These took FOREVER to make but they were soooooooo worth it.
Ali with his mom.
Yummy lentil soup.
These green beans were amazing.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Ice cream and helva dessert
Dondurmalı ve İrmik Tatlısı
Note: Irmik is durum semolina. You may be able to buy this as semolina, farina, or cream of wheat. If you get the cream of wheat, just remember that you don't want a pre-cooked or "instant" variety. Sometimes you can get semolina flour. This is OK if it's coarsely ground (more the texture of cornmeal than the texture of regular wheat flour).
There's a similar recipe on Binnur's Turkish Cookbook website here: http://www.turkishcookbook.com/2005/04/semolina-dessert_18.php We've used this website a lot for recipes and have generally been happy with it.
Here's Alp's mom and grandmother's recipe:
4T butter
6T olive oil
650 g semolina
2 c sugar
2 c water
pinenuts or currants (optional)
Put the butter, olive oil, and semolina into a large saucepan over medium heat and cook until the semolina starts to get toasty. All of the semolina should be damp and crumbly once it's stirred in. Stir frequently to make sure the bottom doesn't burn. Alp's mother and grandmother say you can tell it's ready when it starts to smell nice. If you want to use pine nuts, toast these in a different pan. Combine sugar and water in a different pan and heat it to melt the sugar. Once the semolina is ready, add half of the sugar water solution, toasted pine nuts, and/or currants, and stir. Once everything is mixed in, the semolina mixture is ready.
Spoon a scoop of the semolina mixture into a cup or bowl and pack it down. Put ice cream on top of this, and then top the whole dessert with more semolina mixture and serve immediately.
This dessert is often given out to neighbors and friends when a person in the family dies. After the funeral, a family member makes the irmik helvasi and gives it to people who visit the family and to neighbors along with a request to pray for the person who has died.
Note: Irmik is durum semolina. You may be able to buy this as semolina, farina, or cream of wheat. If you get the cream of wheat, just remember that you don't want a pre-cooked or "instant" variety. Sometimes you can get semolina flour. This is OK if it's coarsely ground (more the texture of cornmeal than the texture of regular wheat flour).
There's a similar recipe on Binnur's Turkish Cookbook website here: http://www.turkishcookbook.com/2005/04/semolina-dessert_18.php We've used this website a lot for recipes and have generally been happy with it.
Here's Alp's mom and grandmother's recipe:
4T butter
6T olive oil
650 g semolina
2 c sugar
2 c water
pinenuts or currants (optional)
Put the butter, olive oil, and semolina into a large saucepan over medium heat and cook until the semolina starts to get toasty. All of the semolina should be damp and crumbly once it's stirred in. Stir frequently to make sure the bottom doesn't burn. Alp's mother and grandmother say you can tell it's ready when it starts to smell nice. If you want to use pine nuts, toast these in a different pan. Combine sugar and water in a different pan and heat it to melt the sugar. Once the semolina is ready, add half of the sugar water solution, toasted pine nuts, and/or currants, and stir. Once everything is mixed in, the semolina mixture is ready.
Spoon a scoop of the semolina mixture into a cup or bowl and pack it down. Put ice cream on top of this, and then top the whole dessert with more semolina mixture and serve immediately.
This dessert is often given out to neighbors and friends when a person in the family dies. After the funeral, a family member makes the irmik helvasi and gives it to people who visit the family and to neighbors along with a request to pray for the person who has died.
Betül's red lentil soup (mercimek çorbası)
Red lentil soup is an old standby here. Almost every Turkish restaurant serves it, and it's usually good, so it's a staple in the diets of many of us. Many of the students agree that the best lentil soup they had while they were here was made by Betül. Fortunately I had some time to cook with her on Friday, so I'm giving you my estimation of her recipe. I made it last night and needed to add a little more water so I'm adjusting that, but otherwise it worked well.
250 g red lentils
1 small onion
4 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2-3 T tomato paste or 3-4 fresh tomatoes
4 cups boiling water
3 tsp salt
black pepper to taste
red pepper (pul biber) to taste
dried mint to taste
Put the lentils in a bowl with water and soak for about 10-15 minutes. Put oil into a large saucepan and heat. Finely dice the onion and cook in the oil. Once the onions are cooked, add either tomato paste or finely diced tomatoes. Cook for a few more minutes. Drain the water from the lentils and put the lentils into the pot. Stir. Add boiling water. Bring the pot back to boiling, stirring frequently. Add salt, black pepper, red pepper, and mint. Cook for about 1/2 hour until the lentils are starting to get mushy and fall apart. At this point you can either blend the soup with a hand blender if you want a smooth soup or serve as is. Serve with sliced lemon (it's excellent with lemon juice squeezed into it) and red pepper for people to add if they like the soup more spicy.
