I’m doing my exchange in Turkey through CIEE, which stands for the Council on International Educational Exchange. CIEE organizes exchanges all over the world, and the advantage of using them over a traditional school-to-school exchange is that they keep in contact with you throughout your time abroad and they organize periodic trips and events for you to attend. This weekend was one of the trips.
We travelled to the city of Eskişehir, in Central Turkey. For all you history buffs out there, you may know the city better by its medieval name, Dorylaeum. If you read the travel books about Turkey, they’ll say Eskişehir is an old industrial city not worth visiting. If you ask the people at CIEE, they’ll tell you it is a vibrant college town that it going through a rapid urban transformation. The truth is somewhere in between. I keep comparing Eskişehir to the city where I go to college, Worcester, Massachusetts. Most people in Massachusetts would tell you that Worcester sucks, and if an untrained tourist were to ever take a weekend trip to the city, they’d probably turn around and race back to Boston as fast as the Mass State Troopers would allow. In truth, both Worcester and Eskişehir are former industrial cities with a large college student population with many hidden gems that can only be found and appreciated if you spend a significant (as in months or years) amount of time there. Unfortunately for us, we only had a weekend.
Eskişehir is definitely more aesthetically pleasing than Worcester. For the past decade, the mayor of the city has overseen a complete overhaul of the city, building new, colorful bridges and buildings, as well as a public tramway and many new museums, parks and sights. One of our tour guides said that Eskişehir is going to become the “Venice of Turkey.” Although I’ve never been to Venice, I think they’ve still got about 5-10 years to go before that happens.
There are a good number of smaller museums in Eskişehir, including a glassworks museum and a cartoon museum, which I both enjoyed. We also visited a “Museum of the Republic,” which was nothing more than a building with LOTS of pictures of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk. Our tour guide also insisted on showing us one of the only 2 cars ever built by a Turkish car company. The story behind these 2 cars is that the President of Turkey in the 1960’s had wanted to create a car that was entirely designed and built in Turkey. The first 2 models were built and the president planned on riding in one on Republic Day. Unfortunately, the fuel gage didn’t work and the engine failed, thus ending the only Turkish car company. It was a little strange for the tour guide to call this failed car a “great symbol for Turkey,” especially since Turkey has accomplished plenty of other things to be proud of.
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| Example of the art from the glassworks museum |
We also visited Anadolu University, which enrolls nearly a million students through its seven campuses, high schools, and online courses. It has a very nice campus and also the students seemed a bit friendlier and down to earth than the ones at Koç. As part of our tour, the Turkish folk dancing student group taught us some Turkish folk dancing. It was kinda awkward since their way of showing us how to dance was having us all get up and dance and just follow their lead, but it was still fun.
Eskişehir has an ok nightlife, though we didn’t run into many students when we went out surprisingly. We ended up at a place called “Tequila Bar” which served us beer and shots at a reasonable price and where we got to dance to techno music. When a bunch of us left to go back to our hotel, we knew we had to follow the tram lines back to the hotel and had a 50/50 chance of picking the right direction. Of course, we picked the wrong one, and our 15 minute walk turned into something more like an hour and a half journey where we first followed the tram way, then a random drunk Turkish guy who took us down every sidestreet in the city until we finally gave up and took taxis back to the hotel.
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| One of the cartoons in the museum we visited, basically predicting my future career path |
On the last day, we visited the most random place I’ve seen in all of Turkey. Along with his urban renewal plan, the mayor of Eskişehir has also built this large children’s’ park right behind an abandoned cement factory, complete with a duck pond, slides, a pirate ship, and a huge story castle that literally pops up in the middle of nowhere. I guess it might seem strange to the average Turk why Walt Disney built story castles in the middle of California and Florida.
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| Most random sight in Turkey, ever! |
All in all, I would NOT recommend visiting Eskişehir unless you are in a large, guided group. The city may one day be a hip college town, but at this point, it is still just getting there. What made the trip worth were the other CIEE students and Tola, our CIEE director Kathryn’s son.
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| May all of your journeys have as cute a kid as this on them. |
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