A weekend in the life

This weekend I had no homework because we'd just had our midterm (we're halfway done already!). I spent Friday going to museums (the Mevlevi Lodge and Ottoman Bank Museums near Galatasaray, and the Pera Museum), and Saturday at the Grand Bazar, another bank museum for Republican Turkey (because it was free and we were in the Golden Horn so why not) and Mısır Çarşısı, both days with people from my program. So today was a day to wander on my own.
This afternoon I went to a bilingual (Turkish-English) church service off Istiklal, where we sang in Turkish and Farsi. There were people from the UK and the US (both of us from the US were in my program), from Canada, Iran, Korea, and Bulgaria. The service was led by a bilingual Korean-Turk, and it was a music-prayer Sunday without a sermon. Afterward I met and talked to a guy who's medical student in the Ukraine, where he had met some American missionaries and converted. He's originally from Iran, but his family now lives in Turkey and he is currently visiting them for the summer.
Being in that church reminded how much of an international space The Church has become; earlier today, there had also been morning services in English and a service for East Africans. Evangelical Christianity is no longer the religion of the American South; it has spread across the globe and already contains people from almost everywhere. Every tribe and tongue, I guess.
After the service I went to the Lambda office, where I found out (in Turkish, which may mean something got lost in translation) that basically nothing's happening around there for the rest of the summer.
Then I headed to Cevahir Mall, which is in Şişli (right by the metra stop). It felt a lot like home, like Northlake or South Park. Though I suspect it was the size of the two put together, along with Concord Mills. I wandered around the six stories of the mall, looking for a duffle bag (which I ended up getting from Columbia Sportswear, because I couldn't find it anywhere else). I got a falafel wrap (a la Naf Naf Grill) from a place called "The Upper West Side" that specialized in Philly cheesesteaks and Falafel (which I guess is pretty representative of the mid-Atlantic region, all things considered). I learned there that electronics are actually considerably more expensive in Istanbul than in the US (a small computer that if I were being generous I'd value at $500 was telling for 2500 lira (which means it's more than twice as expensive), but that in general middle class Istanbullus shop at the same price range as American mallgoers. Also, their food court was two-stories high.
Anyway, classes start back tomorrow. This weekend I've done a lot of talking in Turkish (buying things at Cezhavir, talking to the person at Lambda, generally being out and about), so I'm hoping this weekend, in addition to letting me experience both touristy and less touristy things, was helpful on that front. I feel much more confident that I could survive in Istanbul on my own if I had to, and that I have made obviously recognizable progress.