250 g red lentils
1 small onion
4 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2-3 T tomato paste or 3-4 fresh tomatoes
4 cups boiling water
3 tsp salt
black pepper to taste
red pepper (pul biber) to taste
dried mint to taste
Put the lentils in a bowl with water and soak for about 10-15 minutes. Put oil into a large saucepan and heat. Finely dice the onion and cook in the oil. Once the onions are cooked, add either tomato paste or finely diced tomatoes. Cook for a few more minutes. Drain the water from the lentils and put the lentils into the pot. Stir. Add boiling water. Bring the pot back to boiling, stirring frequently. Add salt, black pepper, red pepper, and mint. Cook for about 1/2 hour until the lentils are starting to get mushy and fall apart. At this point you can either blend the soup with a hand blender if you want a smooth soup or serve as is. Serve with sliced lemon (it's excellent with lemon juice squeezed into it) and red pepper for people to add if they like the soup more spicy.
Cooking class
Last week a number of us took a cooking class. We made some excellent Turkish dishes, including the Turkish lentil soup that Paul keeps petitioning the cafeteria at La Sierra University to add to their menu. I tried to write down the recipes for the dishes we made, though the whole thing was a little inaccurate. When I would ask how much of a particular ingredient to use, the general answer was something like, "Oh about this much" or "you just add it until it looks right." The other problem with getting recipes is that most Turks don't appear to use measuring cups. Even in a lot of recipe books the recipes call for "1 tea spoon of ..." (the size spoon used for tea) or "1 tea glass of ..." or "one water glass of ..." or "one dessert spoon of ...." These aren't standard measures; they literally mean something like "get a water glass out of your cupboard and dump that much in...." In practice no one bothers with the water glass anymore; they just eyeball it. I understand this way of cooking, because it's the way I cook too, but it does create some problems for transmitting recipes to people who don't know what it's "supposed" to look like or how it's supposed to taste. As much as possible, I made gross estimates of amounts, and I think probably those who try to make these recipes will have to make some adjustments along the way. Note also that at times I had to look at the side of a bag and estimate that 1/4 of the bag had been used out of 1000 mg. In this case, I think you could just do the same thing when you try to translate back. Calculate how many ounces of the ingredient you need, and then estimate what proportion of a bag or box you'd need.
Unfortunately all the photos I took of the class were on Rachel's camera, so I don't have them to upload, but perhaps Rachel will put some up later. I will list individual recipes here in individual posts so it's more manageable for me to put them up.
Unfortunately all the photos I took of the class were on Rachel's camera, so I don't have them to upload, but perhaps Rachel will put some up later. I will list individual recipes here in individual posts so it's more manageable for me to put them up.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Ottoman-style miniatures
One of the classes available to the students was on Ottoman and Turkish miniatures. Probably some of our readers have seen Persian miniatures, but these were also made in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire. They are tiny detailed paintings of the daily lives of the people, life in the Ottoman court, stories from the scriptures, and other familiar topics. The current tradition involves starting with a page from an old Ottoman book and then painting a miniature painting onto the page. These pages can be purchased from the booksellers bazaar. Some old Ottoman books are still available for sale, but others have been too badly damaged to be preserved whole. These books in which a lot of the pages have been damaged are sometimes worth more when the undamaged pages are sold page by page. A page of Ottoman text from an original manuscript starts about about $1 and goes up in price depending on the age, quality, etc. These pages are now used as the foundation for painted miniatures.
