Istanbul not Constantinople

Sorry for the long dry spell, I promise I haven't forgotten about the blog! I've been keeping lots of notes and trying to jot my thoughts down before passing out from exhaustion each night. A quick recap: since my last entry, I spent two weeks staying with Ozge in Berlin, attending lectures and meetings with political parties, NGOs, labor unions, business associations for the EiT program, as well as interviewing a few journalists for my independent research project. Of course, I also spent plenty of time exploring the city: museums (lots), nightlife, shops, sampling the varied cuisine, and just walking around Berlin's wide streets- people watching and observing. As things slow down when we return to Poland in a few days, I'll try to include some retroactive posts detailing some of my experiences. Anyway, I've been in Istanbul with the group for a week and a half now, and things have been even more crazy and intense than Berlin. A typical day includes early breakfast is a hardboiled eggs, olives, and fresh-baked bread at the hostel, where I share a tiny room with three of the the other girls on the program. Then we head up Istanbul's main shopping street, Istiklal, Istanbul's equivalent of the Magnificent Mile or the Champs Elysee, crowded with shoppers and vendors selling everything from fake purses to roasted chestnuts and kepabs. Then we take the subway to the Sisli stop, where we walk another mile or so to the Kustepe campus of Bigli University, located in a pretty low-income residential area of the city, which presents an interesting contrast- wealthy students with BMWs and designer clothes attending classes in a gated city block, isolated from the allies of crumbling houses and what seems like hundreds of children running around during the day. We usually have a morning and an afternoon lecture at Bilgi- punctuated by a long lunch break which we usually spend at a local cafe, munching on pilaf or manti, sipping tea, and enjoying the sunny weather. We usually return to the hostel around 4 or so, enough time for a short excursion to one of the city's many eclectic neighborhoods for a look around the shops and sights, maybe a short museum or sightseeing trip, a little bit of reading for class before bed (or, more often, a trip to one of Istiklal's many bars or cafes for a beer, some Raki (Turkish aniseed brandy), or Nargile (water-pipe/hookah), then some much-needed rest for the following day. Like I said, I'll try to do some retroactive posting with musings on my Istanbul experiences (and hopefully some photos and videos), once we return to Krakow and things slow down a bit. For now, I just wanted to give everyone a little update and promise some longer posts later.