Turkey - Transition Day

The last two teams presented to their client (with whom I sang American karaoke at a Turkish bar on Monday night) yesterday. That meant yesterday was cause for celebration. To close out the residency, and once we got back in Istanbul after our 3 hour bus ride back from Bursa, we took a dinner cruise along the Bosphorus with a DJ and open bar. There was much dancing and rejoicing. And we of course rocked it out to our favorite new song, Hadise's Düm Tek Tek (YouTube is blocked here, but I found it on Google Video). Listen to it and love it. We are bringing it to the States.

That's our boat.I'm on a boat.
Rumeli Hisari, built in 4 months when Sultan Mehmet was only 19 in preparation for conquering Constantinople.

On Friday I'm getting on a Turkish Airlines flight to Bodrum for a week at the all-inclusive Aegean Dream Resort, discounted by the GW alumna who had our professor when she was in undergrad. Gotta finish those damn reflections so I can really be on vacation...

Turkey - Day Eight

Tourist Day. We had a tour guide take us around to the Hippodrome, Blue Mosque, Aya Sofia, and the Sunken Palace Cistern. We closed out the day with a helicopter tour of Istanbul. Yeah, that's right. It was pretty ridiculous. I took 143 pictures over the course of the day. Here is just a dabble. I'll probably try to set up a Picasa page or something, because I'm over 300 pictures already for the whole trip.

Hippodrome....looks vaguely familiar...
If you look closely you can see the pictures of the horses & chariots.
Blue Mosque, aka Mosque of Sultan Ahmet I, from afar. You can't see all of them in this picture, but this is the only mosque in the world with 6 minarets.
Part of the courtyard area of the Blue Mosque.Dome of Blue Mosque.

Didn't need to cover my head, but they were giving wraps to women whose shoulders were showing too much. I thought I'd be okay in my t-shirt. I guess not.Aya Sofia. Was a church in Constantinople. Then the Ottoman Turk sultans turned it into a mosque. Then Atatürk, who founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and wanted the country to be more Western, turned it into a secular museum.Istanbul is an example of how East.......meets West. (Images from the leftover Christian artwork from when the Aya Sofia was a church.)
Cistern from when Istanbul was Constantinople. Those lights didn't exist back then, though.Medusa. She is kept at the back corner of the cistern so people wouldn't turn to stone from looking at her. Don't look at her eyes.
Helicopter time. My group looking back and telling me to ride in the front since I had my Flip video camera. They received no protest from me. Stay tuned for the video of the ride.
Blue Mosque (front) and Aya Sofia (back). Now you can see all 6 minarets on the Blue Mosque.

Birdseye of the underground Grand Bazaar. Reinforces why it's so easy to get lost in there and you should keep a buddy. So huge.

What a day. Tomorrow we go to Bursa so the other 2 groups can meet and present to their client. The school part of the Turkey trip is over halfway finished. I still need to do a bunch of visit preparation forms and 5 reflections. Unfortunately I can't just turn in this blog...

Tamamlandı!

That's Turkish for completed, finished, DONE!! My team gave our client presentation today and ROCKED IT! I'm so proud of how well we did, and our client really loved it. A second team presented after us for the same client on a different topic (and they were phenomenal as well), and when they finished, and took questions, our client said, "I have a question for both groups: would they be interested in being hired at ITKIB?"

Not only did the team do an amazing job, but I got an incredibly kind compliment from my professor on my part of the presentation specifically. I was an unprepared wreck of nerves last night as we ran through some stuff in her room at 10pm, so it was especially nice to hear.

A third group presented today for a different client, and they were all offered jobs as well! ("I have a question - when you finish your studies, will you come to work for Pantera?) GW MBAs represent! We all feel a thousand pounds lighter. What a marathon. And the other two groups don't present until next week (after we go to another city on Sunday), so we can all celebrate together tonight.

Post Presentation Picture: Elation and Exhaustion

Also, yesterday was an incredible day for site visits and the Istanbul experience. Will write about it at some point. For now, it's time for a group dinner and celebration down by the Bosphorus. It's going to be a good night. But we can't be out too late, because we have tourist day tomorrow! Hooray!

