I went to Bilgi University's Santral Istanbul campus today to meet with a professor. I'd been there once before, for a music festival a few years ago, and it is one of the coolest looking campuses anywhere. It was the Ottoman Empire's first power plant--the control station is now a museum--and has a steam punk industrial look to it.
Here's the main building is in better weather than today:
I'm in a fancy place in Cihangir because a friend of a friend is renting the room and willing to do so by the week. This is good for me because I may go to Diyarbakir in the next few weeks. But increasingly I think I'll just stay in Istanbul this trip because it has taken me the past month and a half just to make real progress in getting the right connections with journalists and fixers and many of the foreigners at least will have left by the time I return next spring and so I will have to start from scratch in some ways. The new (human) housemate is super nice but I may look for cheaper accommodations outside of the Foreigner Village as Cihangir is unaffectionately known, somewhere I can buy a newspaper and speak Turkish.
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