This summer, Olly Wright found himself sitting in a 1989 VW Polo in Hyde Park, waiting for the starting horn to begin his expedition across two thirds of the world’s circumference in the Mongol Rally. The first year St Edmund’s Hall medic spent the next twenty three days driving across Europe through Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia before embarking upon a treacherous six day crossing of Mongolia to the finish line in Ulan Batur.

Wright and two friends raised £1,500 for Mercy Corps Mongolia and Hope and Homes for Children before their departure to qualify their entry on the rally. Using the true skills of a resourceful student Wright procured £200 sponsorship from ‘Tractorland’ in exchange for allowing a model of Tractor Ted to accompany him on his expedition, promising to photograph him throughout. Wright also got given the beige 1989 VW Polo (affectionately named Gordon) by Jection Garage, and was so ready for the Mongol Rally.

“Out of all the countries we visited, Iran was the place I’d like to back to above all,” Wright said. “It was nothing like we’d expected. We were invited in to strangers’ houses for supper-everybody there was so friendly” he added.

Beside the overwhelming kindness from so many people though, the trip did not go without hitches. “We were let in to Turkmenistan, but then were locked in ‘no-man’s-land’ for twenty four hours” Wright said. “My friend also got his guitar confiscated at the border crossing in Azerbaijan, which was pretty upsetting, but we got it back eventually.”

Equally the car itself did not quite manage the trip without problems. “It was crossing Mongolia that Gordon really began to suffer,” Wright reminisces with a distinct glint in his eye. “The exhaust fell off, and we drove over a rock that punctured our fuel tank, though it’s amazing what you can do with duct tape and a bar of soap” he says.

Having made it to Ulan Batur, Wright caught the Trans Siberian back home. “It wasn’t until we got back to England that it really sunk in that we’d actually made it,” he says. “When I arrived in Ulan Batur itself, there was no massive rush of relief-I just don’t think that we could really believe it.”

Having survived all the drama of the summer, Wright said that the overwhelming greatness of the trip was how it brought friends together. “We’ve all already joined climbing clubs, and have set our sights on Everest in three year’s time. Otherwise we’re thinking about cycling across America, or maybe China.” It seems that having survived the Mongol Rally, the world is Wright’s oyster.

It’s Thursday, and outside the effervescent limits of the Oxford bubble that would usually mean only one day until the weekend. Yet, stuck as we are in this antiquated limbo-land, there is no weekend. No god-sent two day break but only a perpetual tedium of days without dates stretching out before us. But fear not, there is one way to punctuate your work/drinking/sleeping routine.

I’m not talking about college drink-fests or evenings of Oxford Union hackery, which I’m sure already fill your week. I’m talking about the simple pleasures of good food with friends. That’s why Thursdays should be penciled into to your Blackwells calendar, as Sushi night at Edamame. When life in Ox-land gets you down you can momentarily escape along your tastebuds to a pseudo-Japan, minus the geishas and sliding paper doors I’m afraid.

So why are Thursdays the selected instance for such a transportation? You may ask – the truth is, in keeping with the rest of Edamame’s bizarre opening hours, there is no logical or even vaguely plausible explanation. Like all the other eccentricities of Oxford, it’s best just to go along with it because if you happen to want sushi on any other day of the week YO! is your only option. And sushi at Edamame is definitely better than the shards of plastic rice at Yo!

It’s generally fresh and well prepared, they have a great nigri set for seven squid, which although unadventurous is pretty satisfying when doused in wasabi and soy sauce. Only don’t be fooled into thinking that demand indicates quality – only limited supply unfortunately; I await a far-east Asian culinary revolution in Oxford! Because I am an avid supporter of the principle of raw food – why cook something when its tastes better if you don’t? (bacteria is rarely fatal nowadays) and because I love sushi, I can’t help but be happy stepping into Edamame’s tiny teeming dining area with a group of rowdy friends and being crammed onto a rickety Ikea table. No advice needed on what to order; sushi is as variable as it is invariable, so just close your eyes and point at the menu and order a large bottle of sake, because Edamame is about the experience (and not necessarily the food.)

If you are left standing out in the chilly mist of one Thursday too many then you could always go to Edamame for lunch, its really good value and has a varied and exciting menu. The salads are a step above the usual English conception of a plate of lettuce drowned in heavy dressing. They are refreshing and have interesting flavour combinations that zing on the tongue, I especially felt oddly rejuvenated by the wasabi pickled cucumber, which electrified my nasal passage. The fish is definitely a highlight of the menu. Theterriaki salmon that I sunk my teeth into was oozing moisture, aka it wasn’t overcooked, and was the right side of sweet, unlike many a version that I’ve had in my lifetime. Other dishes such as the ginger pork were extremely edible and a welcome change from the kind of grey rubber that they serve in hall at some of the colleges, which is enough to give, me at least, pork-infested nightmares. And all these crafted dishes are complimented by the best sticky rice in the bubble; composed of gooey grains rather than unloved pellets. In short Edamame is the best alternative to the processed mechanized hell of Yo! And as I have yet to visit Japan and therefore don’t know any better it definitely sates my hungering for oblongs of Asian flavors… every week.

