Orientation Week – Part 1

Orientation Week – First Few Days

After departing Pakistan, I landed in Ankara about 20 hours later.  It was 11pm Monday night and I was really tired.  I missed the first day of orientation which I hoped wouldn’t be too big of a deal.  The issue now was that when I called the university dorm management to find out what dorm to go to, the operator/secretary of the dorm didn’t speak English.  He just said “no english” and hung up…he did this the second time I called too.  I thought maybe he was just tired and didn’t want to talk or something??….I mean METU was after all an English speaking university, as advertised in Calgary.  Besides that secretary, no one at the airport was willing to speak English either, which was odd.  I decided I would just crash at a hotel for the night and go to orientation early the next day.  The Iraqi professor actually had the address and phone number of the place he was supposed to stay in.  In English the university is Middle East Technical University or simply METU.  In Turkish it’s Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi or ODTU.  On his address it said Aysel Sabuncu Guesthouse in ODTU and we had no idea what ODTU was.  So anyways, me and the Iraqi professor picked up our luggage and were about to part ways, when maybe out of sympathy or just showing his hospitality the prof asked me to stay the night at the guesthouse….There was an awkward pause on my part when he asked the question.  I mean I just met the guy a few hours ago…I didn’t even know his name.  Anyways, after an awkward silence which lasted a few seconds I said “ummm ya sure, thanks” I decided to go because he seemed like he was legitimately a nice guy and he seemed pretty harmless too so if he tried to pull off some shady stuff I could handle it.  We walked out of the airport and noticed it was cold and raining really hard.  So we took a shuttle from the airport to the central bus station and were off towards the guesthouse.  The shuttle ride from the airport was about half an hour to the central bus station called Asdi.  From there we took a cab. Five minutes later we passed through the gates and I saw a sign that said Middle East Technical University and the Turkish name underneath with ODTU on the side so I was relieved to know I was close by for the next day.  Now we knew what ODTU was.

We got into the room and after calling home to tell everyone we arrived we put on the news.  We actually ended up discussing the situation in the Middle East, more specifically Iraq for a solid 2 hours before going to sleep.  It was interesting hearing the perspective from someone who lives and teaches there.  We decided to get up early because we both had no idea where to go to in the morning.  After a restless sleep on the couch; thanks to a bird that kept flying into the window over my head, we got up early and got ready to head to the Study Abroad office.  We had to take a taxi from the guesthouse, which was in the METU campus to the study abroad office.  I didn’t realize how huge this campus was until I got here. To walk from one end of the campus to the other would take forever.  The campus is 45 km squared, so it’s pretty huge.  It has two lakes, a shopping centre, two or three sports centres, various tennis courts, soccer fields, a track and field stadium, masjid, convention centre, a handful of restaurants, about six banks and a huge forest with a million or so trees.  Its huge.  There’s a shuttle service that can take students around campus called the Ring bus which can be useful at times.  After going to the study abroad office, the lady told me to leave my luggage with her and to go attend a lecture for the orientation about the topic of Turkey and the European Union…….. to be continued

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