Yes, I took two weeks to update. My bad. Anyway, international travel is nowhere near as exciting as it sounds. You sit down, stand up, wait, get in line, later, rinse, and repeat until arriving in Istanbul. I took a cab to Boğaziçi and crashed in my new dorm after a very small amount of unpacking. I had been traveling for about 20 hours (counting car and air travel), and I barely dozed on the flight from Boston to Paris. I went to sleep at about 9pm, and I didn't feel even remotely rested until I woke up at about 5:30 pm. However, by the time the weekend rolled around, my internal clock had adjusted and I went with a couple friends for a trip around Istanbul.
I could talk about a lot of things from that trip, but the thing that sticks out the most is when we visited several mosques on the Asian side of the Bosporus, including the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque. It is one thing to understand that in most Muslim traditions, iconography is prohibited. It is one thing to see video footage of a Muslim prayer service on the news and know that everyone is bowing down in the direction of Mecca and to understand the significance of that city in Islam. It is a completely different experience to actually take off your shoes, wash up at a nearby fountain, and see the inside of a mosque for the first time. Robert Kaplan writes in Balkan Ghosts about his visit to Mosque of Mustapha Pasha in Skopje “My eyes became lost in the arabesque wall designs. The patterns went on and on, indecipherably, in a linear fashion. Like the contours of the desert, Islam is a world of abstraction, mathematical in severity, fearsome and alienating to the most mystical of Eastern Christians.” (p. 50) I was raised Catholic, and I've known Protestants who shied away from iconography, and I've known Eastern Catholics who encouraged much more elaborate displays than I could find in rural Maine. Even then, I still had to take a minute to adjust to the abstract nature of a mosque that Kaplan describes.
Ok, down to business. I can access Youtube through my wired connection on Boğaziçi's network. Rumor has it that the telecommunications ministry has granted an exemption to universities, but I haven't been able to find anything in the news to back that up. I submitted a report to Herdict, and the reports are mixed as to whether the site is accessible. As of this writing, there is one other report from a university network: Doğu Akdeniz University in Northern Cyprus, which is technically not part of Turkey. Hey Berkman Center (more specifically, Herdict), it wouldn't hurt to add separatist territories to your list of countries. In addition to Northern Cyprus, it would be interesting to see what's accessible in Nagorno-Karabakh and compare the results with Armenia. Anyway, the report from Northern Cyprus states that Youtube is inaccessible. Furthermore, I have been able to access richarddawkins.net (which, as we saw in my link in the last post, was banned after Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar argued that he has been defamed on the site) and metacafe.net (which was banned (article in Turkish) after a video that allegedly caught former CHP leader Deniz Baykal with his pants down was posted to it). I'm not surprised that universities may be exempt from the bans, or that enforcement is just inconsistent(1). What I am surprised about is the fact that I haven't found any other source for this possible exemption EXCEPT my own observations and what other students have told me. I've got half a mind to ask one of my Turkish friends about this, and I'll keep you posted.
In less serious news, I heard back from Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones a few days ago. He's all set except for, brace yourselves, Turkish Death Wish, aka Cellat. A little research on my part shows that the film is available with English subtitles from Onar Films for about $25. I might get it later if I can't somehow pick up a copy for less here in Istanbul, although that doesn't seem too likely given the lack of video stores in the neighborhood.
Classes are going reasonably well. I only discovered when I got to Istanbul that International Trade conflicted with Operating Systems, so I replaced it with History of the Turkish Republic for Foreign Students. Operating Systems is...ok. The professor is certainly better than some instructors I've had at UMass, and he's fairly easy to follow. Overall, the academic side of things is working out.
Returning to terrifyingly bad music, while I appreciate the media's place in American soft power, there are some parts of American pop culture that really, really don't need to follow me anywhere I go. While waiting in the lobby a few days ago, I had to sit through about a minute of “Eenie Meenie” by Sean Kingston and...it...Justin Bieber's career can't fizzle out soon enough.
Footnotes:
(1) For example, I just went back (8-15-2010) and looked at the Herdict reports for Youtube in Turkey, and they stand at 26 inaccessible reports and 30 accessible reports.
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