Today I met up with my friend August to walk around Ulus, the old part of Ankara. After a bit of wandering, we found the Haci Bayram mosque, one of the oldest and most revered mosques in the city. Haci Bayram was a Muslim mystic who founded a dervish order centered in Ankara in the 15th century. Unfortunately, my lack of understanding of Islamic mysticism prevents me from going into much detail, but basically, dervishes were orders of mystics who had certain rituals or beliefs in addition to the teachings of the Koran. Westerners are most familiar with the whirling variety, but that's actually only one dervish order, the Mevlevi (followers of Mevlana, aka Rumi), who were originally based in Konya.

(Note: It's hard to tell if you don't know how Turkish is read, but the word haci = the more familiar hadji, a person who has gone on the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.)

Anyway, this mosque is very pretty and also houses Haci Bayram's tomb. August and I decided that since there were plenty of tourists (albeit all Turkish ones) there, it would be ok for us to be touristy and go in, too. We only had one head scarf between us, so I took it first, donned it, yanked down my knee-length skirt a little to make it cover more leg, took off my shoes and prepared to go in.

Just as I was about to hand August my purse to hold, an obviously religious middle-aged woman coming out of the mosque came up to me, put her hands on my shoulders, kissed my cheeks and said (in Turkish): "Thank you! Thank you so much, my dear! My good girl!" Apparently she was overwhelmed that a foreigner and apparent non-Muslim would cover her hair to go into a mosque. Unfortunately, I was rendered speechless by this display, so the woman didn't even have any way of knowing that I understood what she was saying. Still, August and I agreed that it pretty much made our day.

Cranky post

On Tuesday we had our end-of-program talent show. It wasn't really the end of the program - we still have another week - but the junior version of our program (high school kids) are leaving tomorrow, so we did it with them.

Part of the show was a reenactment of a kina gecesi, a henna night. This is a party that happens the night before a wedding, where a bride's hands are painted with henna and her female friends and relatives sing her songs about marriage, like the one we sang:

Let them not build their house on a high, high hill.
Let them not take our girl to a faraway land.
Let them not despise our girl, the apple of her mother's eye.

Let it be announced even to the birds in the sky: I miss my mother.
I miss my mother, and my father, and my village.

I wish my father had a horse, so he could get on it and come to me.
I wish my mother had a sail, so she could unfurl it and come to me.
I wish my siblings knew where I was, so they could come to me.

Yeah. Most depressing wedding song ever. It's from the days when marriage sucked even more for Turkish women than it does now. Usually brides came from a different village (as is the practice in many traditional cultures), so marriage often represented a girl leaving everything she knew to go live as the lowliest family member in a new household.

(As for marriage sucking for Turkish women now, I could write a lot about my impression of gender relations here, but I won't... yet.)

Apropos of that, my host mom keeps asking me if I miss my mom. Every time she asks, I say, "A little bit." To be honest, living in Turkey is not that different from living in DC - I'm not in the same place as my mom, and we talk on the phone sometimes. So I've explained to Host Mom several times that I don't live with my parents, but she doesn't really seem to be able to comprehend that. (Turkish kids live with their parents until they get married, and many of my friends' 20-something host siblings actually seem completely unable to function (e.g. feed themselves) without their mothers.) Finally last night she asked me why I always say "a little bit." Instead of explaining yet again that I don't live with my parents anymore, I said, "In American culture, it's not so good for a 25-year-old to complain about how much she misses her mom." She was shocked. It led to a long and uncomfortable conversation about how egocentric (I would say "individualistic") Americans are, how no one ever helps each other in America. I heard a lot of that in Russia, too. I do think American society is more individualistic than group-mentality based, but I get tired of defending it to people who think it's the worst thing ever rather than just a different way of doing things.

random

I am used to seeing people with strange English phrases and nonexistent English place names on them; this seems to pretty much be a part of global culture by now (as are misspellings of "Dolce and Gabbana"). Nana and Justin had a great post about some knockoff Pittsburgh Steelers stuff in Korea that said something like "Peanutsburg Nutters." The best ones I've seen in Turkey so far have been "Flip-Flop Fanatic" with a clip-art pair of flip-flops (on a man, twice); "I am Summer Muffin!" with a photorealistic cupcake in heart-shaped sunglasses, and "Don't live on the hillside" in threatening Goth letters on a black shirt.

But yesterday on the bus I saw a guy in a shirt that said something like "Since 1956 Genuine Ice Hockey All-League Stars", with SANDUSKY in big letters above that. I definitely did a double take. Where did some t-shirt designer with questionable English skills pull Sandusky out of? The ones in Ohio (Upper and regular) are the only Sanduskies I know of.

Tonight I am leaving on a night bus for Alanya, a resort town (with a castle!) on the Mediterranean coast. I have never seen the Mediterranean. I have never been scuba diving. I have never river-rafted. (Ok, maybe I've river-rafted. I'm not sure.) I will do all of these things in the next three days, thanks to your (and my) tax dollars! Thanks, U.S. Department of State!

Istanbul - 1

Yikes, it’s been a week since Istanbul and I still haven’t written about it! Sorry about that. I guess part of the reason for that is that it’s hard to turn a trip into an interesting blog post. Somehow “we went here, and then we went here, and then we went here” isn’t very entertaining to write (or read, I presume). I’ll do what I can.

