Kap A Doh Kia

Hello everybody! Like I said in my previous post I am sorry for the delay. A post about my Kapadokya trip is long overdue. Honestly, one of the reasons why I have put off posting this for a long time too is because of the difficulty filtering through the pictures and choosing which ones to include here because it is soo hard to describe the experience I had in just words and pictures.

Before I jump into the meat of my Kapadokya I trip I would just like to mention that one day after work we had gone to Taksim Square for dinner and encountered this peaceful protest on Istiklal Street.

Riot police were on standby in the off chance that peace turned into violence. I was smart enough to stay clear of any of these activities.

Now onto my weekend trip to Kapadokya. We (Boming, Jennifer, and I), the 3 Michigan interns at OzU spent two days there. It took 12 hours by charter bus to get to and from there. It was not so painful to go by bus because we were able to sleep for a majority of the time.

Day 1:
We arrived in the Kapadokya region in the morning and checked into our hotel. We were pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of the two guys that ran the hotel along with the beautifully decorated terrace.

cool old-fashioned key to our room :)

The hotel was conveniently named Terrace Hotel. We enjoyed a breakfast cooked by our wonderful hosts on the terrace. This accomodation ran us around 33 TL per night which was around $15 per night per person.

Our hosts were very helpful in helping us figure out the best way to make the most of our short 2 days in Kapadokya. There were two tours that were the most popular (red and green tour) and each one took basically the whole day. So it was decided that the first day we spend exploring places on the red tour and on day two we spend exploring the green tour. Our host mentioned that it was possible to do the red tour by scooter so I decided to rent one because it was cheaper than a guided tour and more of an adventure

On day 1 I completed the red tour without the help of a guide by scooter and on day 2 I was advised that the green tour was too much driving and harder to complete by scooter so I did a guided tour instead.

Rocking the vintage style helmet :)

The first place I visited was Çavuşin, a small but beautiful mountain-side town. Here you could find a beautiful landscape with a mix of cliffs, desert, and old mountainside cave dwellings.

After cavusin I rode up to avunos which was about a 20 km away. Other than the famous pottery there wasn't much else worth seeing so after looking at very collerful and exotic potter we headed down to pasabagi and zelve

This was a cave church. Talk about simple. 

Open air museum in Zelve. You can explore the cave houses carved out of the sides of the cliffs

This area of the town is popular for the mystical fairy chimneys also known as the weird mushroom shaped rock formations

In the devrent valley there were supposedly rock formations resembling different animals. This was the only one I could find, a rock camel. 

My last stop on the tour was the goreme open air museum. This is the most popular museum in the area.

I made it back to the hotel by 530 pm in the evening. I had skipped out on lunch and breakfast so I was really hungry by that time. I made it my next task to find dinner and my trip would not have been complete without the famous Testi Kebap:

Its customary for the waiter to break open the clay jar in front of you with a short saber

After dinner we explored one of the main cliffs of the town in which you can see many beautiful panoramas. This was the view of the city at night.

Just taking some silly pictures in a rug shop with a traditional kapadokyan headdress on.

Day 2:

On day 2 we woke up at 4am to catch the launching of many hot air balloons. Kapadokya is famous for its balloon tours but instead of coughing up 200 USD we just went to where we watched the sunset to watch the balloons and sunrise

panoramic view. It was amazing seeing how precise the balloon pilots were in their flights. It's crazy how close to the rocks the balloons are floating.

Definitely worth waiting for 2 hours after 4am for the view. Had a great nap back at the hotel afterwards.

We woke up promptly at 830 am to depart for our guided green tour. I am glad I took the guided tour because the destinations of this trip were very far from where we were. It would have been very hard to navigate on my own.

Cool tree decorated with eyes of nazar. These are very popular in middle eastern and western asian countries. The folklore behind it is that they soak up all negative energy aimed towards you or your home.

This was a yemekhane, or cafeteria in one of the underground cities

Then we went for a hike in one of the famous valleys. We walked for about 3km down stream to where we would have lunch.

The restaurant at the end of our hike where we had lunch had this shelters where you could literally eat on top of the water

Then with no surprise we visited another place with more cave dwellings. This place was pretty nice because there were less tourists and more secluded.

After our tour we went to "Turkish Night" organized by one of the restaurants in Avanos. It consisted of traditional Turkish food and many shows, including a whirling dervish ceremony.

Turkish Night was the last activity of our Kapadokya Trip. We woke up the next morning at 8am to catch our 10hr bus ride back to Istanbul. This was by far my favorite trip in Turkish. It was an excellent mix of nature hikes, history, and Turkish culture. I could have definitely spent another 2-3 days further exploring the area.

When I was in Kapadokya my sister had also arrived to Istanbul. She is spending six weeks teaching English and working in a hospital. I was able to meet up with her a couple of times after I returned during the very little free time I had between work and my travel. Nonetheless, it was fun spending time with her and showing her around Turkey (as if I knew everything about Istanbul).

