On the morning of June 3rd, I found myself ambling along a tree-lined, mulberry-strewn path leading from Selçuk, a small town on the western coast of Turkey, to the ancient city of Ephesus. My mother and older brother were a bit further ahead, and my father, a mulberry enthusiast, was trailing...

Before beginning my year abroad, I had never lived in a big city. On the contrary, the only two towns I had called home were the sleepy suburb of Prairie Village, Kansas, and Williamstown, Massachussetts, where the 2,000-person college makes up a quarter of the population. It was thus a...

Objective

To discern essential cultural differences and between the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul, focusing on two primary points of analysis: cats and old men.

I. Cats

The majority of local street cats I happened upon in Rio were mangy, flea-ridden creatures. They prowled around the...

I spent my first night in Istanbul at the Antique Hostel in Istanbul, a much-lauded spot in the heart of Sultanahmet, the sight-seeing center of the city. I arrived there at around midnight, and was greeted at the desk by a guy wearing a button-down shirt opened halfway down the front of his...

As I stood in front of an empty check-in desk at Rio’s Galeão airport, due to the extended disappearance of the airline representative who had failed to inform me that she would be taking her dinner break sometime between asking me for my passport and handing me my boarding pass, I came...