Since I began visiting Turkey frequently as a child, I’ve always thought that it must be one of the strangest countries on Earth. It borders Iran and Greece, but it’s not European and not exactly Middle Eastern. It has elections and a heavy military intrusion into politics, but it’s not really a democracy nor a military regime. It’s home to enormous wealth, in the mansions on the Bosphorous with their multitude of Bentleys, and great poverty. It’s taken so much from the West and yet remains so idiosyncratically Turkish. It’s confused and confusing, and one of the most interesting destinations in the world.

My visits to Turkey have always begun with a stay with my extended family in Ankara, the city created to house the new Republican government. For a country with such a distinctive history and culture, Ankara’s capacity for mind-numbing monotony is quite remarkable. Only the bureaucratic at heart can enjoy Ankara’s attractions (the most interesting being a mausoleum): others would do well to avoid the manufactured metropolis.

Its polar opposite lies a mere 5-hour bus journey away, in one of the most beautiful and fascinating places on Earth, the former capital of Istanbul. It may be a cliché to say so, but Istanbul is the one of the only cities I have visited where I expect to see something genuinely surprising every day; an old Armenian woman, weighed down by her stunning, antique jewelry in a crowded minibus in Sariyer, a hip hop record store blasting some classic NaS in Beyoglu, a gaggle of peroxide blond, Istanbul socialites picking up Balenciaga bags in Nisantasi…

And then there are the aspects of Istanbul which, despite its uniqueness, make it so stereotypically Turkish; men playing backgammon in tea gardens overlooking the Bosphorous, the smell of freshly baked baklava, the markets full of Kurdish traders with their fresh produce, the poverty of those newly arrived from the rural South-East… All this activity, that which is unique to Istanbul and the normal bustle of a crowded Turkish city, takes place against an instantly recognizable skyline: centuries-old Byzantine and Ottoman palaces, mosques and homes, the modern architecture of a newly industrialised country and, of course, that vast, sparkling, deep blue body of water that cuts the city in half, the Bosphorous.

Despite the impression that Istanbul gives to Westerners, it is important to remember that Turkey is a country which has remained distant from European intellectual and cultural traditions. Visitors would do well to leave their Western conceptions of liberty, individualism and rationalism at home; the Enlightenment never reached the remote villages of central Anatolia nor the nomadic tribes of the East.

Turkish society remains authoritarian and hierarchical, with a strong deference to elders, authority (legitimate or otherwise) and the past. In Turkey, you are not viewed as an individual with a capacity for independent action. Your family history, your regional origin, your ethnicity and your religion determine who your friends are, which newspapers you read, which music you like, the area you live in and so on.

Aggravating this sense of fatalism is the deeply superstitious nature of Turks, with belief in the power of dreams and fortune-tellers widespread. Indeed, many Turks quite easily take what can only be fantasy as fact.

One particular event in my family history comes to mind: a man, who had fallen in love with my great-grandmother when they were teenagers, waited 50 years for my great-grandmother’s husband to die, only to be refused by his former flame and die himself the next day of a broken heart. “Events” like this often seem more likely to have their origin in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez than my family history.

Factual stories of centuries-long family feuds and blood vendettas are also commonplace. Visits to my father’s tiny, almost pre-historic village in the heavily Kurdish east, with its very own sacred pear tree, have confirmed this aspect of Turkish culture.

Unsurprisingly, this is not a nation in which liberal democracy has had much success, experiencing three military coups in three decades. The military remains the most powerful institution in Turkey, a fact which becomes obvious to foreign visitors thanks to the pervasive army presence.

Tourists will also grow quickly accustomed to the image of Ataturk, a military commander who established the Turkish Republic and governed it under a single-party system. In front of every government building, in every store and café, in houses, hospitals and schools, Ataturk’s stern blue eyes are watching over the Turkish public. Despite the fact that I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Turkey, I still find this hero worship of its founder more than a little disquieting.

Equally disquieting is the fact that, every time I visit Turkey, it seems the country has made few advances towards the nominally democratic ideals upon which it was founded. During my last visit, in September 2008, the government banned YouTube for broadcasting anti-Ataturk propaganda and was jailing journalists almost every week.

In 1951, the Turkish language’s greatest poet, Nazim Hikmet, was exiled to Russia and more than half a century on, it’s greatest novelist, the noble-prize winning Orhan Pamuk, has suffered a similar fate. Essentially, the Western media’s portrayal of Turkey as a beacon of hope in the political disaster zone of the Middle East could not be further from the truth.

This article may present a confusing portrait of Turkey. While this could reflect my own love-hate relationship with the country, it might also be the natural result of Turkey itself being a confused nation. Like the children of the large Turkish diaspora, it stands with one foot in modern, liberal Europe and the other in its Oriental past… desperately trying to keep its balance, and take a step forward. 

All clothes and shoes: Topshop, Queen Street, except Kate’s jacket, Zara
All make up: Mac
Models: Kate Leadbetter, Vanessa Fairfield      
Photographer: Derek Tan
Stylist: Rebecca Johnson
Assistant stylist: Joanna  Wilding