A Typical Turkish Day

I’m lucky enough to say that everyday help something vastly different for me during my dialogue. From traveling to Berlin from Turkey, to the different excursions, to just the breadth of lectures we had during my dialogue, everyday I learned something I wasn’t expecting. Despite this, the two weeks I spent in each country was long enough to get familiar with my immediate surroundings and fall into a sort of routine. When I left my hostel in Berlin after two and a half weeks, the receptionist hugged me and said it was like losing a friend. There’s a certain comfort in getting to know a place, even if it’s very far from home.

In both the hotel in Turkey and the hostel in Berlin, breakfast was provided and most of my classmates woke up early enough to eat it – not me though. I usually rolled out of bed five or ten minutes before my lecture in Turkey where the lecture was in the hotel or thirty minutes before lecture in Berlin where I had to take the subway one stop to reach lecture. By “lecture” I could mean any of a vast number of things – we went on city tours, to museums, to film screenings, to site visits, and had a lot of just plain old lectures with local experts. Usually lecture would begin around 10 am, we’d finish around noon, and we’d have lunch until 2 pm when we’d have another lecture to around 4 pm. After that, the day was mine. This was the time I spent doing my field research, going sightseeing, making friends, eating dinner, and, a lot of the time, taking naps.