My favorite contemporary miniature artist is Nusret Çolpan, who died a few years ago. He created a number of paintings of Istanbul that blend the traditional miniature style with a more contemporary look. Here's one of them to give you an idea of his work:
In any case, several of the students learned to paint miniatures, and I was quite impressed with their work. I don't have a photo of Hew's final project, but it's worth asking him to see it, because it is impressive. Here is Rachel's work:
My favorite contemporary miniature artist is Nusret Çolpan, who died a few years ago. He created a number of paintings of Istanbul that blend the traditional miniature style with a more contemporary look. Here's one of them to give you an idea of his work:
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| Aya Sofya in the snow |
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| Pretty amazing! Rachel is quite a miniature artist. The tree on the right side has roots reaching down to entangle the evil eye. |
Mother of Pearl class
Mother of Pearl inlay is an old tradition here. In the photos from the Topkapi Palace you can see some wooden pieces with mother of pearl inlay in them. Several of the students have been interested in learning how this is done. They asked for a class and we've been trying to arrange it with one of the master craftsmen here. We finally had the class last week, and it was interesting, but not really long enough to learn how to do the complete inlay. We mainly focused on cutting the mother of pearl. They provided a lot of pieces of mother of pearl for us to work with, and showed us how to cut it using a coping saw with a very thin blade. The trick for this type of precision work is that the saw blade is so fine that it is easily broken. All cuts need to be made at a right angle to the mother of pearl pieces being cut, and when the artist reaches a sharp acute angle, the work has to be rotated without breaking the blade. This is a particularly difficult skill for beginners, and most of us went through a number of blades in the process. In the end, though, we had hand cut mother of pearl pieces with a hole drilled in them for hanging. The craftsmen at the workshop were helpful in demonstrating some of the most tricky cuts, but I can definitely see that it takes some practice.
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| Aydin cutting out his design. Aydin said that he really enjoyed doing this and would like to see if it's possible to pursue it more once he gets home. |
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| Alisha drawing her design, with scrap pieces of mother of pearl in front of her. |
Other fun
Here's a photo of our trip to Turkuazoo, the aquarium where the students watched kids and families.
I think this trip was also interesting to the students because the aquarium is adjacent to a suburban mall. Going to a mall in the suburbs is not an unusual activity for our students, but doing so in Istanbul provided a bit of a cultural jolt for them. They had gotten used to seeing ancient monuments and historic sites, and it was good for them to also see that this is a modern active city with brand-name goods and malls and IKEA stores. Sometimes when you are living in the midst of history it's easy to forget the modern people live here with contemporary needs and desires. This issue of living in an ancient city with the parallel problems of preserving the past and meeting modern needs is one of the themes we've discussed while we've been here. Transportation is a huge issue here, because there are 16-20 million people living here (depending on how you count the city's population), and they are surrounded by irreplaceable historical sites. You can't just put a freeway through the Aya Sofya, but you also can't ignore the very real traffic congestion here. This problem has been brought sharply into focus by the attempt to build a tunnel under the Bosphorus. The tunnel would alleviate a lot of the congestion on the two bridges between Asia and Europe in the city, but it also requires excavation and reuse of a patch of land on each side of the Bosphorus. On both sides, the excavation has uncovered significant archaeological finds, and the city has allowed extra time for archaeologists to document and remove as much of this as is possible. Nevertheless, the city is in desperate need of the tunnel, and the construction will need to continue at some point.
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| The classic set up group photo common to a lot of amusement parks in the US is here too. |
I think this trip was also interesting to the students because the aquarium is adjacent to a suburban mall. Going to a mall in the suburbs is not an unusual activity for our students, but doing so in Istanbul provided a bit of a cultural jolt for them. They had gotten used to seeing ancient monuments and historic sites, and it was good for them to also see that this is a modern active city with brand-name goods and malls and IKEA stores. Sometimes when you are living in the midst of history it's easy to forget the modern people live here with contemporary needs and desires. This issue of living in an ancient city with the parallel problems of preserving the past and meeting modern needs is one of the themes we've discussed while we've been here. Transportation is a huge issue here, because there are 16-20 million people living here (depending on how you count the city's population), and they are surrounded by irreplaceable historical sites. You can't just put a freeway through the Aya Sofya, but you also can't ignore the very real traffic congestion here. This problem has been brought sharply into focus by the attempt to build a tunnel under the Bosphorus. The tunnel would alleviate a lot of the congestion on the two bridges between Asia and Europe in the city, but it also requires excavation and reuse of a patch of land on each side of the Bosphorus. On both sides, the excavation has uncovered significant archaeological finds, and the city has allowed extra time for archaeologists to document and remove as much of this as is possible. Nevertheless, the city is in desperate need of the tunnel, and the construction will need to continue at some point.