We arrived in Istanbul early in the morning on a Thursday via overnight train from Ankara. The train station where we disembarked was on the Asian side of the city; we immediately took a ferry to the European side, which is where most of the interesting stuff is. Istanbul is divided into European and Asian sides by the Bosphorus, which connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. The European side of the city is further split into a northern and southern section by a bay called the Golden Horn.

This reminds me, in Vladivostok there was a bay called the Golden Horn, named after the one in Istanbul. I always sort of wondered about that, and can now say with certainty that besides being hilly and having bodies of water called the Golden Horn in them, Vladivostok and Istanbul are nothing alike. Ok, that’s not true, they also both have funiculars. But Istanbul has two and Vladivostok only has one.

So once we got to the European side, rode the funicular up the hill and dropped our things off at the hotel, we immediately started sightseeing. This was both the best thing about the trip and the thing I regret the most: we were only in Istanbul for three days, and our time was packed with seeing the many historic sites the city has to offer. I’m glad I got to see all those famous places, but I also wish I had gotten to see more of the Istanbul that people actually live in. Istanbul is a rabbit warren that’s home to an estimated 12 to 18 million people. The fact that the estimate is that wide should tell you something about the city - there’s been a lot of migration there from villages and small towns all over Turkey in the last 30 years or so, and the upshot of that is slums, shantytowns, and untold numbers of un-censused citizens.

Orhan Pamuk more eloquently described Istanbul as an “archipelago of neighborhoods,” which captures a lot more of the romance of the city than what I wrote above. Despite not having much time devoted to wandering off the beaten path, I did get at least a taste of that idea. We stayed in Beyoglu, which feels European in every sense, from the variety of shops, restaurants and galleries on Istiklal Caddesi, the main street, to the narrow, winding, cobblestoned side streets housing bars and coffeeshops. My first night in Istanbul I met up with Kevin, who studies at Georgetown with me and is doing the advanced version of the CLS program at Bogazici University (in Istanbul). We met up with a friend of his and had dinner and drinks at a rooftop café, then went to a different café on one of the aforementioned side streets to smoke nargileh (hookah, or “water-pipe” as the Turks charmingly (and literally) translate it). By 9 p.m. any night of the week (but especially the weekend), Istiklal Caddesi is absolutely packed with people, both Turks and tourists, out for a night on the town. Our second night there I was part of an exciting parade/putsch of eight or nine of us in search of a non-crowded bar (we didn’t find one, although we did find a bar we could at least fit into). So yeah. Beyoglu is apparently the place to be (or one of the places to be?) if you’re in Istanbul to party.

In contrast, I also spent a lot of time across the bay in Eminonu and Sultanahmet. There’s not a lot to say about the character of Sultanahmet, since it’s home to both the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, probably Istanbul’s most famous attractions (did you know they’re right NEXT TO each other? I had no idea. It makes me feel a little better about the fact that I often can’t tell them apart.), and is therefore super touristy. Eminonu, though also touristy, appears to contain at least a few actual Turks. As you can all see from my Facebook album (I’m pretty sure everyone who reads this is Facebook friends with me, but you can correct me if I’m wrong), the New Mosque, which is right on the Bosphorus in Eminonu, is much less touristy-crowded than the Blue Mosque. We went there near 5 o’clock prayer, and there were a decent number of people who appeared to be there for just that. Anyway, Eminonu as a whole does not have the same vibe as Beyoglu at all - it feels old, but in a different way, not the Western European kind of old. It helps that the Egyptian Bazaar and the Covered Bazaar (usually called the Spice Bazaar and the Grand Bazaar in English) are both there. Bazaars are pretty much as Oriental(ist) as you can get, so the narrow, winding streets, old buildings and wide squares there feel more foreign than Beyoglu.

Wow, this is already super long, so I will continue with a log of what we actually saw and did in my next post!

Crack rice and other delicacies

Our first week here, we all went out to lunch at a kebap place. The rice they served us was so good one of my classmates christened it "crack rice" for its addictive properties. I've had the same delicious rice many times since then, and it turns out that the secret is that before you boil it, you cook the raw rice in melted butter for a few minutes, until it turns translucent.

Seriously, the Turks are a people who know how to make good use of fat in cooking. For example, most of their vegetable dishes involve soaking/cooking the veggies in olive oil and serving them cold. (I maintain that there is nothing more delicious than eggplant in olive oil. Yum.) It rarely tastes overly heavy or greasy, though. That's one of the best things about Turkish food. Unless you're eating a big kebap, none of it makes you feel gross. (Don't worry, I haven't deluded myself into believing that that makes it healthy.)

So, the other night my host mom served me a plate of spaghetti noodles in a light red sauce. "Do you make pasta this way in America?" she asked.

"Um, yes," I said, "I'm pretty sure it's Italian."

"Right." She put the plate down in front of me and stood over me as I took a bite. "Well? Is it the same?" she asked.

"Not exactly," I said. "Say... did you use butter in this?"

"Yes!" she replied. "Both butter and olive oil! I add them before I add the sauce. It makes it taste better."

"It sure does," I agreed, silently thinking crack spaghetti.

Things we shouldn't tell people from other countries

Never try to explain that in the U.S., removing your shoes when entering a house is generally optional. (At least, if you're talking to someone from a culture where this is not the case.) It's nearly impossible to convince people that this isn't filthy and disgusting. Actually, I guess it is pretty dirty. Why do we do that?

