Tax Dollars Well Spent

I'm leaving Turkey tonight, and I can't believe how quickly the time has passed this summer. I came in with no specific expectations, and I'm coming out with a wealth of knowledge concerning Turkish language, culture, and maybe (?) even some of my own plans for the future. I'm really going to miss a lot of things about this place. And not just the food! :)

Due some logistical difficulties, I had to leave my host family a bit early (yesterday afternoon) and I've spent the last day with my friend's family in a different part of Ankara. To recover from the program's going away/end of the summer party last night, we went to a Hamam this morning in a small town about an hour outside of the city. It was exactly what I needed. We swam in the thermal bath, sat in the sauna, and scrubbed ourselves squeaky clean in preparation for our departure. Afterward, we ate some fresh pide (it's like a Turkish pizza, with minced meat) before heading back to Ankara to help my friend do some last minute gift shopping.

I've spent the remainder of the evening at her apartment, with her host family, trying to pack all of her things before we head to our program coordinator's house around midnight. We're leaving for the airport at 3am, so she thought it best for most of us to meet with her beforehand. I'm not particularly looking forward to the 27 hour trip back to New York, especially the 5 hour layover I have tomorrow night in Washington, D.C.. It will also seem strange to spend 3 hours in Munich tomorrow morning when I know I'll be back in Bavaria in just a few days time. But I'm excited to go to New York, even if it's for only two days, and I'll forget about the whole ordeal once I'm settled at my grandmother's house next week.

So to the State Department, to our good friend Hillary, and to (most of) you, the lovely American taxpayers, I say thank you! You've helped a lazy graduate postpone the realities of the working world for a few months' time, and with a vacation in Turkey of all things! I don't know when I'll be able to come back to Turkey in the future, or how I'll be able to use Turkish in my personal or "professional" life. And I'm afraid I won't have all the answers to the end-of-program survey and narrative report I'm supposed to complete in the coming weeks. But hey, I'm only 21. Do you really expect me to have a 5 year plan? :)

From a Woman's Perspective

Earlier this week, I spent the lengthy bus ride on the way back from a party at one of our teacher's houses in conversation with one of my friends from the program, discussing perceptions of (and the need for) feminism in today's world. We talked about variations of gender inequality, about our mothers' generation, about her experiences as a "western feminist" in Russia, and about the role of women in Turkish society today. She shared a very powerful article that she had recently read, which addresses the problem of societal expectations that teach women to give in to men, to be quiet about their concerns, and which allow rape to happen. Later on, I came across a New York Times op-ed piece written by Bob Herbert, in which he also laments the horrible truth of violence against women in America, stating that "we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected."

Yesterday, two reporters from Aksam, a local newspaper, came to talk to our class about our experiences living and learning Turkish in Ankara. At one point, one of the men asked us about any problems we'd had during our time here - what was difficult for us in Turkey? At first, we all agreed that our host families had been great, that the program had been great, our summer was going along just fine. But I thought briefly about what has been on my mind for the last few weeks, and raised my hand to say that it is extremely difficult to be a foreign woman in Turkey. And by that I think I meant to say that it's difficult to be a woman at all in Turkey - it might only be more difficult for me because I have very different cultural expectations.

Back in the US, I'm used to being frustrated at the littler things, like outdated expectations of chivalry that perpetuate structures of female dependence rather than equal, mutual respect between two human beings. I have no problem with people opening doors for each other, it just shouldn't be based along gender lines. I often cringe when I hear girls my age complaining that a guy won't pay for dinner, telling me that the feminist revolution has already finished, or that "oh god no, I'm not a feminist..." Really? You don't favor equal rights for women? Strange...

I don't expect a man to treat me well because I'm a woman. I expect him to treat me well because I'm a human being. And that's just it. I'm used to defining myself as a human being. Since coming here, I've become much more aware of my place as a woman specifically, and it makes me very uncomfortable. Obviously, I am aware of the fact that I am, biologically speaking, a woman. And I'm quite happy with that. But it doesn't need to define me as a person. When I walk down the street in New York, I usually feel like myself. Here, I am acutely aware of the fact that I am a women, and that most of the people I pass along the road are men.

My host sister, who is only slightly younger than me, lives at home, and will probably continue to do so until she gets married. I'm sure if she were a son she'd have a much easier time moving away from the family if she wanted to. From what I've learned in my time here, there is an extreme double standard when it comes to Turkish guys and girls. For many Turkish girls, sex before marriage is unheard of, forbidden, a societal taboo. Men, on the other hand, are able to be more promiscuous with fewer social ramifications. And while a lot of these expectations exist in the United States as well, they're much more pronounced here. Women are given far less agency in Turkey, and I can tell that many guys here are oblivious to the situation and needs of Turkish women, and of women in general.

Stuck in a co-dependent state, many Turkish women seem to coddle their husbands along with their children. With a few exceptions, I've gathered that the majority of the host fathers in the program families do significantly less around the house than their wives. One of the mothers even broke down crying to a student because she was so frustrated with her unequal role in the household and the fact that she could do nothing to change her situation.

Unlike the guys in our program, I can't sit down in a local cafe and play tavla with a group of Turkish men. Nor can I play tavla with a group of Turkish women - because they, with the exception of some younger women, don't really go to the cafes. It's eerie to sit on some of the terraces after class to look in front of me and see only one or two women - and they're often friends of mine that are sitting at our table. We jokingly call them "dude bars," but their existence, to me, reflects some of the more serious realities of gender inequality in this country.

