Bursa/Iznik Trip

Since I dropped my Friday class I was able to spend this Friday sightseeing -- Sarah and I finally toured the Blue Mosque and the Ayasofya. Max, a kid who has been here since October, was showing his girlfriend around and gave us a mini tour as well. It was nice to have him there because he was able to point out a lot of stuff I wouldn't have noticed (ex: Christian crosses visible under the Muslim art). Then our Turkish roommate, Gunce, joined us for our first trip to the haman (Turkish Bath). Since she was Turkish I was thinking she had been before, but it was a first time for all of us. And going without guidance your first time is really quite awkward. Pretty much you are supposed to get naked, lie on this giant stone slab with a bunch of other naked women and wait until and overweight woman calls out "massage!" And at this point you are washed and massaged in a much less gentle way than you'd experience in an American spa. You just get scrubbed down, a slap on the ass means "turn over", and when they were shampooing my hair and face I almost suffocated in the bubbles. It was definitely very pleasant to be in the warmth getting all clean, etc, but weird too for my first time. If you ever find yourself in a hamam just know that it will be really weird...

And Saturday morning we left for Bursa. It was cold, gray, and overall bad weather. So it was painful to hike all over the city, especially since most of the group was pretty grumpy about the cold combined with the necessary removal of shoes before entering every mosque. The professor who did the tour was awesome though, he knew so much about the history and architecture of all these buildings, I felt like I learned a ton in Bursa. That night we stayed in this 2-star hotel, which I thought was hilarious that they displayed those stars proudly. But it really wasn't all that bad -- we got dinner and Turkish breakfast served in the restaurant and there was lots of tea.

In this morning we visited a small village in the mountains (we were near Mt Olympus -- Uludag in Turkish i think). It was so cozy and adorable -- we wandered around, had lunch at a small restaurant. Here I bought a loaf of freshly made bread and proceeded to to devour nearly half of it on the bus ride because it was so good. After this stop we went to Iznik and saw a few more mosques, walked on a Roman aqueduct, and visited an old amphitheater that had in later years been used as a mass grave after a plague. Crazy...

We made it back to Istanbul around 7 and met some friends to go hang out. We got back pretty late and went to bed. I wake up around 4 am with this violent stomach flu. Awesome... It sounded like a few kids on the trip had caught something similar and I did talk to a kid on Saturday who had mentioned he was sick. Jerk! Ha... So I am now recovering. I made it to all my Tuesday classes and ate my first full meal today at lunch. I'm feeling better, but still really tired, so its just about nap time for me....