It's also been pretty hard to explain to my host mom that pork products are delicious and nutritious. The face she makes reminds me of the face some Americans made when I said that they eat horses in Iceland.

Apropos of that, I had "veal ham" in Istanbul. Not because I was seeking it out - it just happened to be on a sandwich that sounded otherwise delicious. It tasted hammy, I guess. I also had a whole fish there. Those of you who know my feelings about fish will find this hard to believe. To clarify, I was served a whole fish, but even after getting someone else to remove the things that made it look gross and fish-like from my plate (to my credit, I at least tried! I did ok until I had to pull out the spine, GROSS), I probably only ate a quarter of it. Sorry, I have trouble finding things that are booby-trapped with hundreds of tiny bones appealing to put in my mouth.

Oh, yeah! I went to Istanbul. It was an awesome trip and it's my new favorite city (please, nobody tell St. Petersburg!). I will write more about it shortly!

Ticks and other devious creatures

I did not go back to the hospital tonight for my second bloodletting to see if I have hemorrhagic fever. I laugh in the face of danger!

My host mom keeps telling me I've lost weight. Ha. She apparently thinks I am an amateur at living among peoples who enjoy overfeeding their guests, and have a will that is easy to break with innocent-sounding compliments. But thanks to my experience in Russia, I see this for what it really is: a devious ploy to get me to eat even MORE of the delicious food she heaps on my plate at every meal. Nice try, Nursen Teyze.

Today in class we had a mini "evaluation" of the program so far (one of our teachers is also the program director for Ankara) in which we critiqued our host families, language classes, and supplementary lectures in Turkish. I said, "I like my host family, but they don't understand that sometimes I just don't want to eat." My teacher's response was, "If I had known they were from Erzurum, I would have warned you. You never stood a chance. With people from Erzurum, there is no chance not to eat. You will be able to roll back to America."

I did not know this about people from Erzurum. All I really know about Erzurum, which is a city in eastern Anatolia, is that the people there hold a hard candy in their mouth while drinking tea instead of sweetening the tea, and the word they use for "cup, glass" (bardak in standard Turkish) is istakan, borrowed from Russian stakan. Nursen Teyze's mom told me that when she found out I spoke Russian. I was very pleased to learn this (because I am a dork who loves word borrowings), but I still refused to let her convince me to take a second helping of lentil soup. I will prevail!

In which a tick mistakes me for its dinner and reaches a sad end.

So yesterday we went on a hike in Kizilcahamam, a region not far from Ankara with lots of hills and forests and things. The hike was led not by our diminutive middle-aged language instructor, Neşe, but by a totally jacked 40-year-old male phys ed teacher who assured us that the "medium-level" hike we chose would be nice and easy (since the "easy" hike was for children). We were accompanied by Nilay, the young (and also pretty buff) beginning Turkish instructor who we all love.

Well, fifteen kilometers later I think most of us (except maybe Nilay) agreed that the hike, while fun, was by no means easy. I'll have pictures of it later, because the scenery was great and as we climbed the mountain we kept passing through different biomes - Alpine-esque meadows, dry pine forest, wet pine forest, desert. It smelled amazing, too, as we kept walking through patches of thyme and lavender.

So at the end of the hike we stopped for a bathroom break and I found a tick halfway up my thigh. Unfortunately, while I'm pretty average as far as being grossed out by bugs is concerned, I do startle easily, and I sort of screamed in the bathroom when I found it. I mean, you would too. There was a bug with its HEAD buried in my LEG, WAVING ITS LITTLE LEGS IN GLEE AS IT SUCKED MY BLOOD. Eww.

Amusingly, as soon as we found the tick, everyone started trying to reassure me that it was exceedingly unlikely that I was going to get Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and that even if I did the death rate in Turkey was only 5%, not 30% like in Africa. I think I was the only one who was not the least bit concerned about tick-borne illnesses. I mean, really. There have been zero recorded cases of hemorrhagic fever in the Kizilcahamam area. How unlucky would I have to be to not only be the first person to get it there, but to get it from a tick that had probably been in my leg for less than an hour? I do appreciate their reassurances, though, because if I had been worried about hemorrhagic fever I would have been REALLY scared. (Do yourself a favor - don't google it. It's gross.)

Anyway, Nilay was 100% against pulling the tick out ourselves, and she convinced me we should go to the village hospital to get it removed. I thought this was a little excessive but also understood that resistance was futile. So we went, and the hospital staff was exceedingly nice about it. As I waited for paperwork to be done (total wait time: five minutes, tops - yay!), an old woman with no front teeth sitting in the waiting room asked me worriedly where the tick had bitten me. "In the mountains," I said, but maybe she was asking about my body and not my surroundings? Who knows. Turkish is confusing.

So they pull the tick out and put it in a little vial and rub my leg with iodine. Then they explain that both the tick and I need to go to Ankara and get tested for hemorrhagic fever. A lot of discussion in Turkish ensues and the doctors, Nilay and I decide together that if I have to get tested in any case, testing the tick is probably unnecessary. The tick is summarily drowned in a bleach bath. (Moment of silence for the tick.)

