Monday, June 7, 2010
Saturday, June 12th, 2010 by Brian Pepe-MooneyI have been keeping a written blog as well as a video blog and I hope that the two will compliment each other. The following posts will be what I had written while waiting for this site to be available for me.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Today was the start of my second week here at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. I am currently at my desk in the biotechnology building. I share the room with three other students currently working on their Masters degree: Özge Karadaş, Sinem Kardeşler, and Gökhan Bahçecioğlu. I have become very friendly with the group that is in my office as well as with the two masters students across the hall Gizem Altay and Birsen Demirbag. Myself, Özge, Sinem, and Birsen usually go to lunch together. They all speak English really well, but obviously they prefer to speak in their native language. We share many laughs during lunch about language and how to say different words such as Tavuk (chicken), et (meat), or pilaf (rice). More recently the conversation has surrounded how one can find joy or something interesting in even the smallest things in life. I pointed to the salt and peppershaker (making a reference to the last lunch that I had had with them where we described how there are different types of salts and how arbitrary the size of the salt grain was). We commented how the saltshaker had one hole in it, whereas the peppershaker had five holes in it. I asked, semi-jokingly why that was the case and interestingly enough Özge answered that this was in fact the opposite trend to the holes in the salt and pepper shakers as seen in city of Izmir. Although we laughed about the ridiculousness of the entire conversation, it was an interesting example of what I had explained to them half-jokingly to try and inspire conversation.