NSLI-Y 2022 Turkey – Week 5
Week Five: Heating Up, Slowing Down
With only two weeks left before heading home, week five of the program was filled with feelings of both restlessness (“Are we there yet?”) and anxiousness (“I don’t want to go home yet!”). In a short amount of time, students have acclimated to living in Turkey, but they also know they have only barely scratched the surface. The biggest story this week, though, was the heat, which many of you reading this blog will be able to relate to. Temperatures hovered in the 90s during the day, but fortunately the nights still cooled down to the 60s. With temperatures so high, everything around the city seems to have slowed down, except perhaps the language classes, which continue to pick up speed. This week students learned the past tense. Students are no longer limited to speaking only of what they are doing right now, they can now also look back and tell you what they’ve been doing during their time in Turkey. A lot, as it turns out, even with the heat.
We held our usual language partner activity in the park this week on Wednesday. Students played a matching game with their Turkish peers, learning the names of many common animals, and had the opportunity to learn some common Turkish expressions related to animals as well. Some expressions are nearly identical in English: clever as a fox, busy as a bee, hungry like a wolf. Some fall on the more colorful side for English speakers: strong tea is called “rabbit’s blood” here, for example, and “the black of a chicken”, inexplicably, is the expression for night-blindness. In the second half of the activity, students visited shops in the city with their partners on a photo scavenger hunt designed to expand their vocabulary (and get them in from the heat).
This week we also managed to fit in two cultural activities. On Thursday, we traveled a short distance out of Bursa to see Cumalıkızık, an Ottoman village dating to the early 14th century that is known especially for its well-preserved Ottoman-style houses and for its mosque, which gives the town its name. After a quick walking tour of the village, students had some free time to browse the village market and relax with a cool drink: black mulberry juice, a local specialty, was a popular choice.
On Saturday, we took a day trip outside of Bursa to the ancient walled city of Iznik (formerly known as Nicea). Iznik has been an important center for trade and religious activity through successive empires, and students were able to visit several of the most important sites, including the Green Mosque, Süleyman Paşa Medresa (the first Ottoman medresa, now used as studio space for porcelain artists), and the Iznik Aya Sofya/Hagia Sophia. The latter has served as both a church and mosque, and you might note the combination of minaret and traditional church architecture in the group photo below. Iznik was also the center of ceramic tile production during the heyday of the Ottoman Empire, and after lunch, students had the opportunity to try their hands at decorating their own tiles. We ended our excursion with some R&R on the banks of Iznik Lake. The gentle breeze and blue-green waters were a welcome reprieve to another hot day. A little ice cream never hurt either!
Cansu, one of the teachers, with some of her students (Freya, Lucia, Christie, Evan).
Ameya and Hüseyin work on animal vocab.
Cumalıkızık
Group photo outside Cumalıkızık Mosque.
Lucia, Seth, and Freya enjoy some black mulberry juice.
Iznik
Group photo at the eastern gate of Iznik.
Group photo in the Süleyman Paşa Medresa.
Group photo Ayasofya.
Noura works on her tile.
Sophia chooses a pattern for her tile.
Kathryn hard at work tracing the outline of her pattern.
Ece and Christie work together.
Burak helps Greg paint their tile (photo credit Freya).
Louis, Ulaş, and Ameya on the streets of Iznik (photo credit Sophia).
Seth cools off with ice cream on the banks of Iznik Lake.