Between then and getting back to Ankara, another guy in my program also finds a tick, but he pulls it off without thinking. But then he gets worried, too, and so in Ankara we both go (accompanied by Nilay and the jacked phys ed instructor) to the hospital, a huge pink building whose waiting room and front lawn are one and the same. They ask us difficult questions like our phone numbers (I am tired and cannot remember how to say "eight") and our parents' names (the secretary gives up when I say something as bizarre as "Kathy" and just enters "R" for my mom and "P" for my dad). Then they take our blood. The woman didn't wipe my arm down with alcohol before she stuck the needle in, and I subsequently had a nightmare about blood poisoning. I know, it's really dumb that I'm not scared of hemorrhagic fever but I am worried about that.

Anyway. Then they scold for not bringing the ticks (apparently only one of like eight species of ticks carries hemorrhagic fever, and they could have told by looking at them), make us wait for an hour (on the lawn/waiting room) and tell us our blood is clean. And that we should come back on Tuesday to make sure it's still clean then. Also we get printouts of our lab analyses, on which I learned (among other things) that my hematocrit is normal. Hooray?

All in all, it was pretty interesting to see how Turkish hospitals work (twice!) and have my first-ever tick bite, but I'm not looking forward to returning to the hospital, and the next time I venture into the wilderness here - assuming I'm not dead by Tuesday - I'm definitely putting on bug spray.

Kokoreç

I can't believe I ate a sheep intestine sandwich last night.

It was actually pretty good.

Today's Special

The CLS program through which I came to Turkey is really awesome. Not only do we go on all sorts of trips (next week: ISTANBUL!!!!), they organize special lectures and things for us, too. Yesterday the assistant to the UN High Council on Refugees in Turkey (I think I just botched that title, but you get the idea) came and gave a talk, and in doing so gave me a potential thesis topic (yay!).

And today, instead of six hours of Turkish (which, it turns out, not one person in our class can handle more than twice a week), we're going to visit parliament and the AK party headquarters!

I'm sure you all know what a parliament is, so I won't describe that. The AK party is the party of Erdogan, the prime minister, and Gul, the president. Or maybe the president can't officially have a party; I forget. AKP definitely backed him when he was running, at any rate. It's a hard party to figure out - it's accused of being "Islamist" (both Erdogan and Gul's wives wear headscarves) and a lot of the Turkish educated elite doesn't like them. (Including my host mother - I learned the words "reactionary" and "ignorant" in conversations with her about the AKP.) My host sister says she thinks they are trying to form an "Islamic bourgeoisie" and are basically giving money to conservative Muslims to do so, a fear based on the increasing numbers of headscarved women in more middle-class and affluent neighborhoods in Ankara.

On the other hand, my Turkish teacher has pointed out that AKP is the only party that's presented a reasonable plan for EU accession, and is in several other ways a party cut from Western liberal-democratic cloth. Politics is not really my cup of tea (although if it were, it would be my 587th cup of tea since arriving in Turkey), so I don't have much personal insight to add to this. I sort of wish I did... Anyway, I don't think I'll be figuring out anything earth-shaking today, but still, it should be a really interesting trip! Also, we get free lunch!

Addendum to yesterday's post

My host mom came home at 8:30 (about two hours after I had finished drinking) and the first thing she said to me was, "Wow, your Turkish is really good today!" I always thought the "alcohol = instant foreign language skills improvement" thing didn't work for me, but apparently I'm misjudging!

I guess it's not study abroad if you don't do your homework drunk at least once...

I didn't realize how well (or badly?) 90-degree heat and beer mix until I had already had two beers. If you know me (= drink with me), you know that's plenty to get me nice and tipsy. Oops.

(This was after six hours of class that were so exhausting that at the end when we read a news interview about the Turkish Oscars with the reporter's questions missing, it took until we had read through a whole list of questions like "did you expect to win the award?" and "if you were on the committee, who would you have awarded?" before I realized that we weren't supposed to answer them, we were supposed to put them in the blanks in the article. When the teacher explained, I said "OH!" really loudly and everyone laughed. Seriously, six hours of Turkish grammar can really mess with your brain.)

On the patio at the bar, the guys continuously noted that there were usually only about seven women in sight, three of whom were seated at our table. Gender dynamics in Turkey are puzzling. I'm never entirely sure whether it's ok to sit in an open seat on the bus next to a man or not. I will report when I figure it out.

At the bar, three of us may have tried to sing "The Great Gate of Kiev" from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition a cappella and had a loud(ish) argument about the adagio from Beethoven's 7th. (I still maintain that anyone who calls it "boring" has no soul.) I'm not exactly proud of that, but I feel super American for it. What are Americans abroad if not inappropriately loud English speakers?

Kapadokya/Konya part 1 - the "Me Talk Pretty One Day" edition

For a brief summary of my Kapadokya/Konya trip, here is a direct translation of the essay I had to write in Turkish in class today. (Translating it into English was actually kind of useful, as it helped me realize how bad my stylistics are. Still, I'm kind of proud that I could say all this in Turkish. I guess this whole living-in-Turkey thing is working.) I will post something more substantive and with pictures later.

I didn’t know anything about Cappadocia before. So I learned a lot this weekend, because we went to Cappadocia! On Thursday morning we all got on a bus and met Mehmet Ali Bey. Mehmet Ali Bey was our guide. He is an English teacher and he speaks very good English.

First from Ankara we went to the Salt Lake. This lake is very beautiful because its floor is made of salt. The salt is not white, it is pink. We stayed at the Salt Lake for fifteen minutes and then we continued going to Cappadocia.