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| IKEA - The writing underneath says "Everything for your home" |
Ephesus photos
I've had a little trouble uploading some of my photos recently, but found a new work-around, so I'm going to post a lot of photos from the past couple of weeks. This set is from Ephesus. It was very hot on the day we went to Ephesus, so we were pretty tired by the end of our day exploring the ancient city, the Basilica of St John, the Temple of Artemis, and a Turkish handicrafts school. The next day, though, we had a full day to relax and enjoy the hotel pool and the town of Kusadasi. I think most of the students stayed near the hotel, but Cait and I went out to Pigeon Island to the fortress there. Here are a few of our photos from the trip to Ephesus:
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| Cait in Ephesus (in a rare patch of shade) |
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| Ron, Hew, and Alisha (with Cidnee in the background) at Ephesus |
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| Cidnee, Alisha, Cait, and one of the many cats (who seem to be a bigger attraction for some of the cruise passengers than the city itself) |
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| Cait and Cidnee in Ephesus |
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| Temple of Artemis (or what's left of it) with the Isa Bey Mosque (mosque named for Jesus) and St. John's Basilica in the background. Three religious traditions in one photo. |
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| At the government-sponsored handicrafts school. This woman is starting a strand of silk threads. She brushed the top of this pot of cocoons and picked up about 175 strands of silk, each from a different cocoon. She will attach these strands to a reel, which will pull the silk threads into a larger strand of silk, to be used in making a silk carpet. |
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| Students taking a break and enjoying the air conditioning and soft carpets in the carpet school. |
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| Ron and Alisha at the Basilica of St John |
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| Cait on Pigeon Island |
Busy week
I must apologize for the relatively sparse blog posts over the past week. We were honored to have the Wisbeys come visit us in Istanbul, we've been trying to show them everything we've enjoyed here. We've also had several students come down with minor illnesses (coughs, colds, stomachaches, etc), and those have required them to slow down and rest more than usual. I think also that because this is our last week here the students are trying to do everything they haven't gotten to yet, so they are spending a lot of their free time doing those things rather than resting and writing blog posts. Anyway, in case you were wondering, we're still fine and we're still here. I'll try to catch you all up on some of the things we've been doing.
We've been taking several Turkish culture classes, and I'll post more info on those. We also visited Topkapi Palace, the home of most of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, and the Church of St Savior at Chora (now known as the Kariye Museum). After we went to Chora we had dinner at one of our family's favorite restaurants in Istanbul, Asitane. This restaurant features Ottoman cuisine, and last year we met one of the chefs who developed the menu. Everything I've ever had there was amazing, and I've found recipes to duplicate a few of the dishes, though definitely not all.
This weekend, the students went to Cappadocia with Dr. Paul Mallery and our son Aydin. They will be there until Sunday night. I know they have some internet access, but I'm not sure how reliable it is. They are staying in a "cave hotel" where the rooms are carved out of the rock. This is great natural climate control, but not so great for internet access! I talked with Dr. Mallery on Skype last night and he said that they had a full day and were enjoying the things they saw, but they were sitting outside on the terrace in the dark to get WiFi so they could use Skype. I'm not sure whether they will post from Ephesus or not, but I'm in touch with them regularly.
We've been taking several Turkish culture classes, and I'll post more info on those. We also visited Topkapi Palace, the home of most of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, and the Church of St Savior at Chora (now known as the Kariye Museum). After we went to Chora we had dinner at one of our family's favorite restaurants in Istanbul, Asitane. This restaurant features Ottoman cuisine, and last year we met one of the chefs who developed the menu. Everything I've ever had there was amazing, and I've found recipes to duplicate a few of the dishes, though definitely not all.
This weekend, the students went to Cappadocia with Dr. Paul Mallery and our son Aydin. They will be there until Sunday night. I know they have some internet access, but I'm not sure how reliable it is. They are staying in a "cave hotel" where the rooms are carved out of the rock. This is great natural climate control, but not so great for internet access! I talked with Dr. Mallery on Skype last night and he said that they had a full day and were enjoying the things they saw, but they were sitting outside on the terrace in the dark to get WiFi so they could use Skype. I'm not sure whether they will post from Ephesus or not, but I'm in touch with them regularly.
A brief clarification
Nerlin wrote below (in the "New City, New People" post) about a project the class did a few days ago. I'll provide a little bit of context by explaining the assignment. For this project, students were sent in a group out to a neighborhood they had never visited before. During our time here we've gone various places in Istanbul, but the students haven't had much opportunity to go outside the areas commonly frequented by tourists. This assignment is designed to get them to see a different community here and try to understand it. The neighborhood for this year's students was Zeytinburnu, a district on the Sea of Marmara. This is a working class neighborhood that is home to a large number of immigrants from various places. The students were to go to the district and choose a neighborhood (each district is broken up into smaller neighborhoods which are easily walkable and a small enough size that it's realistic to get a good feel for the neighborhood). I had suggested the Nuripasa neighborhood to them, but they could choose any of the neighborhoods that were relatively close to the train station but still in the district.