Point of Power

Pardon the pause in daily Turkish updates as I work to finish the Power Point for my group's presentation on Friday. Rest assured, the tummy is better, I'm going on site visits and ohhh am I eating some delicious food.
Here's my team at our site visit on Tuesday to Mavi Jeans. "Mavi" means "blue" in Turkish. Get it? Blue jeans. Pretty creative.

Turkey - Day Four

Updates on drama

• Professor still doesn't have her luggage. It's back in the States from Brazil, but stuck at JFK. Delta says it's Turkish Airlines' responsibility. Turkish Airlines says it's Delta's responsibility. She order some suits online and they should arrive tomorrow. All the client gifts are in the luggage, along with her audio recording equipment she needs for the research she is doing in London after this project. At least we make her laugh.
  
• The invalids are feeling better. We went on our first client visit today and I was able to eat food. Lots of food.
• Presentation is coming along. Looking forward to Friday afternoon.
  

Today was a cool day. We visited Mavi Jeans, which for those of you who are not fashionistas, is a pretty high end brand. It's the leading brand in Turkey, does really well globally, and has one retail store in the Union Square area of NYC.

Wall o' jeans.

Next we went to a carpet store, which was kind of random, but it was cool to hear about that side of the textile industry, when we've been focusing on just textiles and apparel for the past 8 weeks. He taught us the difference between high and low quality wool and silk rugs. We saw some that were as much as 35,000 (I'm not sure if that was lira or USD, but it's still A LOT!). They were beautiful. We sang "A Whole New World."

On a magic carpet ride.

We finished at the carpet store a little earlier than expected, so we went to the Grand Bazaar to fill time before dinner. Wow. What a zoo. Huge. And talk about history. It was built over 500 years ago when the Ottoman Turks overtook Constantinople and it became Istanbul (cue They Might Be Giants). I didn't buy anything there, though, because we are going to Bursa on Sunday, and our professor tells us the market there will be cheaper and we will need to bargain less.

Just one of many entrances.

We closed out the night with an AMAZING dinner and alumni mixer at the Hotel Sultanhan. We ate on the terrace level, which had floor to ceiling windows, and were able to go on the roof top to see some ridiculous views of the city. Couldn't stop taking pictures. Here's one of them.

That's me, just Bri, in Turkey.

And it turns out I don't like Turkish coffee. That was kind of a disappointment. I'm not going to give up on it yet. I didn't have it with sugar. I will try again with sugar.

Bona Fide

It's official. I'm truly an international traveler now.

Our professor sent out an email last night when she got to the hospital saying WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. She appreciated that we were slow to call her last night because we were worried about her rest and well-being, but she emphasized that she needs to be called immediately in case of a problem. It's her job to take care of us, and we also mean a lot to her. We should notify her if we "get lost, in trouble, or don't feel well (even stomach problems)."

Hmmm....well, since you asked...

I'll save you the details, since you can probably figure those out, but let's just say the delicious stuffed potato didn't agree with my stomach as well as it agreed with my taste buds. I wrote to her to let her know, saying I had taken 4 Pepto tablets because I was worried about the 1.5 hour bus ride to our first client meeting this morning.

Cue page long email response -- stay in the hotel, don't risk it, yes it's your client, but this is more important, don't take meds, drink water, could be bacterial, let me know if you get a fever, drink water, but not tap water, eat the BRAT diet (bananas, rice, apple sauce, toast), no dairy, trust me, I have experience. Alright, then. Luckily, today is probably the least eventful day on the itinerary, so if it had to happen, I'm glad it happened today.

So here I am, in my hotel bed, with 2 1.5L bottles of water near me and bread from breakfast to last me all day. At least it will give me time to work on the Power Point for our presentation on Friday, but yeah, this sucks. And it's 2am back home right now, so no one is on GChat to keep me company...whomp whomp.

