We be all night…. in Taksim

S’aber friends (What’s Up)?! Sorry it’s taken so long to write a blog post about this week/weekend but it’s been a busy one! No excuses though- I know.

To start off, last week WE HAD 2 SNOW DAYS (sorry VT friends). I have never had a snow day in all of college and for about 3 inches of snow we had 2 days off. Not to worry though, it’s already all the way back up in the 50s again. To be fair, the Turkish people have no idea how to deal with the snow. I saw men on the back of trucks trying to throw salt in the street, a guy sleeping in a tractor when his intention was to be plowing snow, and people shoveling the snow with the back of road signs. My friends and I, all being used to the snow, decided that we would brave the weather and go downtown into Sariyer for dinner, continuously mentioning and laughing at the amount of snow on the ground. We were greeted at the restaurant with little boys who would throw snowballs in our face and then quickly ask for money… On our way back, we took a taxi because there was no more transportation running that day. Unfortunately, we were too quick to say the snow was fine but in fact, our taxi couldn’t make it up the hill back to campus. We found ourselves eventually pushing the taxi up hills trying to communicate through weird signs and noises to the driver.

Luckily, we got home because on Friday we left for Izmir and Ephesus… or should I say Thursday.

My friends and I thought it would be a good idea to stay out all night in Taksim Thursday night because we had to be at the airport on Friday morning at 5am anyways. Needless to say, it was not. We trekked our backpacks to the bars around midnight and at first it seemed like a great idea. We were having fun and the time was passing quickly. Eventually we coat checked our backpacks because as you can imagine, me dancing to Beyoncé with a large backpack on can be quite destructive. Around 4am, we got on the bus in Taksim to take us to the airport. No one wanted to admit it but we were slowly realizing we had made a bad choice staying up all night. We were informed that the bus was a 2 hour ride so we thought we could get a little sleep in, but when the bus stopped after 30 mins we all looked at each other shocked. We spent the next few hours sleeping in the hard airport chairs and I could tell that people were concerned for us.

Around 7:00am we boarded our flight and in only 1 hour we made it to Izmir. We slowly took a series of public transport and found our hostel. Surprisingly, our hostel was actually quite clean and nice. We put our backpacks down and headed out into Izmir until the 2:00 check in. We went to the beautiful Izmir waterfront, the Kultur Park, some type of book market, and around the main shopping street. Although we were all so tired and delirious that we actually were seeing black spots in our vision, we were so happy to be out of the city and in a place with a less people and clean air. Living in Istanbul, you don’t realize how crowded and congested it is until you leave. We made our way back to the hostel around 2pm and passed the heck out for about 3 hours.

Later that night, we were all feeling 100x better and decided to go get a nice dinner on the waterfront and a drink. We ended up at a place with delicious burgers and wine. After, we went out to the bars and checked out the Izmir nightlife, which was very fun! We made our way back to the hostel relatively early and met our other 2 hostel roommates, Jock and Andrew. Both of them were super funny and interesting guys. Jock was from New Zealand had been traveling India and some of the Middle East for the past 3 1/2 months and Andrew was from Australia and had been traveling the world for the past 9 1/2 months. It made me start thinking about how cool it would be to do something like that on your own.

The next day we went to Ephesus through a series of transportation. We first took a taxi from the town center up to The Virgin Mary’s House. Although the house was quite small and underwhelming, to think about the history of that place is really amazing. We all joked that everything and especially all of the transportation for the rest of the day worked out so well because we were all blessed by Mary herself. After the house, we made our way to Ephesus, which was really one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. We were lucky enough to get in free with our student museum cards from Istanbul. We spent about 3 hours in the ancient ruins peeking around, petting cats, climbing on top of pillars-and then getting yelled at, and sitting in the area’s where the people of Ephesus used to have gladiator battles. It was really like a complete time hop into history and I recommend everyone to put it on their bucket list.

We made our way back into the little town and then up to a small town called Sirince that was famous for its fruit wines. We tasted a ton of wine including pomegranate, blackberry and apple and we even brought some back to the hostel. We made it back to our hostel in Izmir at about 7:00 and quickly started playing drinking games with our new friends and our fruit wine. We had a ton of fun and got to know each other very quickly… I won’t say anything more.

We went out that night with our new friends and danced the night away to some Turkish pop. We decided that we were too poor to buy drinks at the club so anytime we wanted a beer we would all leave the club, go to the corner store, buy a beer for about $3.50, drink it in the street, and then head back home.

All in all, it was such a great weekend and I was happy to start to get the ball rolling with all my upcoming travel plans. Looking at my calendar makes me excited for all the things coming up soon. Within the next 3 weeks I will be going to Cappadocia, Turkey, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Vienna, Austria. Later today, I am attending my first Turkish football game- Besikas vs. Liverpool.

Love you and miss you all!!