Exploring the city

The first day we arrived in Izmir a Turkish guy we met on Facebook picked us up from the airport and brought us to the apartment of a German guy called Max. The Turkish guy (which I call the Turkish guy because I forgot his name :p) had to wait for almost 1,5 hour and even had to pay parking cost to help me and Tom out. When we arrived at the apartment we offered him money but he didn’t want to accept it. It is one of the many examples of the hospitality of the Turkish people. Most of them are so kind and friendly and willing to help you. They even say that the more you will travel to the east to more hospitable the people will get. Maybe I will discover this myself later in my journey. Let I first get to know Izmir a bit more. We stayed at Max’ his house for two nights before moving in into our current house. On Friday morning we moved into the house of our new flatmate, a Turkish guy named Irfan. He’s good guy and the apartment has a really good location. It is a three minute walk to the university. Max is also very friendly guy and I think Tom and I will see him more often in the future.

The second day Tom, his two buddy’s Cansu and Öykü (who we go assigned from the university) and me had some appointments to look for a nice place to live during our study in Izmir. I guess we hit the jackpot with Cansu and Öykü as buddy’s. They are really friendly and helped us already so much these first days. Their English language skills are also very good which is very convenient. I didn’t had much contact with my own buddy’s yet. Tom’s buddy’s are really nice and kind of adopted haha. The first days we spend a lot of time together. One of the reasons of this is that I lost the passport of Tom from the bag we had with us when we were walking in the city centre at the second day. The next morning, on Friday when the introduction started, Tom couldn’t find the passport in his bag. We thought it was back home somewhere in our luggage, so we didn’t gave it many thoughts and enjoyed the first day of the introduction. We met a lot of Erasmus students from many different countries. All the people are really nice and friendly. We went to Ephesus with the introduction, which is an ancient city near Izmir. It was cool to walk in such an old city. After the trip we got dinner together. I think I will make some good friends during my time in Izmir. But let’s get back at the lost passport, which had quite much influence for my stay in Turkey so far. At the end of the introduction day we got back to the house of us and Irfan and we searched for the passport. We didn’t found it. Probably we left it behind at Max’ place we thought. Because of the busy introduction program and little sleep we decided to go to Max’ place the next morning. Unfortunately we didn’t found it at Max’ place either. The hope that we will find the passport is very little right now. So we spend a lot of time to go to the police station and Dutch consulate in Izmir to solve the problem. It is pretty shitty that this happened on the first days of our stay here. But Tom and I know each other already for a long time so I hope we will become even better friends during this shit we have to go through for the lost passport.  

The positive side is that we already saw a lot of the city Izmir because we needed to get to all this places for the passport. I like Izmir and look forward to my time studying and living here. It is even more beautiful than I expected. I am gonna get some sleep right now. I hope the next time I write you guys the passport problem will be solved.