Recapping the last 4 weeks

Since it's been four weeks since my last post I'll try to recap what's been going on:

1) I started grad school. For those of you who don't know, I'm doing an Ottoman History program at an English-using university, although two of my five classes are in Turkish. One of those classes is Ottoman Turkish, which is kinda like Middle English and necessary to know if you want to read old documents about Turkey.

Grad school has been challenging and awesome. It's quite a step up from undergrad: I need to read about 100-150 pages a day to keep up, and in contrast to undergrad classes where the professor basically recaps what you have read, in these classes the professor expects you to read and understand everything, then to plug that information into different frameworks.

The people in my class are cool. There are 9 Turks, 2 Germans and a British-Kurd. The age ranges are from the mid 20s to the early 30s and they are a sharp bunch. I'll be hanging out with a few of them tonight for the first time.

2) Yesterday was my birthday. Thanks to all those people who gave me the birthday shout-outs on facebook. I'll tell more about things in another post. You can even comment and I promise I won't bite!