Once they arrived in the neighorhood, they were to learn as much as possible about it. They were specifically trying to answer questions like who lives there, what do the inhabitants see as particular features of the neighborhood, where do they perceive the neighborhood boundaries to be, etc. Each neighborhood has specific political boundaries, but these may or may not be the boundaries that residents perceive to define the neighborhood. The students' goal was to try to recreate a map that approximated how the residents see and use the neighborhood. This is not simply a geographical map but is more of a representation of the ways the people use the neighborhood.
Nerlin mentions a number of terms in her blog, and I'll try to clarify those. The students used a few tools to help them conceptualize the neighborhood. One of these is a model developed by Kevin Lynch, an American urban planner, to describe how people actually think about cities. This model describes urban spaces in terms of important functions of space. Nodes are defined as points where traffic comes together. They are a type of junction. When people come to a node, they usually need to make a decision whether to continue along the same path they are already using or turn off to head another direction. This may be a central area like a square or a traffic circle or a park. In order to identify nodes, one needs to watch the flow of pedestrian traffic at these points to see whether people seem to need to pay extra attention at those points and to make decisions about where to go. Probably a good analogy in a suburban environment might be freeway junctions, but in this case we were looking specifically at pedestrian traffic.
Another way to think about urban spaces is to define the paths. Paths may be streets, but they don't have to be. These are the lines along which traffic travels. They may be slightly different for different people, but they define the ways that people tend to walk. In some areas a path may cut through a store or a building if that's the way people travel. In other areas, paths may converge to avoid barriers. For example, near our neighborhood in Istanbul there is an underpass that's the only way to get across a railroad line. Paths on either side of that underpass fan out, but many of them lead to the underpass. There is a mosque on the opposite side of the underpass from us, and people on our side may use the underpass several times a day to go to and from the mosque. In this case, the convergence of all the different paths is a node where people have to make decisions about which way to go.
A third term Lynch uses to describe spaces is "boundaries." Boundaries are places people view as edges. For example, in the neighborhood the students went to there is a street that has a working class neighborhood on one side of the street and an upper middle class neighborhood on the other side. If one talks to the residents, it's likely that specific people will feel comfortable on one side or the other of the street. This is likely to be seen as the place where the boundaries of each neighborhood meet, and it's possible that people from each side may not be seen as welcome in the other neighborhood. Often one cannot identify boundaries from a map, unless they coincide with political boundaries (e.g. city lines, etc), but people who live in the neighborhood will perceive them as mental boundaries.
Similar to boundaries are "edges." Edges can occur anywhere in the neighborhood, but they are usually some type of physical barrier that blocks people from moving easily from one place to another. These might be walls, railroad tracks, or even a type of landscaping. On the University campus there is one place that has a large bed of ice plant. Although the landscaping is only a few inches high and people probably could walk through the ice plant, they essentially never do. That planting is perceived as a "no pass" zone, and some students have mental maps of the campus that include buildings above and below that area, but they have to think hard about what is there.
Finally, Lynch talks about landmarks. These may be historic landmarks or things that people traditionally see as landmarks (like statues) or they may just be a place that people living in a particular area tend to know about, like Keyes barber shop or the tree that the Jones kid ran into on his bike last summer.
The students were also supposed to look at architecture and other constructed places to determine what the urban planners or architects were intending to convey with that particular structure. E.g. a mosque or church may be built to convey a sense of the greatness of God or the wealth of a people or it may be designed to show humility and simplicity. Each of these are different messages.
The neighborhood the students went to is interesting because it is very mixed ethnically and it was originally built as a gecekondu in the 1950s. Gecekondus are a bit like shanty towns, but they take advantage of a Turkish law that allows any structure that is completely built overnight to remain where it was built. In other words, if you can get any structure built before the sun comes up, you can keep it. After it's built, you can make "improvements." Zeytinburnu was originally a gecekondu, but over time it's been incorporated into the city. This means that it lacks organized urban planning or the type of neat zoning that occurs when a set of planners sit down and draw an entire district before anything is built. Currently this district is going through a period of earthquake renovation because the haphazard construction of the 1950s is not up to current standards. In addition to the Kazakhstani population that Nerlin mentioned, there is also a large Uighur population in Zeytinburnu. Uighurs are Muslims from Western China and as ethnic minorities there, they have experienced pressure from the Han Chinese. They are Turkic, and thus Turkey is a natural place for them to settle when there are problems in Western China.
