Nabeel - Istanbul - Week 7

Taken from my personal blog:
http://nabeelinturkorea.blogspot.kr/
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AN OVERDUE UPDATE

Hello friends, family, teachers, colleagues, and acquaintances I realize I have neglected my blog for the past several weeks and I would like to send out my sincerest apologies for leaving you in the dark about my experiences in Turkey (and now in South Korea). In this post I hope to recap my experiences at work and in Istanbul in general and speak to the specific activities I have done  in Istanbul during my last few weeks in Turkey . But first I would like to give a little explanation about the hiatus I took in posting to my blog:

When I went to Kapadokya a few weeks ago I spent an amazing 2 days exploring one of the most surreal landscapes of Turkey. My plan was to immediately share my experience with you all by blogging about it as soon as I got back. The problem I encountered was filtering through the vast amounts of pictures I took and describing the experience through just words and pictures. And as I continued to procrastinate I took another trip to Antalya which I would also like to dedicate a blog post to. So, aside from this general post I  am writing now I will hopefully be able to share my Kapadokya and Antalya experiences with 2 more blog posts in the very near future.

I can now reflect on the overall experience I had working in the 5th largest city in the world. When people normally speak about their experiences they tend to say time flew by or it felt like forever but I can't say for sure what my time here in Turkey felt like. My sense of time became clouded by the long commutes by the plethora of available forms of transportation in and out of the city, the long days at the office, and the relaxing time I spent with new friends on and off campus. I can truly say my perspective on commuting has changed quite drastically.

To the extent of my own understanding, the company we worked in Girisim Asset Management is a company that mainly buys loan portfolios that are not making any money from banks for a highly discounted price and works to transform the nonperforming loans into ones in which they can collect from. This is beneficial to the customers in that they can eliminate their debt and increase their credit while improving the economic status of the banks and Turkey as a whole. At first glance I thought this company was simply a collection agency, but it is a little bit more than that. The company's goal is to profit from the collections of course but also write off these loans as soon as possible, so the asset managers work with the customers to refinance or even reduce their amount due in a way that makes it possible for the customer to pay some amount of money that is more than what the company purchased the outstanding account for.

Working in a different country was a completely new experience for me. I often found myself penned up in the office with Boming, the other intern from UofM I worked with and our two mentors, Cansu and Yigit mainly because there was a pretty strong language barrier that prevented us from exploring other departments of the company. Although we did have the chance to meet other employees from other departments during lunch it was fairly difficult to understand their exact role in the company. Compared to what I was used to from my internship with Cisco in the US it was a bit more difficult to network and meet 1on1 with people in the office because of the language barrier. Although I did find the work culture to be quite similar aside from the wonderful lady that brought us chai once before lunch and once after.

Boming and I were assigned one main project at the beginning of our internship, along with a few side projects given to us by our mentors. They asked us to research the financial figures of various banks and asset management companies across the US, Europe, and China. At first there was a little misunderstanding in what type of information we were expected to find but eventually we made it back on track and were able to present our findings to our higher-ups. I was also given a forecasting project in which I was asked to basically forecast the revenue for the remainder of 2014. I really enjoyed this because I was able to utilize the knowledge I learned in my IOE 202 class. Overall, I had a good work experience aside from the fact that we had quite a bit of downtime but I cant complain because the extra downtime allowed me to take days off and travel to places in Turkey like Kapadokya and Antalya.

Apart from work life during my last few weeks I was able to explore some new places around Istanbul. One Saturday I went on an ATV tour with 2 international students from Azerbaijan, shout out to Lala and Ashraf. The natural forest park was really close to the dorms we stayed in so it was a quick and easy day trip. We went for a 2 hour tour which only costed 100TL.

We each had our own ATV. Mine was the slowest so I guess I pulled the short straw.

View of Istanbul, seemed so small from up here.

At the end of our 2 hours our guide took us to climb a tree where we enjoyed fresh cherries straight off of the branch. The tree was nearly impossible to climb because it was wet and we were wearing rubber boots.

This was probably one of the funnest trips I had in Istanbul. It was a really good way to escape the busy paved roads of Istanbul. 

I also was able to explore more areas on the Asian side of Istanbul after work by taking the ferry across the Bosphorous. I found it a little more bearable than the 2 hour commute straight back from the office to our dorms. I visited places like Caddebostan, Bagdat St, and other places in and around Kadikoy. Kadikoy is one of the more populated areas of the asian side. One of my favorite places was near the water where you can get cheap balik ekmek (fish sandwich) for dinner and enjoy it next to the water as the sun sets.

This man was great at posing for pictures by the sunset.

I had a really great time in Istanbul and I will miss everything about it aside from the long commutes. But more than anything I will miss all the great people I met from all over the world and the stories we shared. On the 21st of June I had one last short tour around Istanbul before flying to South Korea. This marked the end of my first, and hopefully not my last, Istanbul story and the beginning of my South Korea story. Stay tuned for my Kapadokya and Antalya posts. I will do my best to write them soon before my Korean experiences begin to pile on. I can already tell you the posts will be a lot different in terms of content :)