QAIS Staff Profile of the Week - Murat Gokalp, DP Coordinator, DP Economics and Math

What is your favorite film or TV show and why?

The movie Shawshank Redemption is definitively outstanding compared to other ones I have watched. It was a great adventure of human patience, and resilience against the circumstances we live in. The scenario was the most remarkable component of the movie carrying a little surprise within. I clearly remember the shock I had when I realized that Stephen King, least expected writer to write such a story, was the writer of the scenario as his work has usually been about fantasy and thriller.

For the TV series, my favorite is definitely Battle Star Galactica. There are two series shot in different decades. When I was a little kid in elementary school, I watched the first series in the 1980s,and as an adult, I watched the second version of the series in 2010s. The first one was themed around a war of machine vs. humanity, however the second was themed around the philosophy of machine and human interaction and was spiced up with humanoid robots within the fleet. I would love to watch them again.

What is your favorite food and why?

The traditional Turkish dish “Kısır”, also referred to as Kuskus, is a typical Middle Eastern salad made of bulgur wheat. Even though the ingredients are varying from region to region in Turkey, and of course around the world, some ingredients like killed onions (cooking onions in olive oil in a very short period of time are named as “killing the onions” in Turkish), bulgur, cucumber, fresh tomatoes, herbs, spring onions, lemon, olive oil, red pepper paste and if you prefer hot spice. You can not think of Kısır without lemon juice and olive oil as they are the key elements in its taste.

I am a lucky guy that both my mum and my other half are real artisans of this salad. To show how much I love the salad, I can easily take a trip to Istanbul to eat a big bowl of Kısır and come back!

What is your favorite traveling experience and why?

Lycia is one of the many cultures that existed in Anatolia located around the southern part of Turkey. This ancient civilization constructed walking trails in the mountains of current Antalya. Centuries later, a British woman and her team who had been walking in the mountains to discover these ancient trails and started a project to mark these trails for trekkers, campers and tourists.

My best travelling experience is a combination of several expeditions to these marked paths named the “Lycian Way”. There is more than 600km of marked paths from Antalya to Fethiye, and I have had the chance to walk roughly 400km of this path by camping and walking in several 3 to 4 days expeditions. I walked by villages, fields, beaches, forests and ancient ruins.

This path also passes through the church of Saint Nicholas in Demre, also known as St Claus!