk Bridge, which crosses the Golden Horn and is only about a block from Kadir Has. Since KHas is on the waterfront, I can plainly see the entire campus where we studied for six weeks, and if I look hard enough I can make out the tiny red rectangle of our old Compound, wedged between some huge housing building and what I only learned two weeks ago was a tomb. I'm actually pretty glad I only learned we were living next to a tomb a few days before we moved out.
Living in the apartment has been great. The fans do away with the worst of the heat and if I weren't being careful not to jinx it I would tell you that a certain service that rhymes with "pinternet" has been working much better lately. But I won't do that. I've decided that having a view of the street and a bit of a breeze is not worth packing up my stuff, which only took a few days to get strewn all over the floor of my room, and moving it across the hall, so I'm going to stay in my room and let Katie and Jill split their time in the big room. They seemed fine with that.
We spent a good chunk of last weekend in the Kadir Has library, working on our papers for the Global Sem, which are due at the end of the week. It wasn't the most exciting weekend, but we did go see the new Batman movie, which was totally awesome. When we walked into the theater and the previews were in Turkish I got worried, but the movie was in English with Turkish subtitles, so I (thankfully) didn't have to try new things.
Although the living situation is going really well, I'm sad that we can't operate our TV because I really want to watch the Olympics. They don't seem to have many sports bars around here, but we were resourceful and went to the bar in one of the hotels near the ICI to watch Phelps and Lochte swim on Saturday night. I wish I could do the same tomorrow for fencing, because Soren Thompson '05 is competing in his second Olympics and I interviewed him about it a few months ago. Mom, dad-any chance you could record that?
I'll have more eventually (because I know hearing about my walk to work has been so riveting that you're all dying for more) and I promise I'll put up some pictures soon, because this area really is very beautiful, but that's it for now. Thanks for reading!
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