Do you have heroin? (Maybe.)

I am home sick from school today, or I guess I came home from school. I've had a headache the past couple days that hasn't really been going away. My initial concern was that it was meningitis. Which would be awful. But a few of the people whom I have spoken with, whose opinions I value very highly, have said that it is incredibly unlikely. So it looks like it is a combination of the head and a sinus thing. So I walked to the pharmacy, which here is called the eczane. It's one of the strangest words in Turkish, I think. It is pronounced like "edge" + "zah-nay," which is really weird for Turkish words. Usually the structure is consonant-vowel-consonant, and seeing two consonants with such different sounds together is exceedingly rare. 

Anyway, I went there and told the guy I think I have an ear infection and that I needed some decongestants and antibiotics. I had no prescription. But guess what? No problem! Here in Turkey you can get all kinds of shit without prescriptions. Meth heads should book the next flight. I paid 16 TL, or about $10.50, for 20 Sudafeds and 20 Ciproflaxin antibiotics. I later bought some aspirin, and for 20 of those I paid 75 US cents. Something tells me the industry is really unregulated. I brought my dictionary along today so I could translate the drug information. Turns out I needed it very little for the drug descriptions, and very much for the word for "spoon" later on. 

I talked to our program director about my sickness, and told her about my meningitis fears. She then told me in rapid Turkish that I should by no means go to the American Hospital here and tell them that. Apparently, and this was confirmed by Prof. Önder on the phone a moment later, a girl went there when she felt like shit last year, and they tested her for absolutely everything, including meningitis, which involves a spinal tap. Turns out she had food poisoning, but she was stuck with a bill in the thousands of dollars. So the goal is to not end up that way. Prof. Önder said it was likely a sinus infection, and said I should give the antibiotics a couple of days to work, and take it from there. My program director, like many of the Turks here, suggested that the heat has made me ill. I tried explaining that Washington, DC is both hotter and more humid, but still, "it's the heat, probably." I wonder why people here think that. I certainly didn't have heatstroke or something. I spent an entire summer here three years ago without getting sick once, and that summer had record-setting highs. I think it's not so much a Turkish thing as it is a European thing. People have crazy theories about ice cubes (they cause ulcers!), air conditioning (you'll get pneumonia!), sitting on concrete (you'll become infertile!), and the heat (you'll get generally ill!). But hey, I have no problem taking any excuse to stay out of the heat. 

I think tomorrow I will go get a cell phone, finally. Hopefully not from the same shop where they guy invited two girls from my group to come back after hours. Creeeper. We were talking last night, before watching "Shawn of the Dead," about how girls like guys who play hard to get. One girl said "actually, now that I think about it, I do like a guy more if he plays hard to get." So we decided I should try that here by standing in the middle of a crowd of girls at a bar with a shirt on that says "I don't care about any of you." First step: finding shirt.

I think now is a good time to nap or upload photos to Flickr. So I will update you all later on my health, because I know you're all anxiously awaiting your chance to break into my apartment and steal my shit.