Art and Ikea

Our apartment was in need of some furniture so we headed over to one of the two Ikeas in Istanbul the - close one. This involved a ten minute walk (steeply downhill) to the nearest lightrail station, 25 minutes on the lightrail, getting off and walking five minutes to a metro station, a 15 minute metro ride, followed by a 10 minute walk through Forum Istanbul - one of the many modern shopping malls that have popped up in Istanbul's prosperous suburbs. I've attached a photo of all the loot we bought. We can safely say that Ikea is the same in Istanbul as in the Northwest - for better or worse. In our case, it was kind of nice - and Eleanor had some Swedish meatballs with gravy at the Ikea cafe. We carried almost all of it back in the first trip. Those 2 big, thick boxes contain two heavy dressers - probably weigh about 90 lbs each. We shoved the rest of the small stuff into backpacks. Carrying the one of the dressers around, up and down stairs, escalators and ramps, trying not to smack people in crowded passageways turned out to be very challenging. So when we got off the metro we took a cab most of the way home, so we only had to trudge for 2-3 minutes uphill to get to our apartment. Of course, we live on the 3rd floor so we still had to do that, but Eleanor saved me and carried it the rest of the way. She'd been carrying the bookshelf this whole way.

Then we went back again for the other dresser and the coffee table (this is fascinating, I know). But since we finished our purchase during rush hour, we knew a taxi trip would take forever, so we jammed ourselves and our furniture into the subway, onto the lightrail, and then onto the funicular so we could avoid the uphill. At the end of the day, our arms were rubbed raw and we each had several bruises forming. But we now have a place to put all of our stuff so it was definitely worth it. And the guy we rent from is buying all the furniture - we just had to do the grunt work.

So that was "Our Ikea Adventure." Here's a picture of the goods:


On another note, for the past two weeks we've attended a Monday night art class put on by a British expat. He only charges 10TL for two hours of artistic entertainment and supplies all the necessary materials. The first week we did some still life sketches. This week we did some sketches from a live model. Eleanor is, of course, the class of the class. She's also been extremely encouraging. She's been trying to teach me some sketching back at the apartment, and these drawings are some of my attempts from the class (pics of Eleanor's art to soon follow):