I'm so happy to join the international travelers' club. :-/

Turkey - Day Two

Our professor finally made it to Turkey at midnight last night. She was stuck on the tarmac at Dulles trying to get to JFK for three hours. She missed her connecting flight, which was a direct flight. When she got to JFK she sprinted to her next flight option but, even though the plane was still there, the gate was closed and she wasn't allowed on. She got the next flight to London and had a 9 hour layover, just enough time to get a $150 day pass at a hotel for a shower and nap. Instead of hanging out with us this morning after breakfast, she had to wander around Istanbul to go suit shopping. To add on to the fun, she's 3 months pregnant (and had to find maternity clothes), has 150 undergraduate exams to grade, and hasn't returned our drafts of our deliverables with feedback yet. Poor woman can't catch a break.

After a class meeting and a guest speaker this afternoon, we headed to the Ortaköy area, which is by the water and, as our professor described it, a great place for dinner, shopping, and people watching.

Purdy.
Famous stuffed potatoes. This picture doesn't do them justice.
This gives a better idea of the height. My arm was tired after holding this while I ate.

Remember how I said my professor can't catch a break? Well, she decided not to join us at Ortaköy so she could continue with her work, sleep, and you know, take care of her unborn child. Unfortunately, we made tonight a little more exciting than she probably would have liked. The bus was going to pick us up and take us back to the hotel at 9:30. After having one drink (I swear, just one drink each) at a pub, we headed to the potato stands around 8:30 or so.

After one bite, one of my classmates collapsed in the middle of the street. She was out for a minute or two before waking up. In the meantime, we called our TA, but he was on a dinner boat, so it would be a little bit before he got there. We had broken up into smaller groups, so we didn't have our native Turk with us, so another classmate ran off to find her. In the meantime, we ran to the police down the street and they called an ambulance. One of the vendors gave us water for said collapsed classmate. Lots of Turks stopped to help. By the time the ambulance arrived, she was awake and sitting on a bench, with a rockin' knot on her head. The paramedics told her to throw up. Huh? It wasn't the food, she was sharing the potato with another classmate, and we were all eating them. Before she collapsed, she said her chest hurt.

The ambulance left because her pulse was back to normal and she was awake and we didn't trust them. Our Turk drove her, her closest friend, our first responder classmate, and our TA to the hospital. TA called our professor, who of course hopped in a cab to go meet them at the hospital. (Added drama - there was bickering as to whether we should call the prof because the TA was slow to do so).

Is the suspense enough? Classmate is fine. As some predicted, she was just fatigued and dehydrated. Apparently she hadn't slept in two days, and wasn't keeping up with the water, and something similar had happened to her one time before. Gotta keep drinking water when you are traveling, I've been told. I think they left the hospital about a half hour or hour ago.

By the way, apparently I'm not so good in crisis mode, especially during my first trip abroad. I was like a deer in the headlights with shaky hands. I stood back and let other people handle the situation. Better to not be in the way and not give wrong opinions on solutions. So don't get hurt or sick if you travel with me. I won't be much help.

General Thoughts - first trip abroad

My roommate for the trip just asked me what I thought about my first international trip. I realized I said some things to her that I didn't include in the first two posts:

• Free booze on international flights is pretty cool
• Sleeping on international flights is pretty tough (for me and my long legs), but I do like the sleeping mask they give you.
  
• There isn't a water fountain to be found in the Charles de Gaulle (Paris) airport
• When we were waiting for the bus, we had cabbies try to make deals with us (a group of 9) to take us to our hotel. Our professor warned us not to take a cab unless we wanted an adventure and/or didn't mind getting ripped off. We stuck with the bus.
• I mentioned the traffic before, but seriously, it's chaotic. But at least they are little cars, and no SUVs like in the States.
  

Other thoughts/occurrences:

• I peed in a hole in the restaurant last night. The toilet, that is, was a porcelain hole in the ground.
• Beer is measured in centiliters. 70 cl is a very large beverage.
  
• My bizarre sleeping habits have translated well and I'm not sure if I'm going to have trouble with jet lag. I went to bed at 11:45 Turkish time, and woke up at 6am, felt fine, but went back to sleep, got up at 8, and feel amazing.
  
