In the interest of helping you form a more complete mental picture

I realize I have done very little in the way of illuminating my environs.  My flat is on the second floor of a five-story apartment building named Gül D1.  Gül is the Turkish word for rose, but D1 is a mystery.  I am fairly certain that it doesn’t refer to our block, as our block is actually a narrow finger in a delta of several streets that flow down the back side of the hill from campus.  This fanning delta must be, without exaggeration, at least 30 degrees steep in places.  Given the casual mania of most Istanbul drivers (more on that forthcoming) I dont' want to be walking them when the first snow hits.  However, when this hill does become a white, frictionless deathtrap for the hundreds of cars and minibuses that already careen along it seemingly unperterbed by the laws of physics, I doubt I'll find much refuge in my room.  Living on the second story puts me on the first floor on the uphill side.  Actually, I’m slightly subterranean.  My window looks out at  stucco wall and a sliver of the dizzying asphalt ascent beyond.  This view is preceeded by a small level area that could be construed (if one were in the right state of mind (panic)) as a runoff area for a runaway car.  I wouldn't be at all surprised to look up from reading in bed this winter to find one of those very nice, but especially maniacal BMWs two thirds of the way through my north wall, which, I’m afraid, would likely bring the poor old building down on top of us. 

Another part about being at street level means that I’m intimately aquanted with street sounds.  I am beginning to recognize individual cars by their distinct chugging and clanking noises as they struggle up the hill every morning.  My neighborhood also has two types of push-cart-men.  One is a water-seller who goes around during the day shouting suyu which means the water in the same tone a Texan hog rancher might shout sooweee.  Despite being somewhat annoying, this has a certain Orientalist charm.  Slightly less charming is the scrap-metal guy, whose push cart is full of metal odds and ends collected from the neighborhood that he takes to a plant to recycle.  I have not yet been able to decipher the meaning of his ululating cry, but there’s something about my window that compells one to explode from his lungs whenever he’s beside it.   Better still, he and his compatriots troll the streets until the small hours.  Suffice to say, if you’re looking to get rid of some scrap metal at two in the morning, you’re up to no good.

But back to the flat.  It’s a charmer with wood and marble everything and big iron bars on all the windows, but tends to creak in strong winds and drips in odd places when it rains, suggesting deep cracks running through places they shouldn’t.  The plumbing is old enough to have been done by Atatürk himself.  Pipes poke out of the walls in unexpected places.  Periodically a gurgling banshee wail begins somewhere upstairs and rattles its way down the pipes that run through the wall I share with the bathroom.  I believe I am getting intimately aquanted with biorhythms of my upstairs neighbors.

Our water is heated by a blue box on the kitchen wall.  We leave it unplugged because of a leak in the coils that the water passes through.  They are in the top of the box.  If you leave the machine on long enough, the water gradually courses its way down to the eletrical heating component on the bottom and short curcuits the entire thing.  This limits hot showers to around ten minutes (not exactly a hardship, I know but I'm a bit of a shower hedonist), fifteen if you’re willing to risk opening the bathroom door to the smell of singed plastic.  This hasn’t been a concern recently, however, because for no obvious reason (although I more than half suspect dark magic) our water pressure has been twentiethed.  The heater seems to find heating such a piddling amount of water beneath its dignity, so I’ve been taking frigid pseudo-sponge baths of late.  

Although I still brush my teeth with it, the water is not recommended for drinkng, despite purportedly being chlorinated.  The website for the school's foreigner dorm says that it is entirely potable, but recommends students drink bottled water.  Well, an Ausie student decided to take that at face value won himself a trip to the hospital.  He caught some sort of bug that set him leaking from every orifice possible.  Although the connection is textbook post hoc ergo propter hoc, the doctors said it was waterborne.  He was put on an IV and some heavy-duty antibiotics and is just about recovered now.  Like many cities in developing nations, Istanbul is turning out to be an unpredictable melange of the ultra-modern and the throwback.  We are still waiting on a resolution to the water pressure issue.  Unfortunately, Turkey doesn't seem to have modified its tennant laws much since Ottoman times.  We can be evicted on a whim and the onus for fixing broken apartment appliances and even building’s front door seems to fall on us.  I suppose I’m just lucky that we aren’t made to wear serf blouses and farm watermellons.