About this blog!

Merhaba! My name is Carly, and I'm an exchange student spending a year in İstanbul, Türkiye as part of Rotary International's Long-Term Youth Exchange Program. I'm a recent high school grad, and my year here is intended to be a social and cultural exchange before I dive back into the academic pressure cooker when I start at university in the fall of '09.

(For those of you at home who are a bit confused by the funky spellings of country and city: İstanbul is the proper Turkish name for Istanbul and Türkiye is the proper Turkish name for Turkey. I'll try to use the Turkish names when possible, but I will in all likelihood slip up occasionally. Bear with me...)

This is my fifth day in Türkiye, having flown from my hometown to Minneapolis to Amsterdam to İstanbul . My host family lives on the Asian side of the city - if you didn't know, Istanbul is the only major city in the world to straddle two continents, Asia and Europe - and not terribly far from one of the bridges. I'll be attending a high school here, and hopefully picking up some of the language at the same time. I like to joke that my Turkish vocabulary is around 'terrier level' at the moment, with hopes that I'll eventually reach 'sheepdog' level.

This is a blog for everyone who should want to stop by - unless you're being boorish, in which case, please move on. Anyway, this is for both family and friends, and therefore: friends, remember that my grandma will be reading this ("Hi, Grandma!") and please keep it vaguely polite; family, please no wildly embarrassing stories of my misspent youth! Many of my Turkish friends and family follow this blog, and please keep this in mind if you are posting comments. If you aren't sure: don't.

My hope is that with this blog, I can both chronicle my year here for my own reference and - more importantly - help you learn about this wonderful country. As an exchange student, I have two primary roles - as an ambassador from the United States to Türkiye now, and as an ambassador from Türkiye to the US later.