The last few days at Boğazici

My summer program is done! I took my final exam and my final oral placement test today, and tomorrow will take the final written placement test and move out of the dorms. The next few weeks are going to be a little interesting, as I don't really have housing yet, but inşallah everything will work out nicely: I'm heading on a bit of a vacation down to Antakya tomorrow night, via Ankara, so I'll be off gallivanting in southern Turkey for a bit before returning to Istanbul, grabbing my luggage, and moving into ARIT's guesthouse in Ankara while I apartment-hunt. Tentatively, I'll be in Ankara next week.
Last weekend was pretty great. Since almost everyone else in the summer program is leaving, everyone's been keen to get some last shopping and sightseeing in. On Saturday I headed sown to Sultanahmet with Abby, to check out a palace. We first grabbed lunch at a restaurant abutting the Aya Sofia, and impressed the waitstaff with our mad Turkish skillz. That's the nice part about the touristy areas of town, that they're so amazed by any amount of Turkish proficiency, as almost all the yabancı tourists speak not a word of Turkish. Anyways, we finished up our lunch and headed over to Topkapı, where we waited in an epicly long line only to find out that they wouldn't accept our student ID cards for the student discount, and that the regular cost of admission came out to 35 YTL each. As that's ridiculous, we decided to not see Topkapı and instead headed down Eminönü through this really gorgeous park to the Galata Bridge, which we took over to Kabataş, and from there walked over to Dolmabahçe Sarayı (Palace). It was closed by the time we got there, but their clock-tower cafe was open, and was serving slushy iced beverages (a rarity in Turkey), so we grabbed a Bosphorous-side table and enjoyed our slushies.
On Sunday, Abby and I returned to Dolmabahçe Sarayı, and after waiting in another epic line (they shut down the ticket booths because the palace reached its maximum capacity at one point) got our 2 YTL students tickets. Dolmabahçe Sarayı is gorgeous; its courtyards and gardens were just beautiful, as were the rooms and halls of the Selamlık and Harem. I generally just got photos of the gardens, as I didn't buy a camera ticket, but I did get a photo of the room where Ataturk died-- Ataturk lived in Dolmabahce for his final years, and had his own suite of rooms in the Harem. His bedspread was a giant Turkish flag representation. It was pretty darn neat. The palace itself was a glory of conspicuous consumption: everything that could be decorated, was decorated, and the furnishings were all red plush, or gilded, or crystal. The ceilings were all gilded and painted with cringeworthy floral motifs. The main palace had a 4.5 ton Waterford crystal chandelier in the hall used for official government business. It was a wonderful celebration of gaudy excess. I loved it.
After Dolmabahçe, I headed back to Superdorm before meeting most of my class to head to one of our professor's house. Betül (our professor) and her rommate and neighbor had made all kinds of Turkish food, and we came equipped with ingredients for a wide variety of American foods, so it was a pretty amazing night of cooking, dinner, and talking. We had these amazing lentil,parsley things wrapped in lettuce leaves, and macaroni salad Turkish-style (no eggs, made with yogurt instead of mayo), eggplant salad, and this sweet wheat-type dish that is hard to describe but kind of like a crumb crust. We students made brownies, a nectarine pie, a boiled peach dish, and this amazing mushroom-garlic-onion dish. It was a really great night; Betül is just adorable, as are her friends, and we talked and laughed for hours in Turkish and English. We really had a good class of folks this summer, so şt was nice to have a bit of a send-off.
The early part of this week has been a flurry of packing, studying, making travel and luggage arrangements, and so on. I'm really looking forward to Antakya: it was originally part of Syria until it was given to Turkey in a referendum, and is the only part of the country that eats hummus (Turkey, although partly Mediterranean, does not do hummus or falafel, as a general rule)ç It also is a hotbed of early Christianity: it's where the term 'Christian' was first used and the site of the first cathedral. The province also is home to the last surviving Armenian village in Turkey. So it's pretty cool. It takes forever and a day to get there though, so we're taking a bus overnight to Ankara, hanging out in my city for a day, and taking another overnight bus to Adana, where we'll grab a dolmuş to Antakya. My travelling companions are returning through Cappadocia, so I may return via Konya or Antalya, depending on whether I'd rather see beaches or religious conservatism and derviş orders. It should be really fun, and I'm sure I'll have scads of photos to overload my Flickr account with when I get back.
Hope you all are doing well,
-R