Life In Turkey: The First Couple Days by Sarah Trice

Gὕnaydin Amerika, I am typing to you from Assos, Turkey, on Thursday May 22^nd.  On Tuesday May 20^th, we arrive at our first hotel, staying on the European side of Turkey. The bus driver Hiro pulled to a stop as we got out a trekked several blocks up the cobbled road to our hotel that was located on a skinny, cobbled road of twists and turns. We all come inside and are given our room keys.  We make our way to the elevators.  There are several things different about this hotel than most I’ve stayed at in America. One, you key card in this hotel is blank card; there is no magnetic strip visible.   Two, the key card is used for several purposes, getting in and out of rooms, activating the elevators, and allowing the lights to stay on in your hotel rooms. This hotel seemed more like a college than an actual hotel.  The hotel included: a game room, a movie theatre, a cafeteria restaurant, a hair style place, a laundry room, a security and TV room, and an art room. Three, there were negative floors. My room was situated on floor # -1, while the cafeteria and the most of these other rooms were located on floor # -2.

So all of us went down to floor -1, but none us could find our rooms. So step one as someone said is to find ours rooms and then go from there as we had been on a plane most of the day.   As it turned out our rooms were located by going through several different doors in the same building with ground level being floor #0. Upon getting to our rooms, I believe most of us were pretty excited as well as pretty exhausted.  The words I would use to describe our hotel rooms would be tech savvy and an efficient use of space. The rooms were tech savvy in the sense that they reminded me of Apple computer products by how smooth all the desks, drawers, shelves and closets were laid out. The rooms were efficient in the sense of size of the rooms were very compact, but size wouldn’t bother you, as you would have a child-like joy upon seeing the spiral staircase that would remind you, or at least me, of something out a fairy tale or child-like dream. The upstairs loft was small, but there were plugs and consistently smooth furniture pieces everywhere.

The cafeteria was like any cafeteria, buffet style with picnic bench-like tables alongside of tables with pull out chairs. This is where we had our dinner as well as a breakfast the next day. Wednesday May 21^st at 7am we left the hotel, descending back down the road we first trekked up to get here. We saw cats and dogs alike roaming the streets around us as we made our way back to the place the bus had first dropped us off. 

Clean crisp looking lofted rooms

The staircase it would be fun to slide down!

It was then from there we left Istanbul.  Cenk our tour guide for this entire trip began to talk about how Turkish people buy their neighbors. In Turkey, people prefer to buy apartments over houses. But Turkish people don’t say they are going to buy an apartment; they say they are going to buy neighbors. While the apartment you are thinking of buying may appeal to you, that’s not the deciding factor. In Turkey, your neighbors are important. You can have bad neighbors, so should try to avoid those. Our tour guide meant by this is the Turkish people are very curious people. If you were to move to Turkey, all your neighbors would like to come and visit you and ask you about your life. At first you might think this isn’t so bad, but let’s say you would have twenty new neighbors. Of those twenty new neighbors, all twenty of them would come one by one to ask why you moved there. How many kids you have? What’s your job? Etc.  After answering the same exact questions over and over, you’d get the point of why you would desire to have good neighbors in the first place. 

See the apartment blocks in the background. People like living in apartments so much that farmers live in town and commute out to their fields.

As we continued our journey, we stopped at a couple of gas stations. The interesting things about gas stations are that a lot of them seem to have restaurants attached to them, and sometimes very nice restaurants at that. Also, at one gas station we stopped at we got to see camels, ostriches, peacocks, dogs, ducks, and rabbits a mini zoo located next to it. Also, in the bathroom of one of the gas stations; I saw that they had a separate spot with a nicer mirror and hair dryer. It seemed oddly placed being in gas stations setting.

And finally if you missed everything I’ve said before this sentence here; read this last paragraph. If the bottled water is a good price anywhere you should buy it, as bottled water is a lot safer to drink than the tap. Road walking or walking in the middle of the road seems very common place here. Animals are everywhere, in the streets and at the hotels. Dogs and cats are typically wild here. Spiky cacti plants are very spiky and hurt upon touch. The food is all very good, but hard to describe. Coconut is very common on their desserts, and olives are breakfast foods. Anyways, be alive!  

Here are some shots of the night life in Istanbul around our hotel: