My first visitor!

Dear Everybody,

I'm sorry that I have neglected you for the past two weeks. I'm sure you've been dying to hear what I have been doing since my last post, which was just after Thanksgiving. So I concede that it has been a while, but as I believe I mentioned previously, but I am in fact IN SCHOOL. I have had roughly a month of "midterms", averaging roughly one paper and one "midterm exam" per week for the past several weeks. Why do I put quotation marks around "midterms"? Because they can't possibly be midterms if they are in the last quarter of the semester, right? Yet somehow they are still justified, apparently. I just love taking five classes! What I'm most excited about finals, which start in less than a month. And my neuroscience class is really rocking the boat. Hard. Good thing these grades don't translate to my GPA back at Williams!

So enough of that silly class stuff. The highlight of my past two weeks was hosting my first

visitor, Sara Wallace. I was honored to show off my territory to one of my best friends, who will now hopefully be able to vouch for the fact that Istanbul is the coolest city in the world. Luckily for her, she had already been to Istanbul once before. We therefore did not go to the touristy region of Sultanahmet, which is where you find the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and lots of pushy Turkish men. She wanted to see what I like to do with my time on weekends, and I tried to give her the right idea. Highlights from our weekend together include, but are not limited to:

1) Enjoying a sea bass dinner together in the classy Galata region of Istanbul, and enjoying the Galata tower all lit up at night.

2) Going to Ortaköy and enjoying kumpir, which is essentially a super-stuffed baked potato, by the waterfront. Ortaköy has tons and tons of kumpir vendors. It's really the thing to get there. As we ate our kumpir, we watched as the waves from the Bosphorus splashed up onto the sidewalk, scattering jellyfish all over the pavement. Some little boys decided to collect them all in a plastic bag, which is a difficult task. It's not that they sting-- it's that they fall apart. There were little pieces of jellyfish adorning the sidewalk up and down the waterfront.

3) Rowing together in a pair (2 person boat, 1 oar each for you non-rowers out there) on

Saturday morning. It was especially interesting because we are both starboards. And my oar broke when we were in the middle of the lake. Try getting anywhere in a pair with one functional oar. You really can't. I'll leave it up to your imagination as to how we got out of that one. Here we are, back on dry land after practice!

3) Hopping on a ferry over to the Asian side of the city and satisfying our shopping craving. We spent most of Saturday night in Kadıköy, which probably the most cosmopolitan area on the Asian side. After checking out some clothing stores, wandered around the food markets, had a delicious kebap dinner, and stuffed our faces at Mado, a restaurant chain that specializes in phenomenal desserts. I introduced Sara to salep, which is a hot, creamy, sweet drink that is some combination of milk, sugar, and spices. The picture at right shows Sara just moments after I told her to watch her step. She is straddling a gutter that is carrying a stream of fish blood and guts from the fish market uphill.

Like I said, this is a pretty limited list. We really did do a lot of stuff. Sara got to meet my friends, go to rowing practice, and see the Bogazici University campus, so now she basically knows as much about Istanbul as I do! Any questions? Ask her.