Day Twenty-Two: Smoke on the Water

Hello, again!  We're halfway through with the seminar, which means I'm a little less than a third of the way into my time in Turkey, and I'm loving every minute of it (except the last Turkish quiz we took online, which counted my answers wrong because I said "do not" instead of "don't").  Yesterday was an amazing day.  Mujgan (pronounced Moojg-yan), on of the Turkish students in our class, arranged for a shuttle to take us about a forty-five minute drive up the Bosporus to a nice restaurant right on the water for brunch.  I found a number of excellent vegetarian options, including borek, and we all sat there eating for what seemed like a good two hours.  After that, the bus took us to nearby Koc University (pronounced "coach"-it should be spelled with a Turkish letter that I don't know how to make using my keyboard), Mujgan's school, a seemingly brand-new series of beautiful, Stanford-esque buildings spread out over an otherwise deserted area of forest overlooking the Black Sea.  I say Stanford-esque because the architecture is what Stanford's looked like in it brochures and because the area looked a lot like Northern California.  Or, at least, what Northern California looks like in its brochures.

Once there, we were able to make use of Koc's swimming pool, on the condition that we wore swimming caps.  After lounging around for a while, some of us went to play soccer on a nearby turf field, hoping to burn off at least some of the weight we'd gained at brunch.  We may have burned off a few calories, but the more noticeable burns ended up being on our feet.  Turns out that stuff gets very hot in the summer, which I guess makes sense.  I was able to borrow sandals from Thomas, which were not ideal for soccer but worked out fine considering I had very little soccer ability to be hindered by improper footwear in the first place.  Alfonso was less lucky.  I'm not sure why, but he played the entire time, almost an hour, without shoes.  It was painful to look at how red his feet were afterwords.

As our feet recovered, we packed up and moved on to Solar Beach, where they were having an annual music festival called Mono.  The festival took place in a series of stages on a hill overlooking the Black Sea, making for quite possibly the best venue ever.  I saw bands like Gogol Bordello, Oh Land, Metric, Com Truise, and other weird names like that, most of which I'd never heard of but all of which were very fun to watch.  The atmosphere was great, and once the sun went down on Solar Beach the gigantic cargo ships off the coast turned into a series of Christmas lights stretched out along the horizon.  It's incredible to me that there can be that many ships waiting to get through the Bosporus at a given time.  What's even more incredible is that it was just like that the last time I was on Turkey's Black Sea coast, four years ago, and I doubt that the stream of ships has let up this whole time.

Speaking of things that never stop, it seems as if everyone in Turkey smokes.  I would say that anyway, but the point was really driven home (and by "home" I mean my lungs) at the festival yesterday.  After about twenty minutes in the crowd, I realized that I had to crane my neck up in order to get a breath that actually seemed to have some oxygen in it-everything below that level was just tobacco smoke.  Well, maybe not just tobacco, but definitely just smoke.  At the Oh Land concert I met a very nice Turkish guy who, it turned out, had graduated from Kadir Has and had visited Virginia.  He asked if I had cigarettes, and when I said no he asked if I was actually from Virginia.  Philip Morris is doing great here-they don't have to hide behind the names of other tobacco brands or the "Altria Corporation," and seems that the Turks are collectively ignoring the gross pictures of cancer on their cigarette boxes.  Getting on the bus the other night, we saw a kid who couldn't have been older than 10 smoking.  As my friends and I discussed how ridiculous this was, he handed his cigarette off to a kid who couldn't have been older than 7, who was smoking like he knew how to do it.  I know it's a different culture, but I can't say I'll miss having smoke everywhere when I leave.  That might be the only thing I miss, really.  Well, that and the quizzes.  Thanks for reading!  Happy July from Istanbul!