Some may recall that this abroad columnist was to be in London this semester after a stopover in Istanbul. Well, sometimes planning for months on end and doing piles of paperwork doesn’t actually secure your place within an abroad program.
Now, I don’t want to name names or point fingers, but let’s just say that a certain University, American in origin, might have made some slight errors resulting in a student being stranded in a strange country on a program with no way to pay for said program.
And while I could conceivably turn this 600ish-word article into one massive dump-a-thon, I really wouldn’t want to invade Eagle Rant’s territory.
So, through the power of blind optimism and quick, reckless decision-making, I have created my own study abroad program. There is no deadline to apply because there’s no application!
One must simply book the soonest, cheapest flight to Istanbul, find the cheapest, most crowded flat, then simply find some way to provide for herself as quickly as possible without a workers permit, university degree or ability to speak the native language. I’ll call it the “Illegal Immigrant Experience!”
Well, as irresponsible as this all may sound, I am absolutely loving my time with IIE.
I found a job where I teach English to 4- to 5-year-old Turkish children while they run around a room manically putting glue sticks in their mouths, kicking each other and openly planning my demise in their secret tongue.
Meanwhile, I sing songs like “Days of the Week!” at them and pray they don’t wet themselves. I might have snapped by now, but they have the super effective survival mechanism of being just so darn adorable that my rage morphs into the inexplicable desire to give them candy.
Life in my flat is also a bit manic. But for all I know, this may be how all Turkish flats are. With this assumption in mind, I have done some calculations and cooked up Turkey statistics, based solely on Flat 4 of the building I live in.
The average home in Turkey contains 10 people. Each typically has 0.5 beds, 0.3 forks, 26 white socks, one toothbrush and zero cars. In Turkey, a household consumes roughly 28 loafs of bread, 15 containers of white cheese, 65 packs of cigarettes, nine liters of Fanta and one glass of milk.
Turkey’s population is extremely young, in fact a shocking 100 percent of Turks are under the age of 35. And Turks is the wrong label, because only 10 percent of the population is in fact Turkish. The majority of citizens are German (40 percent), followed by Macedonian (20 percent), American (20 percent) and unidentified drifters (10 percent).
Turkey also has an astonishing unemployment rate of 70 percent which might account for the six nights per week that households dedicate to celebrations involving the imbibing of various substances such as delivered meat wraps and cigarettes.
Currently the most prominent issues plaguing Turkey are unemployment, fleas, lack of dish soap, confusion over sock ownership and eviction. And while Turkey imports mass amounts of food, condoms, knock-off Ray Bans and bottled water, it’s only apparent export on record seems to be “Party Music” which is graciously shared with all surrounding people nightly.
These statistics may prove inaccurate as I gather more data but luckily, thanks to my participating in IIE, I will have three months to gather more data.
