First Week of Classes

I just finished up my first week of classes at Bogazici. I am taking four courses this semester in order to have time to travel and not have to spend all my time doing work. On Monday, I only had Intro to Electrical Engineering. It's a class of about 75 people and everything went along smoothly. I think that I am the only American in all of my engineering classes, which is pretty cool.

On Tuesday, I had Thermodynamics and Turkish. In Turkey, classes meet more than they do at Lehigh. I have classes from 4-5 hours a week instead of 3. It's kind of a pain and it is really hard for me to sit through classes for two hours at a time since I'm not used to it. In Thermo, my professor introduced me to the entire class as the 'American exchange student.' I was really embarrassed, but in a way it ended up working out for the best. There are a bunch of students in that class that are studying at Purdue next semester, so they wanted to talk to me about the states. They told me where to buy books for cheap too! It's only around 20 USD for a book here which is amazing compared to the 150 in the states.

Lastly, on Wednesday I went to my first class of Systems Simulation. So far it seems like it could be a very interesting class. It is the hardest class in my major at Lehigh so it will be nice to get it over with while I'm abroad. There are also only about 10 people in that class, so it should be pretty cool. He brings up that I am from America like every ten seconds though. I had a good perception overall of my classes so far.

On Monday night, I got to go to a club where they were only playing Beatles music for the night. It was pretty entertaining to see that the Turkish people knew more words to the songs than I did. This weekend, I got to see a friend from high school that was visiting from Jerusalem. I went to a market by my dorm and got some fresh fruit (which ended up not being so fresh). Lastly, today I went to a huge Purim party at this convention center. It was SO much better than I expected it to be. There were hundreds of people there. We got a free dinner out of it as well! Such delicious options. There were men on stilts, inflatable slides, games to play, pony rides, most people were dressed up, and it was overall just really fun. Good week!

Until Later!