We had lunch in Cappadocia. The restaurant was in a fairy chimney, in old times it was a monastery. The food was good but I had no appetite because the weather in Cappadocia is very hot!

After lunch we went to an underground city. Cappadocia’s underground cities were built by Hittites and Byzantines. The Byzantines were Christians, and they hid from the Arabs in their underground cities. I really liked the underground city because it was cool inside and very interesting. The one we went in had eight stories.

After that we went to the hotel, and before eating any dinner we went swimming in the pool. After dinner we went to bed and immediately fell asleep because we were all very tired. (There was actually a part that I didn’t write about in my Turkish essay, because it involved drinking a bottle of vodka in someone’s hotel room and I didn’t think my teacher probably wanted to know about that.)

On Friday we went to the Goreme Open Air Museum and saw a lot of Byzantine churches. The churches are special because they aren’t in buildings – they’re in caves! They are more than a thousand years old but the drawings (here the word “fresco” would have been useful) are still colorful and beautiful. After that we went to a pottery works, but I didn’t buy anything because Nilay said there is more beautiful, cheaper pottery in Ankara. In the afternoon we went walking in Pigeon Valley. (I did not describe how the girls wearing skirts and flip flops almost mutinied because we had not been warned that there would be anything resembling a hike on the itinerary.)

After that we went to a caravanserai. I really, really liked the caravanserai because we got there toward evening, so it wasn’t too hot. Also there was a beautiful courtyard. We all rested a little, and then we watched whirling dervishes. Their ritual was very beautiful. Two of the dervishes were younger than I am, and I didn’t expect that at all. I thought all the dervishes would be old men.

On Saturday we went to Konya. Unfortunately, I didn’t like Konya at all. It was very hot and we were all very tired, and our guide was very bad and spoke no English. God willing, I will be able to go back to Konya someday and I will enjoy seeing Rumi’s tomb very much!

God bless you!

I'm back from Kapadokya and Konya and will write about them soon!

What Turkish phrase am I best at saying? Probably "Sen de gör." When you sneeze in Turkey, the response people give is "Çok yaşa" or "İyi yaşa," meaning "Live much" or "Live well," respectively. The response is "Sen de gör", "May you see (it) too," meaning, "May you also live to see all those years that I'm going to live." I get to say this a lot, because in Turkey I sneeze even more than I sneeze in the U.S. And that's saying a lot, friends. I am allergic to LIFE in Turkey. I probably sneeze upwards of 20 times a day.

So today I was excited when Nilay, one of our teachers, sneezed and responded to "Sen de gör" with "Hep beraber," "All together!" (i.e. "may we all live long together!") Hurrah, some variety to add to my daily collection of sneeze-responses!

Ulus

Disclaimer: I’m sorry if I ever repeat myself in this blog. I write it at home, where I don’t have an internet connection, so I don’t have access to past entries and I might say the same things twice.

Ulus (“Nation”) is the old district of Ankara, situated between the suburbs where most of us live (I live in Subayevleri, “Officers’ houses;” most of the kids in the program live farther out in Batıkent, “West City”) and the downtown district, Kızılay (“Red Moon”). The main thoroughfare in Ankara, which is obviously Atatürk Boulevard, runs north to south from the suburbs through Ulus and Kızılay to Çankaya (specifically Kavaklıdere, “Poplar Creek,” a somewhat swanky neighborhood with several embassies), where we have class. This is basically the extent of my knowledge of Ankara, since it’s what I see every day.

Ankara Kalesi, which I know I’ve mentioned before, is in Ulus. It’s interesting for several reasons. First, the walls are really old, and the people who built them used whatever stones they could find, including ones with statues stuck in them or Greek or Roman writing on them. Neat!



Second, it’s one of the only real slums in Ankara (Istanbul has lots more, I’ve been assured). Not neat, but interesting! People live both inside the fortress’s walls and in the surrounding area. I did feel pretty uncomfortable being in a large group of American tourists walking through people’s neighborhoods snapping pictures, though.



Third, it has great views of the city! (The view of the city in this picture isn't that great, but you can imagine that the people in the picture had a really nice view.)



After the kale we walked around the area, went to a kuruyemiş (dried fruit, nuts and seeds, or “anything you’d find in trail mix” as one student put it) market, walked around a kervansaray (caravansaray, a rest stop/trading post on the Silk Road), wandered through antiques shops, had gözleme for lunch (filled crepes), and eventually made it to the heart of Ulus, where there is a bazaar. They were selling fish. Dead fish staring at me + sunburn + not enough to drink meant that I was pretty much at my limit with Ulus at that point, and happy that we spent only about two minutes in the bazaar with the dead, staring fish and then hopped on a bus and went back to school.
Another rambling side note: I find that Turkey is dangerous for me in the sense that they produce attractive consumer goods. One nice thing (for me) about Russia was that the revolution disrupted material links with the past (“traditional” forms of craft were politicized or lost, etc.), plus the Soviet economy was not very consumer goods-oriented. The upshot of this is that even today in Russia there is very little that I really want to buy. You can only have so many nesting dolls. (Actually, I’ve never purchased a nesting doll. At least not for myself. Fun fact.) But in Turkey there are ALL SORTS of things I want to buy, like jewelry and scarves and Turkish tea cups and Turkish ceramics and Turkish rugs and Ottoman maps of the Russian Empire (I searched forever for an old map of the Russian Empire in Russia, and never ever found one… unfortunately, I think the Ottoman one I saw today is a bit out of my price range). And hookahs. Okay, I’m probably past the stage in my life where I feel the need to own my own hookah, but still. Also, unlike Russia, which imports most of its consumer goods (preferring to run its economy on raw materials exports), Turkey makes things. Particularly textiles, which means there’s plenty of cheap, decent quality clothing here. Yikes. I’m glad I’m not spending two years here, or I’d have serious budget and closet-space issues.

