Act as if you belong

While traveling anywhere, staying safe is usually a matter of staying aware, trusting your judgement, and using common safe. Neither of the cities I traveled to during my dialogue were inherently more unsafe than Boston, but you do put yourself at risk when you travel anywhere that you are unfamiliar with. In general, I always tried to stay in groups, in well-lit places with a lot of people.

If you’re considering going on a dialogue, you shouldn’t be worried about safety. Each of my professors were from one of the cities I visited and I also had a local TA in each city so I was always surrounded by people who knew the environment. The professors made sure to go over all the basic safety tips with us first thing in the beginning of the dialogue. We were also kept very aware of our environments. For example, there was a terrorist attack in Turkey (very far from Istanbul) when I was there. We were immediately alerted of this attack and told which areas to stay away from in order to stay safe.

In general, the rule I’ve always followed while traveling aboard is not to flaunt that you are an American, that you have any significant amount of money, or that you are alone in vulnerable. If you act as if you belong, you are more likely to remain safe. One important traveling tip I picked up on in Istanbul is to make sure that your taxi drivers are licensed with a taxi company, use their meters, and actually get paid the amount on the meters. Some taxi drivers will try to charge you more than the meter price if they know they can get away with it.