PS I have one more experience from Turkey (Antalya) to share with you before I begin to share my South Korean experiences so please bear with me. I'll hopefully make the antalya post a bit shorter than this one :)

An Overdue Update

Hello friends, family, teachers, colleagues, and acquaintances I realize I have neglected my blog for the past several weeks and I would like to send out my sincerest apologies for leaving you in the dark about my experiences in Turkey (and now in South Korea). In this post I hope to recap my experiences at work and in Istanbul in general and speak to the specific activities I have done  in Istanbul during my last few weeks in Turkey . But first I would like to give a little explanation about the hiatus I took in posting to my blog:

When I went to Kapadokya a few weeks ago I spent an amazing 2 days exploring one of the most surreal landscapes of Turkey. My plan was to immediately share my experience with you all by blogging about it as soon as I got back. The problem I encountered was filtering through the vast amounts of pictures I took and describing the experience through just words and pictures. And as I continued to procrastinate I took another trip to Antalya which I would also like to dedicate a blog post to. So, aside from this general post I  am writing now I will hopefully be able to share my Kapadokya and Antalya experiences with 2 more blog posts in the very near future.

I can now reflect on the overall experience I had working in the 5th largest city in the world. When people normally speak about their experiences they tend to say time flew by or it felt like forever but I can't say for sure what my time here in Turkey felt like. My sense of time became clouded by the long commutes by the plethora of available forms of transportation in and out of the city, the long days at the office, and the relaxing time I spent with new friends on and off campus. I can truly say my perspective on commuting has changed quite drastically.

To the extent of my own understanding, the company we worked in Girisim Asset Management is a company that mainly buys loan portfolios that are not making any money from banks for a highly discounted price and works to transform the nonperforming loans into ones in which they can collect from. This is beneficial to the customers in that they can eliminate their debt and increase their credit while improving the economic status of the banks and Turkey as a whole. At first glance I thought this company was simply a collection agency, but it is a little bit more than that. The company's goal is to profit from the collections of course but also write off these loans as soon as possible, so the asset managers work with the customers to refinance or even reduce their amount due in a way that makes it possible for the customer to pay some amount of money that is more than what the company purchased the outstanding account for.

Working in a different country was a completely new experience for me. I often found myself penned up in the office with Boming, the other intern from UofM I worked with and our two mentors, Cansu and Yigit mainly because there was a pretty strong language barrier that prevented us from exploring other departments of the company. Although we did have the chance to meet other employees from other departments during lunch it was fairly difficult to understand their exact role in the company. Compared to what I was used to from my internship with Cisco in the US it was a bit more difficult to network and meet 1on1 with people in the office because of the language barrier. Although I did find the work culture to be quite similar aside from the wonderful lady that brought us chai once before lunch and once after.

Boming and I were assigned one main project at the beginning of our internship, along with a few side projects given to us by our mentors. They asked us to research the financial figures of various banks and asset management companies across the US, Europe, and China. At first there was a little misunderstanding in what type of information we were expected to find but eventually we made it back on track and were able to present our findings to our higher-ups. I was also given a forecasting project in which I was asked to basically forecast the revenue for the remainder of 2014. I really enjoyed this because I was able to utilize the knowledge I learned in my IOE 202 class. Overall, I had a good work experience aside from the fact that we had quite a bit of downtime but I cant complain because the extra downtime allowed me to take days off and travel to places in Turkey like Kapadokya and Antalya.

Apart from work life during my last few weeks I was able to explore some new places around Istanbul. One Saturday I went on an ATV tour with 2 international students from Azerbaijan, shout out to Lala and Ashraf. The natural forest park was really close to the dorms we stayed in so it was a quick and easy day trip. We went for a 2 hour tour which only costed 100TL.

We each had our own ATV. Mine was the slowest so I guess I pulled the short straw.

View of Istanbul, seemed so small from up here.

At the end of our 2 hours our guide took us to climb a tree where we enjoyed fresh cherries straight off of the branch. The tree was nearly impossible to climb because it was wet and we were wearing rubber boots.

This was probably one of the funnest trips I had in Istanbul. It was a really good way to escape the busy paved roads of Istanbul. 

I also was able to explore more areas on the Asian side of Istanbul after work by taking the ferry across the Bosphorous. I found it a little more bearable than the 2 hour commute straight back from the office to our dorms. I visited places like Caddebostan, Bagdat St, and other places in and around Kadikoy. Kadikoy is one of the more populated areas of the asian side. One of my favorite places was near the water where you can get cheap balik ekmek (fish sandwich) for dinner and enjoy it next to the water as the sun sets.

This man was great at posing for pictures by the sunset.

I had a really great time in Istanbul and I will miss everything about it aside from the long commutes. But more than anything I will miss all the great people I met from all over the world and the stories we shared. On the 21st of June I had one last short tour around Istanbul before flying to South Korea. This marked the end of my first, and hopefully not my last, Istanbul story and the beginning of my South Korea story. Stay tuned for my Kapadokya and Antalya posts. I will do my best to write them soon before my Korean experiences begin to pile on. I can already tell you the posts will be a lot different in terms of content :)