A lot a small things happened, but sometimes they have a large effect on me and my thoughts.
.. When talking about the "walking on the snow without leaving traces"-t-shirt Mary said that it may be about not leaving traces in other peoples lives.
.. I can write "I love you" in four more languages now; Jag älskar dej, Ka te Ljubem, Ti amo & Qishterv :)
.. I'm not the only one who played with Kapla in my youth, Tove did too.
.. Saying spädbarnsmassage really fast in Swedish is pretty near impossible.
.. Someone thought up the idea to combine Chinese calligraphy and the English language, an Chinese image for the word horse, made up of the latin letters h o r s and e. Nice :)
I finally understood the meaning of "the environment creates the meaning"! We thought of creating a mobile for baby's with calligraphic sura's as parts of the mobile. But it would be of no use when the parents wouldn't tell the background stories of the sura's. So the tarket group should be Islamic parents. There the environment creates the meaning for the calligraphy, without that it is meaningless.
Today (Thursday) I (together with Birgit and Angelika) also went to the Istanbul Modern, a museum with modern art from Turkey. They had some nice things in there. The coolest thing was a ceiling of books. They hang the books up on the ceiling with wires and created a second ceiling. Very cool.
After the museum I walked back to hotel and went out to have some diner -I was starving- with Roy and most of the Swedish students; Andreas (roommate and teammate), Kristina (aka Koko), Maria, Sofia and Tove. We ate some very nice noodles, spaghetti and pizza and afterwards went for a experience with dondurma (Turkish icecream) and had a drink with live Turkish music while playing Mikado using chopsticks from the Wagamama.
Sleeping time now...
The day started with some introduction about brainstorming (very very short) and mindmapping (less short). The teachers got 10 minutes from us. :) We also started on our mindmap today, need to finish it tomorrow morning as we needed to catch a boat very quickly. We will post some pictures tomorrow.
As "Cornie vèn Delft" (English pronunciation) wrote it is good to have more questions than you had before.. but it still feels strange. Today we went to a museum about calligraphy (with the cool -as in cold- boat). The museum had very nice .. paintings? of calligraphy. Well yeah, a little side-step here, but how would you call this? Calligraphy is text, it is not an image. But how do you call it when they put text, which looks like an image, behind glass in a museum? I think I'll just use "calligraphy" then.
So, the museum had some nice calligraphy. And immediately you start to analyse it. Why does these calligraphics have flowers which the others have not? (They seem to be from a later period in which the sultans needed to impress the people and say that everything went ok when it didn't). Why do the lines go up when they reach the end of a line? Is one sura with flowers really a different one then the one without? (You can write a whole post about sura's, which would be very interesting, so maybe I will some day). Do the stripes below the letters really have meaning or are these for decoration? (You should be carefull saying that parts of calligraphy are just decoration :)).
On the boat back I was talking with some students from Austria (Graz) about the study Interaction Design. I had the strange fealing of being with other people and for the first time not having to explain what Interaction Design is. As normaly when I'm with others I can spend hours talking about what I do. But I was wrong. The different Interaction Design studies don't have the same subjects. For example we have more tech subjects and they have choices like exhibition design which sound very nice.
By the way, the language here in Turkey is funny as they have a lot of words written phoneticly. Like taksi (taxi) and oto (car which is auto in Dutch).
Below me and Georg, another student from Graz :)
