The 5th floor hostel room was sweaty, pressed full of musk and stagnant air. The paint was peeling and bed sheets dull. But on one bed was a book. Gabrijel Garsija Markes, it read. Sto Godina Samoce.

It matched the book on my bed: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 100 Years of Solitude.

I flipped through the doppleganger book and found an unfamiliar language. The script was Roman but I could not identify a single noun or preposition. It wasn’t French or Spanish or German or anything remotely in the family. It was wholly foreign, and I was overjoyed. But the names gave it away as the same book I was reading.

In the bustle of Beyoglu, a neighborhood of Istanbul that bustles with a cacophony of foreign faces my eyes linger on, appreciating the variety, where pedestrian streets are packed with street musicians and vendors selling corn and ice cream outside of sleek glass storefronts and hidden night clubs, this same-different book was a comfort. A reminder that behind the facade of our different languages we are more fundamentally alike than different.

The next morning I awoke to my two new roommates, Tijana and Stevan, who joyfully identified the mystery language as romanized Serbian. How strange, I thought, to be in a foreign city, where a dozen Northwestern students happen to be studying and living down the street, and to find myself reading the same book as a Serbian girl on holiday.

The Serbs (or Serbistanians, as they jokingly call themselves) are constantly light-heartedly bickering, telling a story, or making fun of their own cultural stereotype. “In Serbia…” begins many of their sentences. They are instantly lovable, and I’ve spent the last two days with them, wandering the streets of Istanbul, soaking up an impassioned history lesson of the Balkans along with some traditional Serbian insults.

My favorite: “May your mother recognize you in a kebab.” It sounds better in Serbian, though.

While I miss the students, city walls, home cooked food, and blistering countryside of Diyarbakir, Istanbul is an unpredictable and ever-more-colorful story of winding streets and surprising characters, and it’s good to be here.