Knowledge Day 2004
My first first of September in Kyiv. I did not understand the flowers, and nobody explained them, and I have loved the day ever since.
Happy Knowledge Day.
This was my first. I had arrived in Kyiv a few days earlier to begin mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic, and on the first of September the whole city seemed to be carrying flowers. Children in white shirts, first-year students who looked as lost as I felt, parents photographing everything.
In Turkey the school year starts and life continues. Here it is an occasion, and I remember thinking that a country which makes a ceremony of the first day of school is telling you something about what it values.
To everyone starting today — the six-year-olds with bows in their hair and the first-years who have just moved to a city they do not know yet: it goes better than you think. Mine did.
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