To make a long story short, we saw a lot of things I could have happily bought in Ulus, but I didn’t buy anything except a couple of refrigerator magnets for the fridge magnet connoisseurs in my life. But if I have a lot of stipend money left over at the end of the trip and I don’t end up going to Georgia (the one with khachapuri, not the one with peaches), watch out, I may come home with some sort of strange Turkish musical instrument or an antique Ottoman chandelier or something similarly ridiculous. Or just thirty or forty scarves.

Ankara, city of dreams

Ankara has a huge inferiority complex. From the beginning of my knowing anything about Turkey at all, I’ve known that Istanbul is Where It’s At, and basically everyone I’ve met has confirmed this. Even at the program orientation in Washington people were knocking Ankara - the woman who came from the Turkish Embassy, the program alumni panel, teachers on the program. Ankara is boring, Ankara is nothing but the capital, Ankara is ugly and new, blah blah blah. A lot of Ankarans seem to have the same opinion. Often the first question I’m asked (once it’s been established that I can sort of speak Turkish) is whether I’ve been to Istanbul, and my host mom insists that once I go to Istanbul I will probably never even bother to come back to Ankara.

I can sort of understand. If you’re comparing to Istanbul, can you expect Ankara to really compete? I’ve been told even New York can’t compete with Istanbul (but that’s apples and oranges, maybe?). Plus there are lots of other amazing places in Turkey - the group studying in Alanya lives in some kind of Ottoman villa on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, or something like that. I think they all get personal servants to feed them grapes and kebap, too. Ankara just doesn’t have a wow factor about it, unless angora goats are your thing. (We were not issued personal angora goats upon arrival, alas.)

But as it turns out, Ankara is actually pretty nice. I mean, I wouldn’t plan a vacation here, but it’s a livable city, pretty easy to get around, has a happening downtown district, and is situated on the rolling hills of the Anatolian plateau, so you can get nice panoramas from many spots in the city. The big-city issues Istanbul faces, like pickpockets, stray dogs and massive traffic congestion, aren’t a problem here. Overall, I’m finding it to be a very pleasant place to study, made even better by the fact that I get to live with a family.

Plus, there are actually some interesting things to see in Ankara. The second day I was here, as I mentioned, my host siblings took me to Ankara Kalesi, and one day last week all of us Americans went to Anitkabir, Ataturk’s massive mausoleum-cum-Independence War Museum. It was architecturally pretty neat and (of course) Ataturk-tastic, and when I manage to borrow someone‘s camera cord and upload pictures again, I will post some. On the same day, we went to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, which houses tons of old pre-Turkic (Neolithic, Phrygian, Hittite, Assyrian, etc.) stuff in a restored 16th-century covered market. There’s apparently a zoo here, too. And, you know, Parliament and stuff. And by my school there is a very nice park with fountains and swans.

Also, the weather is great. A little hot, but almost always dry. It turns out that “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” thing is totally true. When it’s 90 degrees in Washington I want to die anytime I step outside of the air conditioning, but in Ankara I pretty much only want to die when I’m riding a crowded city bus, even though there isn’t much air conditioning to be found here.

AND on Thursday we’re going to Cappadocia and Konya! Underground cities and whirling dervishes, yes please!

More on Islam, plus a life update

I got a triple dose of Turkey’s Muslim culture all at once yesterday, as within 15 minutes after arriving at Ankara Kalesi (Ankara Castle, the 9th-century Byzantine walled section of the city) I asked Bengü about head scarves, heard my first call to prayer, and saw my first circumcision party. Fortunately, the last of these did not involve actually seeing a child being circumcised. Muslims (or at least the Turkish ones? I’ll do my best not to pretend to know anything more about Islam than I really do, here) circumcise their boys at around age seven or eight, and the process involves dressing the poor child up like a little prince in a sparkly cape and feathered hat, parading him around (this was the part I saw) and giving him lots of presents. Actually, as I write this, I am looking at a framed studio portrait of my host brother Hazar in just such an outfit, complete with silver cane. (I got Hazar’s bedroom.)

As for the head scarf question, Bengü explained that many Turkish women wear head scarves, and the number is increasing because the current government looks on it favorably. Then last night we were sitting on the balcony having tea (I’ve had more tea in the past two days than in the whole six months before that, all out of ince belli bardaklar, Turkish hourglass-shaped glass teacups) and a woman in a head scarf walked up the path to our apartment building. Nursen Hanim made a scoffing noise and Bengü explained that her mother doesn’t like women like this, because they wear their head scarves as a political statement, not a religious one. Their family, it turns out, are secularists (I learned the word for secularism, layiklik). There are a lot of interesting things that could be said here about Turkish politics and religious/secular identity, but I think I will save it for when I know more.

