Serendipity in Istanbul: Registration and Fun!

Last week I’ve been quite busy with the registration at Bilgi. What started so smoothly became a disaster in the end. After I found out that it wasn’t possible to register for MA courses online I’ve been mailing and calling everyone from the International Office to the Faculty Departments. Even our supposed Erasmus Student Coordinator couldn’t help us out and referred us to our actual coordinator...it would have helped if they have given us the right information.
Luckily I had some success at the Architecture Design faculty. Yee! The instructor of a course I wanted to take turned out to be the author of the book I will use as a guideline for my thesis. I’m really happy she accepted me at the course even though she never had a international student in that course as long as she’s been teaching it. I thought this was nice and scary at the same time. Because it means that all the discussions will be in Turkish as most Turkish students don’t speak English very well at Bilgi. Well see how it turns out.
Furthermore I’ve chosen a course at Cultural Studies which Miryam also wants to take, so it’s nice if we have one class together and can help each other out. Unfortunately the department director of Cultural Studies didn’t answer our mails so we still don’t know if we can take it or not. We decided to just go to the first class as if we were accepted at it.
Next to all these registration problems I’ve been having a great time here! Together with Miryam I went to Ikea to get some things for my room. Just going and leaving from Ikea was a little adventure while it was 10 pm when we left and stood in a complete deserted dark parking lot trying to find our way back. The other day we tried to get our student transportation cards. It’s called Akbil and it’s really useful and cheap for students. But since it took us a lot of time getting it I decided to call it Kakbil…I think it suits better. Also we joined the Erasmus Student Club to a trip to Pierre Loti Hill. I still haven't decided if it was nice or not...
Last night we met with the other girls from Holland who will be in Istanbul this semester as well. We had dinner and went for Özsüt where they make delicious deserts. Tonight we’ll go out because there will be several reggae nights to celebrate Bob Marley’s birthday.