Traffic, Kittens, and Alcohol

Hey everyone!
I know you have been checking this blog religiously, even hourly, so I apologize for the anguish surely caused by my failure to post yesterday. A lot has gone on since my last post, as evidenced by the title (don't worry, not all those things happened at the same time).
So yesterday's big event was a scavenger hunt! Professor Shields hid 15 items (a marble, a string, an orange, etc.) around Istanbul and we had to go find them!! Actually, we had to find Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, and lots of other cool things. Like a place in Asia to eat ice cream:

Turkish soft serve, dondurma, is so much better than American soft serve (why Turkey moment of the day)

We had to go to Asia AND Europe (still not old), and take basically every mode of transportation known to man to find all the places. My group, the Dream Team, was myself, Edward, and Amanda. We won the search, obviously.

After four hours of searching, the Dream Team locates the Blue Mosque, whose minarets are only visible in 95% of the city

After walking approximately 85,000 miles, we were all treated to a delicious feast at Prof. Shields' flat. I wish I had taken a picture of the strawberries, because I've never seen huger things before in my life. Pretty much all produce is delicious here, by the way. Oh yeah, I also figured out how to do black and white on my camera, so here are yet more views from our terrace:


We got back to our flat at about 9 or so, the time we had arranged to meet some Turkish friends of ours. Yep, five days into this trip, and we already have Turkish friends. A couple days ago, up on the terrace, Amanda and I met Murat, who lives a floor or two beneath us (we're still not sure). We also met his friends, Uğur and Yucel; the three of them are students at film school here. It took us about an hour, but we arranged to meet up with them on Tuesday on our terrace for a parti Wednesday night. (Sidenote: alcohol is much more expensive in Turkey than in the US; the conservative AK Party in power for a few years now has raised taxes on alcohol and made it much harder for bars to serve it). The highlight of the night was rakı (yeah, no dot on top of that i- it makes an 'uh' sound), the Turkish national liquor. It's mixed with water, and turns milky white. Observe:


It's anise flavored, and it tastes like black licorice, so only about two of us were able to drink it steadily. I had a good two sips, and couldn't do any more. Still, we all had a great time.

Emily, Amanda, Yucel, Murat (who has a fear of smiling in pictures), Uğur, and David

Şerefe!

We gave each other different names, them in American, us in Turkish. Left to right: Eugene, George (he was not happy about being called George Bush the rest of the night), Çamil, Brad (I told you, the dude does not want to smile), Davut, and Erol.

We went to Istiklal Caddesi later that night with them, to see what goes on in Istanbul at 2 on a Thursday morning. Turns out, not much. One funny thing did happen: on the way back, Uğur gave me his puşi, a black and white scarf that you wear around your neck- it's the same thing Yasser Arafat wore on his head. Anyways, we stopped to get some döner on the way back, and the guy asked me if I was from Diyarbakır, which is kind of like asking me, when I lived in California, if I was from Compton- Diyarbakır is a rough Kurdish city in far eastern Turkey. Evidently I have gotten reallllly tan over the past couple days.

Today we had class in an art school 2 blocks from Hagia Sophia, and we talked about Ottoman history (my least favorite topic of conversation ever). Walking out, we stumbled upon baskets, literally, of kittens. Don't tell Peaches, but I did kind of freak out.


Can you blame me? The other thing I wanted to talk about today was traffic here. Maybe it's not that different from other major cities, but it is absolutely nuts. It still cracks me up how there are NO rules whatsoever. Cars, people, buses, bikes, and motorcycles go wherever they want without regard for lanes, curbs, other humans, or their personal safety. At lunch, it looked like this for about a second:
Most of the time it looks like this:
Other note- every time someone (waiters, people on the street, etc.) tells us the population of Istanbul, it goes up! The first we heard was 11 million, then 13, then 15; the highest bid is currently 18 million people. Hope all is well back in the states, thanks again for reading, and I'll talk to you soon.