And as for the call to prayer, if I sleep with my window open (a good idea, as there is no air conditioning), the 4 a.m. one wakes me up. I sort of don’t really mind, because it’s actually quite beautiful sounding, even though it is blared from loudspeakers. I wonder if it’s really a muezzin (is that what they’re called? I‘m sorry if I‘m totally wrong) calling it, or a recording? Probably a real person, right?

Life update: My Turkish continues to be terrible but gets less terrible almost hourly. Yesterday I saw a lot of Ankara with Bengü and some of her friends (and Hazar, who was our driver), which was pretty fun. And most important, Turkish food is really amazing. Seriously, come to Turkey and eat. Breakfast is assorted cheeses, bread, olives, tomatoes, honeys and jams with tea. I was told that’s how it would be before I came, but I somehow didn’t believe it til I tasted. It’s the best breakfast possible (except maybe, maybe grits with bacon. Maybe). For dinner tonight Nursen Hanim made red lentil soup, bulgur pilaf, a salad of snap peas in olive oil, stuffed grape leaves, homemade pickles, and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. And then when I was doing my homework she brought me cherries. I’m glad the heat suppresses my appetite, otherwise they’d have to roll me onto the plane at the end of the summer (although all this food is pretty healthy, I guess).

Speaking of Nursen Hanim, almost every conversation with her is like a mini train wreck, as I continuously fail to understand her or convey my thoughts eloquently in Turkish. During dinner I may or may not have accidentally led her to believe that not only do I have a fiance, but he has cold feet. (Yeah, don‘t ask. It started off as an innocent conversation about Bengü‘s engagement and then all of a sudden I was the one who was engaged and trying to explain to her why I didn‘t know when my wedding would be.) Her response: “Afraid to marry a beautiful girl like you?! Dump him!”

Turkolog FAQ, or a belated jet lag post

I wrote this when I woke up at 2 a.m. on Saturday/Sunday, but you’re not getting it til now. Sorry!

1. Is Turkey a Muslim country?

As the Turkish Embassy representative who spoke at our orientation in DC explained no fewer than three times, Turkey is not a Muslim state. It is a secular state with a predominantly Muslim population. (I get the feeling embassy representatives have to explain this to Americans a lot.) This is (she explained) what differentiates it from the other countries of the Middle East; secularism was one of the founding values of the Turkish Republic and is still highly prized by the government and the ruling elite. There do exist Islamist political parties, but I confess that I don’t presently understand/remember enough about the political system and situation to explain their current status and role in the government. As for the practice of Islam, it varies widely and depends partly on social class and location (village vs. city, etc.). The only outward marker of religious faith I thought to look for on the plane from Munich was head scarves on women. Some women had them, but the majority - probably at least two-thirds - didn’t. No one in my host family covers her head.

2. The real FAQ - what’s your host family like?

Well! I’ve been here for about ten hours (it’s 2 a.m. here - yay jet lag) and they seem really nice so far. The mother, Nursen Hanim (Hanim means “Ms.”) pronounces my name like “Lessee” and has already called me kizim (“my girl/daughter”), canim (“my soul”), tatli (“sweet”), and said I had a very happy, smiling face. I’m not sure if she works, but she makes amazing lentil borek and stuffed grape leaves (borek is savory pastry). The daughter, Bengü, is 23 and just graduated from university with a degree in economics. She speaks some English, which is good for me because with the stress and exhaustion of traveling yesterday my already weak Turkish was further damaged by ridiculous lexical access problems. (That is, I couldn’t remember how to say ANYTHING. It took me 5-10 seconds to even say “no” in response to a question at one point.) She plays guitar and loves music. The son, Hazar, is 19 and huge (maybe six feet tall), but I didn’t see him for very long before he ducked out to meet friends for the evening. The dad, Özcan Bey, (Bey means “Mr.“) came home after I had met everyone else. He is bald and friendly and a professor of modern history (everything from the French revolution onward, he explained).

Ankara!

I made it to Ankara! Unfortunately we cannot make my host familys internet work on my computer, so the post I wrote late last night in the throes of jet lag will have to wait to be posted, and I will have to make do with a keyboard on which I cannot for the life of me locate the apostrophe key. (That is why there are no contractions in this post.) My host family is super nice so far, although very unimpressed with my level of Turkish (they keep asking if I am sure that I will be taking intermediate Turkish and not beginner... but that is understandable, since speaking and oral comprehension are my worst skills, and the jet lag made me forget how to say pretty much everything I knew). But they seem to like me, especially the mom, who calls me tatlım, kızım, and canım (my sweet, my girl, my soul).

I have not seen much of Ankara yet, but it seems hot, dry, and hilly, and also very new-looking. My dichotomy for foreign cities seems to be "looks like Western Europe" vs "looks like Russia," and so far Ankara is much more on the Western Europe side of things. I am definitely ok with that.

Washington - Munich - Ankara

Hello, everyone!

I am leaving for Ankara today. FINALLY.

I'm trying not to be very nervous. But I'm pretty nervous.

My next post will come to you from Turkey! Yay!

Summer Reading List

I’ll trust my mom to keep her silence on how much of my summer reading list so far has consisted of various types of romance novels and just tell you about the Turkey-related books I’m working on. (The links in this post are just to Amazon pages.)

