Princess

I am all registered for classes and my schedule has congealed into something that I hope will resemble its final form.  Registration has been a bit of a headache.  The system is largely predicated on the assumption that you will not get into half of the classes you want or need.  Rather than the SPU system of staggered online registration system which paces student registration out over four days according to credit seniority, Boğaziçi has opted for a much more democratic battle royale system in which ten-thousand students all get to take a stab at once as of 10:01 am on the morning of registration.  The school computers have a more direct connections to the servers so students cue up and take numbers hours beforehand to get a chance to edge out their off campus peers.  Inevitably the massive influx of traffic slows the servers to a crawl. I watched many students got tantalizingly close to finalizing their schedules only to see the wait for loading pages grow from seconds to minutes as they got tantalizingly close.  Then the servers crashed.  The International office opted to spare us visiting students the anxiety of this slow motion anarchy by not activating our login IDs in time to participate.  I couldn't even log in until that evening.  This put my chances of immediately getting into the classes I wanted at somewhere between a snowball in hell and a candle in a cyclone.  

Early in the afternoon as I compulsively tapped the refresh button on my browser I came to the conclusion that snagging a spot in Pre-Ottoman Turkish history wasn’t worth the ulcer I was nursing.  Classes be damned.  If absolute worst came to absolute worst, at least I’d be taking basket weaving in Istanbul (and not have to worry about Christmas presents).  I dropped everything and went with a friend to the Princess Islands, which are neither metaphor nor innuendo, but rather a small chain out in the Sea of Marmara about forty-five minutes away by ferry.  Having done little preliminarly research, I’m afraid we picked a bum island (there were five to choose from).  A Turkish naval base sprawled over most of it.  Men behind barbed wire fondled big guns and alternately scowled and smirked as we walked by on our way to the beach... which happened to be perhaps the only place in the entire Sea of Marmara where the water is brown instead of azure.  Plastic trash bags rolled in limp surf like depressed jellyfish and two crusty French men, spedos nearly invisible under baguette-fed bulk, lurked in the shallows.  We opted to walk another mile past the beach to an Orthodox monastery we'd heard tell of, purportedly Byzantine.  We found it, but it was being lived in by a small Turkish family and the only monks on the premices were in the overgrown cemetary out back.  Alas, the building was about five hundred years too new to be a legacy of Eastern Rome.  It was all gaudy pastel icons and painted glass windows.  Unfortunatley, its relative newness did not save it from being utterly delapidated.  But, as seen in the late afternnon light, the peeling paint, cracked walls and broken windows lent the building a sense of moldering dignity and serenity that I doubt it enjoyed in life.  Also,  one of the stained glass skylights depicted a beatific bearded man flying a pretty lewd gesture, which, even if the photos did not turn out, certainly made my day. 

I did eventually make it back and hammered out a working schedule.  I am not taking basket-weaving.