First Week Impressions of an Italian Traveler !

I flew from Venice to Istanbul one week ago.
The impact has been strong: from a peaceful, no-car and waterful small city to a big metropol like Istanbul...
I jumped into a landscape which was absolutely new for me. The language, the colours and smell of people and street, everyhting seemed caothic and amplified when I get off the plane and through the metro I reached Taksim (the city centre) but while I was waiting to board on the plane and during the flight I already could perceive a different tone.

A girl in the tube gave me some tip on how to reach the Sabiha Gökçen airport, so I went to Taksim to take the bus and at night I was arrived in Gaziantep! My one-day travel was came to an end and I have been received by my new friends and collagues at the airport that brought me home!
The house was great and my roomate Yana is a beautiful person as well.

My working week passed very fast even if it has been intense and at times tiring because I had to get used to a new routine. I was surprised to see the office too: many women and girls are spending the day making artcrafts... something difficult to find in my city, Milan, where these kind of jobs are reserved to old men and maybe very few young 'alternative' people.
Me and Yana started our Mozaic course drawing shapes on a paper and reproducing them in a framework!
Then we started to taste the different foods and, I must confess, it's a harder life for me, vegeterian, 'cause everybody eats meat and this seems to be the local specialty.

I had my first english lesson and it was funny and interesting at the same time: many people has a low english level but somebody is really good at it... I hope to be useful to help my students improve their knowledge because I think that english is an important tool for the people.

And what else, I wake up every morning with the bird's chant, and this is great - they have built their nest just in my window! - and some times during the night, if my sleep is not deep, with the mosque prayer of 4.30 am - and this is less great :)

We had a kind of wild weekend camping close to the lake Dongel and I really enjoied it... I will charge soon some pictures of me, Yana, Mahmut, Zeynep and his friend among the trees and the river, a dreamplace where you can have lunch and sleep on some special wood platform built on the water stream!

My second week is starting and who knows which adventures it wıll take... the prayers are now loud in the air and for me it means that lunch time has came!!