Odds and Ends

This picture has my survival kit for Turkey. This is basically all I will need to live here indefinitely. It has a small hot water heater replete with spoon, my new coffee cup for Nescafe and soup, my tea thermos on a homemade coaster, my travel spoon/fork/chopsticks from Mitsuwa, and Bratz wipes for cleanliness. I guess I didn't include my Swiss Army knife in the photo, but it is also an important travel dealie. (You can imagine it in the blank space at the bottom of the photo.) I am very, very glad I have the travel cutlery and tea thermos. They are two of the most useful things in the universe. I highly recommend everyone travel with them.

Speaking of really important things, here is the kitchen. Please note that on the right there is an additional 2L hot water heater which I bought yesterday. I take hot water very seriously. There is also a giant bag of tea and a box of sugar cubes on the table which you can't really see, but they go hand in hand with my survival kit.


Here is a photo illustrating that my sheets match my computer. They also match my coffee cup and plate.


And here is my whole bedroom, which has two beds. The rules of the building include "No visitors overnight except your mother and siblings", but after we put up quite a fight they said Fulbrighters could use the extra bed for one or two nights if the need arose. Then the landlord looked at us very angrily, suggesting we should not actually take advantage of this special permission. We shall see.


The building also has roughly 1,000,000 (bir milyon) security cameras, and at night a little old woman watches them like a soap opera ("Life's Hallways" would probably be my title for it). We have to sacrifice a bit of privacy to have a beautiful apartment, I suppose.