• Our professor missed her flight out of Dulles. We got an email from her around 6pm asking one of us to leave a European power adapter for her at the front desk because she was going to get in around midnight and had lost her luggage....

Time for breakfast...

Turkey - Day One

I flew from DC to Paris with 4 of my classmates, and ran into 5 more classmates in Paris waiting for the flight to Istanbul, on which we all were flying. Did a little bit of sleeping on each of the flights (which were about 8 hours and 3 hours respectively), but nothing that would really make you feel rested.

We landed around 2:30pm Turkey time, 7:30am DC time. We waited for a bus to take us to our hotel, and traffic was terrible. But while were traveling to the hotel, we were observant of the surroundings, because, while on our project, we are going to be keeping a field log full of reflections. Our first is about our "first impressions" of Istanbul, so to drop the cliche, we noted and shared examples of how Istanbul is truly a city where "East meets West, tradition meets modernity." We drove along the coast of the Sea of Marmara, and I felt like I was driving along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, with people and families out along the park, having cookouts and playing soccer. But then we turn our heads to the left and saw all the ruins of the ancient city along with countless mosques.

Incluing waiting for the bus time, riding the bus time, walking from the bus to the hotel time, plus check-in time, I got to my room at 5pm. We can see the Bosporus Strait from our room. We hadn't eaten since noon-ish so a group of us decided to explore, since we don't have anything school related until 1pm tomorrow. We walked to the main strip with food, shopping, and lots of people - Istiklal Avenue. Whereas, on our drive we saw many women wearing head scarves and being fully covered, Istiklal could have been a just another packed street in NYC or DC. Perhaps U St, with all the skinny jeans and Converse that I saw. But throw in the occassional call to prayer from the many mosques in the city, and you are reminded of where you are.

Our group grew as more people got into town, and culminated in a fun dinner with "traditional Turkish food and beer" as our waiter marketed it to us. Four courses of deliciousness.




Back in our room now, we have our balcony door open so we can enjoy the perfect weather, hear the sounds of the still bustling street. There's also some traditional Turkish music being played, which makes closing out this evening that much more enjoyable. Sleep now. In country projects start tomorrow.

Turkey - Day Zero

I stayed up until 5:30am packing and still had a lot more to do. My mom and I got pedicures at 11am for an early Mother's Day outing, then I had about 3 hours to pack before go time. Turns out I didn't know what all to bring and wound up packing a lot.


The parents got to my place, some advice was given, and some readjustment of bags occurred. We left, I made it through security, and I was on my way to Turkey, an excited bundle of joy.

Stay Tuned

So obviously I haven't been good about keeping this here blog up to date. Turns out business school keeps you pretty busy.

What's going on -- classes are over. I should be studying for finals right now, which are tomorrow and Tuesday, with a take home-monstrous essays-type exam due Thursday. Then at 6:40pm on Friday I get on a plane to Turkey. That's right, freakin' Turkey. Off to present on the consulting project we've been working on the past 7 weeks. Did I mention this is my first trip abroad? Hot damn, I'm excited.

The first 5 or so days will be really busy and stressful because we will be finalizing our project for our client. But we are one of the first groups to present, so for the rest of the time my group can relax while the other groups finish up and present their projects. And our professor has planned some amazing cultural activities and outings for us. I'm going to do my best to blog every night or every other night while I'm there, posting pictures too. We have to keep a travel log for the class anyway, so I'll probably just post a lot of those reflections.

Then after 10 days of school stuff, I'm sticking around for another 9 days or so and going to an all-inclusive resort on the Aegean Sea! Ohhhh my goodness. I can't wait. We're getting a sweet discount too from a GW alumna who works there. I'm packing my sun screen.

Fly home on the 29th. Celebrate a best friend's birthday. Say hello to the parents. Then on June 1, I start my internship. Oh yes, I got the internship that I was dying to get. Just found out on Thursday. (Screams with excitement). It's perfect in every way, and I can't wait.

I just need to survive this week....