4 Month Anniversary

As I was looking through my blog today, I realized I wrote this post but never published it! Might as well do it now. Enjoy!

Monday marked my 4 month anniversary of being in Turkey. Sorry I didn't post anything for it, but that day I took my last final, so I was a bit busy. So I finished my last final, which means I have officially finished my semester abroad at Bilkent University and am on summer break!

It feels so strange to be finished. Now I have three weeks of traveling around Turkey and Greece before heading back to America. After looking forward to these blissful weeks of travel for so long, now that it is here, I am so excited to embark on it, but at the same time I am saddened that my experience of living abroad has just about come to a close. I don't want it to finish! Even though it has been hard at times and I have been homesick, family sick, and friend sick, I will truly miss Turkey and the experience of living abroad. I will also miss all of the people I have met while in Turkey: my professors, my Turkish friends, and my international friends. I keep thinking that next semester I will see all of them again, just like at ISU, but that is not the case for study abroad. We will all probably never be together again. It really is like living in two worlds; part of my heart will be in Turkey forever.

Well, here's a few things that I did in my last month of being in Turkey:

I traveled to Istanbul for 3 days at the beginning of May with 5 other international students. After those 3 days, I felt like I finally got the lay of the land, at least for the European side. After all, it is a city of 15-20 million people, so I am very thankful that I can find even a few things! We were able to see the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cisterns, Topkapi Palace, the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, and take a Bosphorus cruise. It was a jammed pack 3 days, but totally worth it. When you come to Istanbul, just accept that there will be many tourists at each of these sites, as people from all over the world want to see them.

My cousin got confirmed. I was unable to be a part of the celebrations as I was in Istanbul that weekend, but I did talk to her beforehand.

My sister graduated from college. I was able to watch my sister's ceremony via Skype thanks to my brother. It was hard to be away for these two major events, but I was certainly there in spirit for both of them.

I attended two more orchestra concerts. One with a violinist who also conducted while he played. The other concert had a double bass player play an extremely difficult concerto and he did it amazingly. I basically sat there with my mouth hanging open the whole time. The second half of the performance was a Broadway musical tribute, involving the voice students that attend Bilkent, including one of my classmates, singing songs from West Side Story, Grease, Les Mis, Once, Cats, and Rent. It was so fun to see two of my favorite things collaborate to produce a fabulous show. The audience did not want it to end, so they repeated two songs as encores.

I practiced. A LOT. More than I have ever practiced in my life.