No scarves in Istanbul med school. So far.

It's quiet in IU's med school library. Only a few typing sounds emerging from below the fingers of the medicine students who are wearing white frocks.

It's a busy faculty, with over 9000 students. I'm working in the library, which looks out onto the Marmara sea, while my friend Rabia attends her psychiatry class.

We have a 40-cent (delicious) lunch in the uni's cafeteria. I don't see any student wearing a headscarf.

I'm fascinated by the headscarf. I guess it's a powerful social and religious symbol- that's why I'm fascinated.

Imagine: one line in the Q'ran advising women to cover their heads... and what ensues are decades of social debate, sometimes conflict, talk of freedom of expression, of religion.

Rabia's friends are über-friendly and talkative. We sit in the sun on campus and talk about traveling, the scarf (surprise, surprise), politics, parties. Everyone is smiling.

Of course, there are med students who wear the scarf, but I haven't seen any yet. I would like to talk to girls who wear the scarf. It somehow seems so much easier to address the issue here, because it is at the heart of national debate.

...Especially since the headscarf ban in universities was lifted in Turkey on Feb. 9, 2008.

How to pack 7 days within 48 hours

My phone was ringing non-stop this morning. Welcome calls from my new Turkish friends. Of course, courtesy of couchsurfing. Alp, Dogan, Fatma... Just overwhelming kindness.

My host Özge spent all morning helping me research and set up interviews: I have 3 set up already. I love this country. I think I won't have problems with finding sources in this city of over 12 million people.

In the afternoon- a short stroll through Sultanahmet- in the rain- and köfte (meetballs) at Sultanahmet Köftecisi, one of the best-known ın Istanbul. A jump ınto the Russian district. I was greeted with zdrastvoitie in all the shoe shops there. Discovered the local warning code: if someone lifts your wındshield wiper, you shouldn't park there anymore. You're not welcome.

This is my second night in Istanbul, and I am spending it at Rabia's place- a girl I met traveling from Bosnia to Montenegro last year.

In less than 48 hours, I took the ferry, different minibuses, the taxi, the metro, the bus and the tram. Oh, and a Turkish plane :) I feel like I've been here for at least a week!

Istanbul, sweet Istanbul.

From Istanbul wıth love

27 April, Istanbul, Day 1

A baptism by fire. In Istanbul, the city of thousands of years of history, culture and wonders.

My couchsurfing host was quite busy the day I arrived, so I headed out to the city on my own. There I had a different experience surfing: through people, that is. Istikal, the main street in Taksim, or new part of Istanbul, is gorged with people flowing back and forth.

Out of this sea of people emerges a tram that resembles a whale rising out of the water. The pedestrians make way nonchalantly. Music spills out of one shop more colorful than the other, drowning out the calls for prayer echoing through Istanbul’s hundreds of mosques. Istiklal pulsates with life, energy trickling from it into the perpendicular streets to it filled with cafés, Istanbulites smoking narghileh and mountains of fresh fish, fruit and sweets.

The city has embraced me, as a have embraced her. Chaotic, vibrant, delicious, old, new, conservative, flirty, religious, secular. Istanbul is all of that.

I tried to blend into the crowd of the city’s millions of inhabitants. Have the “I know where I’m going look on my face”. I walked down the hill to the Bosphorus on the Anatolian side, took the ferry to Beşiktaş as if I had done it all of my life, and caught a Dolmuş (collective taxi) that took me into Taksim, where I met up with Sinan, a couchsurfer I met in Dortmund.

On the menu: lamb kebap, local ice cream, narguileh, coffee at the faculty of law where Sinan studies, çaj, a view of the Bosphorus on a terrasse in one of Fransız street’s dozens of cafés. Already feels like home. I guess sometimes you just have to jump right into it, even if it's a bit scary.