A brief photo tour of life at Bilkent so far

As promised in my last post, now that my camera works and I can upload photos onto my computer I will provide you all with a brief photo tour of life here. By "life" I mean dorm pictures, janky toilet pictures, roommate pictures, etc. I am especially excited about the picture of my room. Why? Because it is so small.

Here we go.
This is the H Building. It is where I have every single one of my classes. I believe it is one of the biggest buildings on campus and houses a large number of Humanities departments, including the Archaeology department (1st floor). It's kind of a boring building, but that's ok. I have come to accept the modern style. Or at least, more modern than Berkeley buildings.

This is my walk back from the H building to my dorm, which sometimes I make multiple times a day. Look at how green it is! I'm almost sad that it won't be as green as soon as summer is over, even though it's hot as all hell here and it's almost October. Most of the time there are people sitting on the little patches of grass on either side of the walk. It's also very full of stairs. I think when this picture was taken I had already walked up 2 other stair segments.

This is my dorm. Wait, I just realized that there are 3 dormitories in this picture. Mine is the one on the far left, sorta behind the trees. It's in a prime location because it's right behind the grassy knoll where people sit and hang out after class. What you really can't see in this picture is the French kid who constantly juggles. Constantly.

This is the super ghetto kitchen that I make all my food in. Notice the lack of oven. Also notice the fact that I will be COOKING OFF OF HOTPLATES FOR THE NEXT 4 MONTHS. Never again will I complain about the Hoyt kitchen. This by far takes the cake as most communist era kitchen. What you can't see in the picture is the microwave (which didn't work this afternoon), large refrigerator, and toaster thing that looks like a George Foreman grill. I am tempted to cook hamburgers on it.

Whoa, what the hell is this? More importantly, what the hell is this doing in my dorm? There are two of them in the bathroom across the hall from my room, which comprises half the stalls in that bathroom. And it's a girls bathroom. There aren't even boys allowed inside my dormitory building. And it's not like it's a hold over from some period when only boys were allowed at this school. This dorm was renovated this summer. All the facilities are basically new. So this was put in my bathroom because people actually use it. In fact, these strange hole in the floor toilets are all over campus. I had to pee in one this afternoon in the H building because the normal toilet was being used. Why do they even keep these things around? They smell funny. I guess they bring a whole new meaning to "squating" and "standing" stalls. Also note the decided lack of toilet paper because they don't give us any.

Holy crap its the official first picture of my room, complete with roommate! I told Valentina to look excited to be in our room, so she of course wanted to ensure that everyone knew that this room is a war free zone. I sleep on the top bunk with the treacherous and completely vertical ladder that I must scale at least twice a day, sometimes more, fearing for my life every time. My desk is the one that's the closest to the window. I'm actually standing slightly outside of the doorway if that gives you any idea as to how small this room is. What you can't see in the picture is our tiny wardrobe on the left and our mini fridge that is also on the left. I like the room so far. We'll see how much I like it by January.

So there it is. A small tour of my day to day life at Bilkent. More to come later.