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So, now I finally have time for a longer post.

Today was the last day of my first week of school! It went really well. The school, like I mentioned, is very small. It goes from kindergarten to 12th grade, and all the kids are in one big sprawling building. It is a nice building, but is not incredibly modern. The walls are all different shades of light green and light blue and light pink. The two rooms I spend most of my time in are a light shade of lime green with lavender shades and I think some kind of pink trim maybe. There are no wall decorations in the classrooms, besides the obligatory three framed Ataturk tributes. This is because, rather than the students rotating classes every hour and going to totally new mixtures and new rooms, we stay together and the teachers rotate among us. So, as no teacher has his or her own room as a "nest," so to speak, they are pretty bare. Just desks and whiteboards. Staying together as a class in one classroom is the norm throughout Turkey, not just in schools as small as mine. For the first five or six years of school, you don't even change classes from year to year! It's the same 20 or so kids, in the same class, all day, for sometimes even seven years. Then, in secondary school, they switch groups once a year. Not until college are there different classes with different kids throughout the day. Actually, college is very different, too. Almost always, kids live at home for their entire college careers, actually taking a school bus to the campus everyday. It's also much cheaper to go to college in Turkey, only about 10,000 TL a year, or something like $6,000. College is also the first time Turkish kids don't have to wear uniforms!

Speaking of which, the uniforms have not been nearly so bad as I feared (of course). They are not very strict about the code, so almost everyone wears some color of Converse sneaker or other non-black, non-dress shoe. I have continued to wear my black leather lace-ups because I think they're snazzy. Also, you can wear different cardigans or sweaters over your white collared shirt, and luckily, I brought a million cardigans. In fact, I have even seen kids in just plain old white t-shirts. It seems that as long as your shirt's white, your pants are black, and you look somewhat tidy, you're fine. I even wore my pair of very dark blue slim-leg jeans today. No problem.

Also, I have noticed that most girls don't use hair bands. They have them, but instead, almost everyone uses those big plastic jaw-type clips to put their hair into some kind of half-up deal. I haven't really seen any girls with buns, ratty or otherwise. My host sister was sort of surprised when she came back into the room a few seconds after I had thrown my hair up into a big bun on top of my head. She was like, "When did you do this to your hair?!" I told her I had done it just then. She was very mildly in awe. I don't know. Buns just aren't a thing.

Note: My apologies to male-type readers for this last dissertation.

Anyways.

I don't know if I mentioned, but I'm actually in 11th grade again here. Ugghhh. In America, 11th grade is the tough year and 12th is really the year to slack off and have fun. It's the total opposite here. Junior year is sort of your last fun year before you have to worry about THE Exam. So that's good. But I'm still sort of missing the sense of seniority. Anyways, at the end of a young Turk's senior year, he or she has to take this HUGE exam, a culmination of everything they've learned in their whole high school career. And it's no SAT--it's really difficult. So, in March, every senior is excused by the government from all of the rest of their classes/school for the rest of that year so that they can go take 7 day per week test prep classes outside of school. Many of them actually start these in their Junior, sometimes even Sophomore years. And if they can manage it, a lot of them get medical excuses so they can get out of school in the January of their Senior year. The reason this test is so important is its impact on college. It's not like in the U.S., where the SATs are just another component in a long, cushy, individualized application. In Turkey, you're exact numerical score on this test will determine with terrifying finality your eligibility to attend entire brackets of schools. If you don't get the score, you can't go. That's it. Apparently kids have breakdown and all of these health issues and stress related problems for whole months before the exam. It's insane. So, to avoid losing my entire set of classmates to mental health issues and test prep classes, I'm put with the Juniors. But it's really fine. They don't feel particularly younger, and everyone is really friendly.

I have been feeling pretty homesick lately, especially today. I keep pining for a somewhat fabricated New England-y autumn experience, especially as it's still incredible hot and somewhat tree-less here, even in late September. At least nights are cold. Oh, I also saw Resident Evil 3D today with my host brother, while my host mom and sister went to see some other movie. It was certainly a form of entertainment, but really not my cup of çai, so to speak. It was gory and intense and super loud and disorienting. Not what I needed when I was feeling like a sleepy, homesick little kid away from home.

Luckily, the shock of this cinematic experience was very much balanced out by a great phone conversation with my mom, Aunt Chris, Grandma Betty, and little cousin Lilah in Cleveland, followed later in the evening with a skype chat with a few of my friends and with my Grandma Bobbie up at Lake Erie, who recently got her first computer! It was really, really unbelievably nice to talk to everyone. I miss everywhere and everything and everyone.

I was going to write more, but, like I said I spent a lot of time skyping.

Even though I sound sort of sad in this post, everything is really okay. Homesickness is normal, as I am acutely aware. I hope it doesn't last too long. We'll see.

Love Always,

Natalie