pat loughery

Day 1: October 20, 2008

Today I checked out of the Istanbul hostel I’ve been staying at since Saturday and into the class hotel. In the taxi between the two locations, the 1PM Muslim call to prayer happened, and it was fascinating for me to hear their chanted prayers echoing throughout the city. It was a new experience for me and it felt like a sacred moment.

After checking in to the new hotel I was doing some writing in the lobby. Robert Calvert and Randy White came in from their lunch, and we chatted a while. Hungry but not wanting to walk far, I got some baclava from a bakery next door. It was delicious but incredibly rich and sweet. Other students filtered in later in the afternoon, and one of my favorite times in a BGU class began as we learned about each other and our stories. I was happy to see several familiar faces from Celtic Trail and from my recent Overture I.

During this meet and greet time, however, I was rushing to try to finish a paper for a Research Bridge assignment course done and uploaded to the Moodle course site. I was hoping to finish the paper before Orthodox Trail began so that I could get feedback on the paper at the same time I was concentrating mostly on the trip. I didn’t post this document until about 15 minutes before we left to go to dinner.

The plan was for the students to walk 10 minutes to the restaurant at which we would eat our first meal together. However, my ankle being in the condition it is in, apparently we decided to take our bus instead. I didn’t feel too bad about that (though if my ankle were fine I’d much rather have my feet on the brick to get a feel for the city). I especially didn’t feel bad when it took us 15 minutes or more to drive to the restaurant in the bus. The estimate of ten minutes to walk was a long way off.

Our dinner was in a market area that was clean, appeared safe and was wonderfully lit. Unfortunately I chose to leave my camera at the hotel so I missed some great photo opportunities. After lugging my best digital camera and three carefully selected lenses across the planet, the least I could have done was to bring the bag with me. Dinner was bread with a salsa dip, some small fish and what I initially thought was yogurt and cucumber but was instead something very different; then a fried bread appetizer, then vegetables and finally pan fried sea bass. It was tasty and a great way to start the class. However, the confusion that our wait staff had on our attempt to pay them correctly was frustrating and took more than half an hour to resolve

The bus made several bad turns on the way home, and our route took us around the city with no easy ways to simply U-turn. I felt sorry for students who really needed to use the restroom.

From the conversations I had with people at dinner and on the bus, I was much looking forward to deepening our relationships and learning and experiencing together.

On the negative side, I was quite apprehensive about the amount of walking which was planned for the next two days. I planned to keep up as much as possible, but knew I would likely have to sit out a good deal of the walking tours around Istanbul.

I was also not thrilled that the Internet connectivity was spotty at best in the lobby, and in our room it was painful. I’d rather have no Internet access than have the tantalizing glimpse of doing a chat with my wife and kids after class. But of course I’d much rather have a strong connection so that we could do a video chat instead.

The moments during the course in which we had video chats over Skype were incredibly helpful to me, and I told they were to my family back in Seattle also.

I’m amazed at the technology which fuels globalization. Even though I work in the software industry, it is situations like this one that remind me that the world is becoming flatter, as Thomas Friedmann argues in his book The World is Flat. This isn’t always a beneficial thing, however. It is jarring to see the large number of Muslims in traditional dress, including women in full burkas, walking in front of western advertisements for global brands such as Coca-Cola. The world is flattening and cultures are mixing, but that does not at all mean that the best ideas and cultural influences are winning the battle for the attention of the people.