Day Fifty-Nine: Ömer's Odyssey

Merhaba!  I'm back in the office after a relaxing weekend.  And after Monday, I guess, since today's Tuesday.
First, a brief summary of the weekend's activities.  Müjgan had to cancel the brunch/pool thing because of inclement weather.  Although the weather in the main part of the city wasn't bad, she assured us that if there was rain in the forecast it would rain at Koç since the university's much closer to the Black Sea and apparently that means more rain.  I had been looking forward to the brunch as much as the swimming, but I guess we couldn't do one without the other.  So it came to pass that we decided to head in the opposite direction, to the Prince's Islands in the Sea of Marmara.  I feel like that sounds like something from Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, but I assure you, the Prince's Islands are very real and conveniently located, just a fifteen-minute ferry ride from Kabataş,which is near the Galata Tower..  We went to Burgazada, an island that Wikipedia just told me was named after a fort built by Demetrius I of Macedon, something I wish I had known when I was there.  I thought it was just named that because it was fun to say with an Italian accent.  Anywho, Katie knew Burgazada because she's been practicing and playing water polo every now and then with a club team on the island, so we got to go to a private club on a pier stretching out into the sea, facing the island we went to on the Fourth of July.  They had a nice pool, where Katie played water polo while Jill and I lounged and tried to understand water polo, as well as several very nice, roped-off areas of the sea for us to swim in.  We swam, read, walked around the town, and had dinner.  It was all very relaxing, and it looked like this:

Tell me that's not scenic.

Saturday night was mostly spent watching the Olympics.  And I Skyped with some of my Princeton friends, which was great because they're the people I've gone the longest without seeing.

The next day, we slept late and went to Bebek for brunch.  We had a great brunch at a very good, very hip restaurant where parents with tattoos brought their children to mingle with dogs.  Seriously, there was literally a dog.  Just chilling while everyone was eating.  Everyone was cool with it.  I think it belonged to one of the families eating there, although there are so many dogs around you can never really tell.  But I assume someone would have said something if it were just a random dog.  After that, we decided to take a nice stroll up to my old stomping grounds, Boğaziçi University.  Unfortunately, since I hadn't stomped around there in four years, what I thought was a shortcut to the campus turned out to be a long, steep road that wound progressively further and further away from Boğaziçi, so after about ten minutes of climbing the others suggested that we turn around.  It was for the best.  We walked along the Bosporus for a while before taking a bus back to the apartment.  When I had recovered from that walking, I decided to do some more, so I headed over to Istanbul Modern, a modern art museum I had visited briefly with some people from the seminar and promised myself I would go back to before I left.  They have a bunch of really cool paintings of Istanbul, as well as an awesome gallery of photographs of the city in 1950, which were really cool to see because parts of the city looked almost exactly the same back then and some parts were barren compared to what they are now.  That happens when the population goes up by about 10,000,000 in thirty or so years.    Istanbul Modern is located on the Bosporus very close to where it meets the Golden Horn, so you know what that means... it's time for an way more pictures of boats than you wanted to see!

 Not that many ships, right?

 Ok, so a few ships.

 Decent amount.

 My God, now there are too many!

 They're heading straight for each other!

Nah, but they didn't crash.

 ferries headed toward the Prince's Islands

 ferries on the Golden Horn approaching the Bosporus

 Did I mention I like these boats?  (Also, in the background you can see the Hagia Sophia on the left and the Blue Mosque on the right)

This is now my cover photo on Facebook.  That's Topkapı Palace on the hill.

Ok, unless something major happens I can safely say that's the last time I'll inundate you with pictures of boats.

So after a lovely weekend of hill-walking and ship-watching, I'm back at work.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the two guys who work with me.  Our supervisor is here, but Mürşat is out of the office for two days and Ömer is on vacation with his wife.  He's gone for two weeks, and I'm gone in two weeks, so unfortunately I'll have no one with whom to talk about Seinfeld and the Olympics with for the rest of the internship.  In fact, I might not have anyone to talk English with.  My other coworkers are decent at English, especially Mürşat, but it can take them a while to express themselves sometimes.  And of course I'm still awful at Turkish, so things will be quieting down a bit in Ömer's absence.  That might be for the best, since I have a presentation to do, but still.  Yesterday it was just me and my supervisor, so the AC was off most of the time, although she did turn it on at one point in the afternoon, which was a pleasant surprise.  Today, I turned it on with the remote from Jill's office because I couldn't find our remote, so now we're in this weird limbo where the AC is on but it isn't very cold and the door is open but the windows aren't.  I would discuss this with my supervisor, but between the language barrier and my fear that she'll just turn off the AC entirely I've decided it's better to just see how this plays out.  Riveting stuff, I know.  Thanks for reading!  If you're in Richmond, I look forward to seeing you in under two weeks!  It's weird how short two weeks seems now that I've been gone for more than eight.  It feels more like it's two days until I'll be getting on the plane to JFK.