1. The novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature. I’ll write up an entry about this when I finish it; for now, I’ll just say that the slog through Snow has made me understand why I’ve heard such mixed reviews of Pamuk’s work, but it has been an interesting primer on the issues that concern contemporary Turkish intellectuals, such as Islam and secularism, Turkey’s political and cultural relationship with Europe, and authoritarianism versus democracy. If anyone’s interested in Pamuk, I’ve heard great things about his non-fiction Istanbul: Memories and the City.

2. The Turkish Language Reform: a Catastrophic Success by Geoffrey Lewis for the Oxford Linguistics series. On the reforms that de-Arabicized the Turkish language in the 1920’s and ’30’s and created a sharp enough divide between Ottoman Turkish and Modern Turkish that I’ll probably never be able to read the former without special training (step one: learn Arabic alphabet). Swoon. My Turkish professor recommended this back in November or so, and I’m shocked and slightly embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to get around to it.

3. Crescent and Star (could be a Yale secret society?) by Stephen Kinzer, or, “even better,” Turkey: a Modern History by Erik Zurcher. Both recommended by my classmate Dave, who’s spending his summer in scenic Baku, Azerbaijan (like Turkey, but post-Soviet). I chose the former for now, since it’s shorter and I’m on a schedule (one week til departure!).

Mail Call!

My, that's a lovely refrigerator you've got there! But you know what would make it look even better? A postcard from Turkey!

Email me your postal address (ljr84@mail.ru if you don't have my primary email address on hand), or just leave a comment on this entry if I'm likely to already have your address. And assuming the Turkish postal system is not nearly as inscrutable as the Russian one, you'll get a postcard from me sometime this summer!

Seurat the Dot, or Dorky Language Post Number One (of Many)

What's with that dot on the first letter of İstanbul in your last post, Leslie?

Well, I'm glad you asked! (Someone really did ask me this over the weekend, and I really was glad.) Turkish has two versions of the letter i, and they represent different sounds. The one with the dot, written i in lower case and İ in upper case, is pronounced like the vowel in English beet, or perhaps bit.

(I am not clear on this point because my Turkish textbook says the former – pronounce it like beet – but my Turkish professor pronounces it more like bit. Maybe I'll report on this once I've heard more native Turkish speech.)

The one without the dot, written as ı in lower case and I in upper case, represents a high back tense unrounded sound. If that means nothing to you, it sounds a little like the u in English cup, but with the back of the tongue a little closer to the roof of the mouth. Or the Russian vowel ы, but with the tongue a bit farther back toward the throat.

Anyway. İf İstanbul were written without the dot in Turkish, it would sound kind of like Uhstanbul. Since there's no such problem in English, İ guess there's no reason to keep writing it as İstanbul in this English-language blog, except that İ like capital dotted i.

-Yelİz

YES

Excerpt from an email I got this morning about the program I'm going to be on:

As part of your program, many trips are organized to places like Istanbul, Cappadocia, Safranbolu etc. There is also a trekking activity in your program, near Kızılcahamam region, a liveboard discovery diving experiment and canoe rafting in Alanya. Also excursions are included in your program to historical places in Ankara...

I was quite upset at first, back in April, when I found out that they put me in Ankara instead of İstanbul. (The CLS program has two intermediate-level groups, one in İstanbul and one in Ankara). İstanbul is the tourist destination, the city people fall in love with, the place with all the history and all the sights. Ankara is... well, the capital, formerly a dusty little town known chiefly for its goats ("Ankara" = "angora," get it?) until it found Atatürk's favor in the 1920's. İstanbul is on the Bosphorus; Ankara is, I am given to understand, somewhere in the Anatolian desert. You can imagine why I would be upset.

But I came to terms with my lot (after making sure I couldn't switch into the İstanbul group... no dice), since the Ankara group was promised excursions and homestays instead of dorm-stays. In trying to keep me on Turkey-track instead of having me run off to Kyrgyzstan (always a risk, with me), my Turkish professor also tempted me with the prospect of lots of Central Asians in Ankara to chat in Russian/Turkish/Uzbek with. Nice. So by now I was already prepared to love my time in Turkey's drab capital, and now that they've sweetened the deal with trekking, canoe rafting, and the geologically bizarre region of Cappadocia (I swear, Cappadocia is ALL my Lonely Planet Turkey guidebook talks about), I'm super excited!

PS, since people have been asking, I leave for Turkey on June 19. Still nearly four weeks away! :(
PPS, if anyone knows what a "liveboard discovery diving experiment" might be, I'd like to know. It makes me a little nervous.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my new blog: the Turk-o-Log! (brass fanfare)

I’ll be going to Turkey for eight weeks this summer on a U.S. government-sponsored language learning program. Actually, maybe now is a good time to put up the disclaimer they asked us to include: the views represented on this weblog are solely my own and do not in any way represent the views of the U.S. Department of State. Or Georgetown University, or any other institution with which I may be affiliated. There.

This blog won’t be quite like my dearly-loved (by me, anyway) Russia blog; the difference lies mostly in the fact that I actually knew some things about Russia, while I know next to nothing about Turkey. The goal of this blog, then, besides reassuring my parents that I'm still alive and well in Ankara (hi Mom!), is to share my first explorations of contemporary Turkish language, culture and society. And share pictures. Since I'll only be in Turkey for a short time, I'll be writing a little bit before I leave; in my abundant free time (classes have finished for the semester), I'm making an effort to learn some things about Turkey to avoid being completely shell-shocked when I get there. Look for new posts soon!

-Yeliz (it's my "Turkish name" from class this year)