Hello from Turkey.
After a 20 hour bus ride from Corfu -on the fanciest bus I’ve ever been in – I arrived to Koç early Friday morning and happily proceeded to sleep all day. I’ve settled into my dorm room and fortunately my roommate is not here yet, as (of course) most of my things are still on the floor.
I haven’t seen the city centre yet, but Koç has a very nice campus. Everything is very planned. It’s all new and it all matches and everything seems to be in the perfect spot. The dorms are definitely much nicer (and cheaper) than the ones in UBC – if Marine Drive had dorms they would look like this. We even get a mini fridge!
Until now I haven’t really felt like I’m in a university… It’s more like a very fancy resort with ocean view. Every time you walk into the campus (or take the bus) your ID is checked, and they have cameras and security agents everywhere (I’m not quite sure of how I feel about this yet). There’s a pool that is nothing like the Aquatic Centre at UBC but totally amazing – it has beach chairs and umbrellas and such a vacationy feel about it that I find it hard to believe that in a few days I’ll be taking classes here.
Orientation starts tomorrow and exchange students have been arriving at all times for the last two days. They’re easily spotted as the somewhat awkward circles of english-speaking people. I’ve been meeting lots of people, mostly from Europe and the US. I also met a girl who says ‘eh?’ at the end of every other sentence !! Guess where she’s from :).
Luckily I’ve met some other vegetarians, so we’ve been navigating our way through the food options, slowly figuring out the turkish words for food we don’t eat. On that note, my turkish sucks. I clearly remember writing a to-do-list for the summer that had ‘learn turkish’ as item number one. What a fail.
And so life is good and now I have to get ready for dinner – we’re going down to Sariyer, the closest town (city?) to Koç. I promise to post some pictures soon!
Have fun in Turkey! It sounds like it will be amazing!