There a little heat, a bit of steam, a massage and a lot of nudity.They say study abroad is the best way to get away from the daily grind and academic stresses of life at the 'Deis, and they certainly are right.
An hour naked in a Turkish bath with your professor is all you need to understand that study abroad is a truly unique experience.

When I first arrived in Istanbul last February to start my semester abroad, Turkish sounded like some perplexing alien gibberish, I had never been inside a mosque before and I thought that a Turkish bath actually involved a bath tub.

A week later I was lying naked on a marble slab getting a massage-or more fittingly, a beating-by a middle-aged Turkish woman who slapped my behind whenever she wanted me to turn around. Covered in suds, our professor explained the elaborate history and architecture of the bathhouse as my female counterparts and I giggled over how glaringly we had crossed the boundaries of normal teacher-student relations.

Yet it was fitting enough, considering Turkey is not a place that really prioritizes or adheres to strict boundaries. East meets West, the ancient mixes with the modern, and the religious and secular coexist. Every time a caf or pub turned down its music so it wouldn't disturb the five-time-daily call to prayer, or when my Turkish friend told the Pakistani girl on our program to chug down a beer because "all good Muslims drink," I was made increasingly aware of the contradictions that characterize the country. Even the national drink raki, a clear licorice-flavored alcohol, turns cloudy when you add water as a mixer.
In fact, you could say a lot of my time in Turkey was spent trying to make the murky more clear.

Although I always drank my raki cloudy, there were certainly other things I found myself trying to swallow straight up.

Before I left Brandeis last fall, I wrote a paper about Turkey's potential admittance into the European Union. In it, I concluded that despite some shortcomings, new government reforms have helped Turkey fulfill the EU admittance criteria. I also noted, however, that Turkey's eventual entry into the EU would be challenged by conditions outside that of the official criteria-conditions specific to Turkey's bid. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's claim that the EU's refusal to admit Turkey would just prove that the EU was a "Christian club" didn't seem to be too far from the truth.

Valry Giscard d'Estaing, a former French president, has said that Turkish entry into the EU would mean the end of Europe. French Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has said Turkey isn't European enough in terms of geography, culture or history to become a member of the EU.
Whether or not the French think Turkey is "European enough" is less interesting to me then what the Turks themselves think. Most people I asked said they thought that joining the EU would be good for Turkey and that Turkey was certainly on its way to becoming qualified for the position.

Yet at the same time, people said they feared that joining the EU would harm Turkish culture, and claimed that "we aren't like them" and really, culturally, "we don't want to be." This new understanding was a departure from my previous EU-Turkey paper conclusion. Really, why can't Turkey embrace its Eastern charms and still be a part of the EU?

When I first arrived in Turkey, I found myself in the middle of a mass exodus of pilgrims returning from the Hajj. In the airport's international arrival hall I struggled to maneuver myself through hundreds of veiled old women pushing huge bundles and carrying jugs of holy water, screaming for their relatives who were literally jumping over barriers, pushing through the guards and flooding the restricted areas to greet them.
While this display at the airport seemed to indicate a degree of religiosity I had not anticipated, I soon realized that for the most part the Turkish brand of Islam is more moderate and secular, with the more traditional communities interspersed in the population and more densely congregated in the eastern region of the country.

While the French may prefer hot showers to the Turkish style bathhouse, they don't seem to have a problem with nudity. I suspect professors and students can be found naked together all the time in France as well. So what's the problem? Boundaries aren't clear, borders and relationships are constantly changing, and perhaps contradictory elements can coexist.