Each morning our group has breakfast on the 6th floor covered roof in our hotel. One of the most noticeable things about the view is how the haze seems to fade away parts of the city, much like my brain right now. We’ve done so much that I rely on my camera to help me remember what we saw on which day, otherwise all of my experiences blend together and distort.
I’ll work in reverse since I can most easily remember yesterday.
We were scheduled to meet with faculty and students in the architecture department at Istanbul Technical University, about twenty minutes away from our hotel by foot. I was expecting the university to be quite large – Weldon had told me beforehand that their lobby was the size of the North Annex. It’s not that I was skeptical, but I couldn’t image that volume as just a lobby because it seemed over the top and excessive. He wasn’t exaggerating.
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When we approached the school it reminded me much of building 7 at MIT: large and classical in style on a plinth with closely spaced columns designating the main entrance. Our contact, Prof. Dr. Semra Aydinli, met with us out front and took the group around before the workshop began. The architecture building itself is a converted military hospital built in the late 1800s. In plan, it is square in shape, with a large courtyard in center. The building is massive, and could probably fit all of Annex and Ira Allen in its volume. Despite its outward grandeur, the building was very empty. The architecture department is much smaller at ITU than WIT, so most of their extra spaces were completely empty.
After introductions and a brief presentation, we split into five groups that were two WIT and one ITU student each and left to document areas near the Galata bridge each group was interested in. Upon returning to the university at 16:00 we had a two hours workshop and presented our findings. Myself, Jenn, and Bahar spent time taking an alternate path from the Galata tower down to the waterfront.
That evening, all the students had dinner in the region of the fish market, where I ordered the lamb special. I want to take the opportunity to write a little about food in Turkey. While my body has had some issues with the food so far, it is generally half as expensive and tastes better than similar food in the United States. The use of preservatives and high fructose corn sugar, etc. does not seem common. My classmates tell me the Coke tastes different here. I have not tried it yet, but I plan to.