Some Cultural Differences

Hello again,

We've learned a lot more about the Turkish culture the past couple days. Here's a list of some noticeable differences:

Language
Not as many people speak English as we expected. We were told we could show up without knowing any Turkish and we would be fine but we quickly found out this is not necessarily the case. They only started encouraging English ten years ago so trying to speak to restaurant owners who are mostly older people do is almost impossible. From what I've found, there's a maximum of one person in the restaurant who might know English. So we're doing our best to quickly learn. Some of the guys yesterday ordered soup and the server was only saying "stomach" but couldn't say anything else so the guys thought it was a soup that's good for your stomach when really the meat in it was sheep stomach. But it was still good soup I guess.

It's funny though how we have to speak very broken and simple English with lots of hand gestures to the people here and then we find ourselves talking to each other very simply on accident. It's almost as if my English is getting worse being here for a couple days.

We have one other guy on our floor, Sharin (not sure if that's the correct spelling), who just graduated from Anadolu in statistics that we just met. He just went out to the market to get fruit and brought back bananas, peaches, and green grapes (with seeds) to share with us which was very nice of him. His English isn't bad but he has to have a Turkish-English dictionary near by for some words. We asked him what the Turkish word for all the fruit was and bananas were pronounced the same as "moose." I tried to explain that bananas are similar to an animal in English and I did my best to draw a moose but as you can see drawing is not my strong-suit.

We also got on the topic of fast food and I asked him if he liked french fries and it took a while to explain. I guess they're also called chips here but it took a while for him to understand. In the end we found out he doesn't like fries or McDonalds in general.

And this is our whole set up with Sharin and a few people from our group.

Hospitality
The Turkish people have been very hospitable towards us any where we go. At the international bar we went to yesterday they gave us all patches of a Turkish flag, American flag, and one that has the name of the bar, Del Mundo, plus a bunch of snacks like popcorn, salted peanuts, and these rice chips that were suppose to be dipped in a teriyaki-like sauce which I liked. Other restaurants will bring lots of bread or maybe some free cookies or something. When we went to the university today they asked us if we wanted water, tea, or coffee before every presentation we had and were even served some tasty tea during one of our presentations.

Transportation
Turkish people are crazy drivers and I haven't seen an accident yet which I find surprising. I guess it's somewhat difficult to get a driver's licence here so maybe that's why they're more risky drivers because they're more confident on the road. If you're crossing a road and a car's coming you better get going because the car will not slow down. Today we were taking a van back from one of the campuses we were at and were extremely close to being side-swept which was pretty scary. But luckily we'll only really be riding a bus or maybe a train around so it will be more safe.

The roads aren't marked at all and I don't quite understand how their lights work but at least they have some sort of system down. The highways are clearly marked though from what I could tell.

University
There is a main campus, an engineering/architecture campus, and some other campus I believe all a part of Anadolu University. The main campus is within walking distance and is very large and very beautiful. All the buildings look rather new, lots of nice landscaping and flowers, and more clean than the city. It's a rich university because they have about 1.5 million people enrolled through their online education classes and the government only allows Anadolu to have a distance education program. Mehmet said no other colleges are allowed to have the same program but he was unsure why.

The engineering/architecture campus is nice as well and is about a 15 minute bus ride from where we are living. It's kind of out in the middle of no where but the campus itself is nice and has a gym/rec place which we're going to check out tomorrow.

There was a bit of confusion today because we found out that one of the classes that some of the group was planning on taking, highway design, is no longer offered because there wasn't a teacher willing to teach it. So now we're trying to work something out where these people can take a different class. Luckily it doesn't affect me. All of us are planning on taking two classes though with most all of us taking hydrology together.

Classes start tomorrow and my first class is at 9:00 a.m. for transportation engineering. The scheduling is weird though because it is not consistent throughout the week. For example, my transportation class is at 9:00 tomorrow, noon on Wednesday, 3:00 on Thursday, and 4:00 on Friday (not sure how Friday classes will work since we have weekend trips where we're leaving on Friday).

I'll be sure to take more pictures of both campuses though because they're both very nice.

Food
Luckily we've discovered more food that is less bread-based so that has been nice (although bread is still always involved in a meal). But this morning I had a delicious omelet and its spelled "omlet" but I realized I had to switch my pronunciation from "ahm-let" to "ohm-let" for them to understand what I was saying. They also have some great freshly squeezed orange juice which I really enjoy.

Yesterday for dinner we had soup, bread, rice, and a vegetable and meat dish that were all delicious for only 5 or 6 Turkish Lira which is about $3 in the U.S. So food is very reasonably priced. I haven't been to McDonalds but I guess its actually more expensive because it's considered somewhat of a luxury.

The City/Old Town
The city is a lot larger than we expected. I feel like there's still a lot more to see. But its very diverse with about 650,000 people. You can find pretty much anything you need in the city and there are a lot of places for shopping and whatever else.

Yesterday we visited the older part of Eskisehir referred to as Old Town and it was very cool. The buildings were from the 12th century or so and were brightly colored. We visited a medium-sized mosque, some art and history museums, and looked around at some shops. Many places sell pipes made out of a certain soft, white stone common to the area that are carved into all sorts of patterns, faces, animals, or pretty much anything. The one shown below is only for display purposes but they have smaller ones that are sold too.

And that's about it for now. I didn't expect to write that much but we're taking in a lot right now so there's a lot to share. We're certainly looking forward to starting classes tomorrow, checking out the gym area, and getting a flow down for living here. Check out my facebook if you'd like to see more pictures but I haven't taken any of the inside of our apartment nor the campuses which I plan on doing at some point. Hope that wasn't too boring to read.

I've got to wake up early tomorrow though so good night!