Once they arrived in the neighorhood, they were to learn as much as possible about it. They were specifically trying to answer questions like who lives there, what do the inhabitants see as particular features of the neighborhood, where do they perceive the neighborhood boundaries to be, etc. Each neighborhood has specific political boundaries, but these may or may not be the boundaries that residents perceive to define the neighborhood. The students' goal was to try to recreate a map that approximated how the residents see and use the neighborhood. This is not simply a geographical map but is more of a representation of the ways the people use the neighborhood.
Nerlin mentions a number of terms in her blog, and I'll try to clarify those. The students used a few tools to help them conceptualize the neighborhood. One of these is a model developed by Kevin Lynch, an American urban planner, to describe how people actually think about cities. This model describes urban spaces in terms of important functions of space. Nodes are defined as points where traffic comes together. They are a type of junction. When people come to a node, they usually need to make a decision whether to continue along the same path they are already using or turn off to head another direction. This may be a central area like a square or a traffic circle or a park. In order to identify nodes, one needs to watch the flow of pedestrian traffic at these points to see whether people seem to need to pay extra attention at those points and to make decisions about where to go. Probably a good analogy in a suburban environment might be freeway junctions, but in this case we were looking specifically at pedestrian traffic.
Another way to think about urban spaces is to define the paths. Paths may be streets, but they don't have to be. These are the lines along which traffic travels. They may be slightly different for different people, but they define the ways that people tend to walk. In some areas a path may cut through a store or a building if that's the way people travel. In other areas, paths may converge to avoid barriers. For example, near our neighborhood in Istanbul there is an underpass that's the only way to get across a railroad line. Paths on either side of that underpass fan out, but many of them lead to the underpass. There is a mosque on the opposite side of the underpass from us, and people on our side may use the underpass several times a day to go to and from the mosque. In this case, the convergence of all the different paths is a node where people have to make decisions about which way to go.
A third term Lynch uses to describe spaces is "boundaries." Boundaries are places people view as edges. For example, in the neighborhood the students went to there is a street that has a working class neighborhood on one side of the street and an upper middle class neighborhood on the other side. If one talks to the residents, it's likely that specific people will feel comfortable on one side or the other of the street. This is likely to be seen as the place where the boundaries of each neighborhood meet, and it's possible that people from each side may not be seen as welcome in the other neighborhood. Often one cannot identify boundaries from a map, unless they coincide with political boundaries (e.g. city lines, etc), but people who live in the neighborhood will perceive them as mental boundaries.
Similar to boundaries are "edges." Edges can occur anywhere in the neighborhood, but they are usually some type of physical barrier that blocks people from moving easily from one place to another. These might be walls, railroad tracks, or even a type of landscaping. On the University campus there is one place that has a large bed of ice plant. Although the landscaping is only a few inches high and people probably could walk through the ice plant, they essentially never do. That planting is perceived as a "no pass" zone, and some students have mental maps of the campus that include buildings above and below that area, but they have to think hard about what is there.
Finally, Lynch talks about landmarks. These may be historic landmarks or things that people traditionally see as landmarks (like statues) or they may just be a place that people living in a particular area tend to know about, like Keyes barber shop or the tree that the Jones kid ran into on his bike last summer.
The students were also supposed to look at architecture and other constructed places to determine what the urban planners or architects were intending to convey with that particular structure. E.g. a mosque or church may be built to convey a sense of the greatness of God or the wealth of a people or it may be designed to show humility and simplicity. Each of these are different messages.
The neighborhood the students went to is interesting because it is very mixed ethnically and it was originally built as a gecekondu in the 1950s. Gecekondus are a bit like shanty towns, but they take advantage of a Turkish law that allows any structure that is completely built overnight to remain where it was built. In other words, if you can get any structure built before the sun comes up, you can keep it. After it's built, you can make "improvements." Zeytinburnu was originally a gecekondu, but over time it's been incorporated into the city. This means that it lacks organized urban planning or the type of neat zoning that occurs when a set of planners sit down and draw an entire district before anything is built. Currently this district is going through a period of earthquake renovation because the haphazard construction of the 1950s is not up to current standards. In addition to the Kazakhstani population that Nerlin mentioned, there is also a large Uighur population in Zeytinburnu. Uighurs are Muslims from Western China and as ethnic minorities there, they have experienced pressure from the Han Chinese. They are Turkic, and thus Turkey is a natural place for them to settle when there are problems in Western China.
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