The reason I initially brought up the articles on the mistreatment of women in America is to remind myself that gender inequality is a universal phenomenon, and to maintain perspective. It's easy to demonize another culture for practices that we consider offensive or unjust, but it's much harder to recognize them in our own surroundings. I'm also wary of essentialist cultural criticism, especially when I find myself flirting with it now and again. One of my greatest worries in Europe at the moment concerns leftist and feminist discourses of emancipation which often reinforce tropes of Muslim cultural minority, unwittingly orientalizing and victimizing Muslim women rather than actually raising their status in society. Many Turkish women in Germany, for example, are not only marginalized as Turks in Germany and as women in general, but by their combined status as both Turks and women within the dominant German society, for which the Turk is the quintessential Muslim Other and the Turkish woman is the quintessential victim of male Turkish power.

Many of these issues that have been bothering me lately are far too complex to be treated in full in this simple blog post. But I felt the need to process some of my thoughts on gender relations before I leave Turkey in two days. I'm spent a wonderful summer here, and I don't mean to say that I've been bothered non-stop by my status as a woman here. I've just gained another reason to keep fighting the fight our mothers won't be able to finish without us. :)

Top ten reasons I love Amasra

10) The pine trees and the cliffs

9) The fisherman and their boats

8) The tiny little fried fish

7) The amazing Amasra salad

6) The Black Sea - it's wonderful! (I'm looking at you, 90 degree Mediterranean)

5) The wind that comes from the Black Sea

4) Turks live there

3) Russians don't go there

2) Kolbastı is from the region (well, Trabzon is close enough...)

1) It's just plain beautiful, and it's one of the most calming places I've been to in a very long time.

I definitely did not want to leave Amasra after only 24 hours. But I guess now I have an even bigger reason to come back to Turkey as soon as I possibly can.

We left Ankara early on Monday morning and arrived at the Black sea just in time for a lunch of fresh gozleme and ayran (yogurt drink), served beachside in a small town near Amasra. We had a chance to go swimming afterward, an experience made all the more pleasant by the perfect water tempurature and waves. It was a much more agreable day at the beach than the one afforded to us in Alanya. After splashing about for a while, I swam across the cove with a friend of mine (about a mile or so in total) - we stopped for a moment before turning back to admire the scenery of the green cliffs and the complete calm of the water around us. It was exactly what I needed.

After leaving the water, we drove to Amasra, where we stayed in a small house on the hillside of the city, our bedroom overlooking the Black Sea. After a bit of shopping, we settled down along the docks for a dinner of fresh fish from the region and a generous portion of the famous "Amasra Salad" - basically a raw vegetable lover's dream - followed by a chocolate dipped banana from a nearby vendor.

We hung out as a group on Monday night, both in the house and out in the town. My host sister had come with us, so I ended up speaking more Turkish than I'd expected, as she speaks little to no English and shook her head at us in disapproval everytime the conversation devolved into English. Around midnight, a few of us shared a beautifully cheezy moment on the breakwall, playing guitar and dancing Kolbastı with some random Turkish guys we'd just met. They were impressed that we knew how to dance, but seemed confused that we couldn't manage to coordinate and sing even one entire song in English for them.

On Tuesday morning, we enjoyed a delicious Turkish breakfast on the balcony (overlooking the sea of course) followed by some shopping, exploring, and a quick trip to Safranbolu on the way back to Ankara. Safranbolu is a beautifully preserved Ottoman town whose charm was mostly destroyed by the hilarious and poorly translated tourism video we were forced to watch in a lokum factory store and a frightening display of lifelike Ottoman mannequins in one of the houses-turned-museum near the city center. I'm glad to have seen the town, but I don't think I need to go back again. I'd rather save my money for the Black Sea.

More pictures of the trip (and of Saturday night) will be up on facebook soon.

It's been a long and relaxing weekend, so relaxing in fact that I have yet to start my research for the Turkish oral presentation due Wednesday morning. We're leaving for Amasra and Safranbolu tomorrow morning and won't be back until late on Tuesday, so now is pretty much the only time I have to work. But I can't. Probably because I stopped caring about these sorts of things the second I handed in my thesis this past April. So I'm sentencing myself to a late night on Tuesday by being lazy today, and I'm kind of ok with that. I've never really been one for last-minute work, but I'm starting to think it's not all that bad in certain instances.

I tried uploading some pictures of yesterday evening (our raw meatball extravaganza) on facebook, but it's being lame and I gave up. Until I manage to get the pictures online, check out this video I took of my host father (in the stripes) kneading the raw meat with a friend of my host mother. The little girl is her niece.

Mutluluk - Happiness

I'm sitting in my host sister's room right now, hanging out with some of her friends and one of my friends from the CLS program. We're drinking orange "juice" (it's like Turkish Tang), chatting, and listening to Turkish pop music on high volume. And we're speaking Turkish!

Today was my first real free day in Ankara since getting here, and we spent the afternoon shopping in the older Ulus district. Tonight, we're making "raw meatballs," a traditional Turkish dish made from kneading raw meat with spices for about an hour until it's cooked. Like the cow intestine sandwiches, it sounds pretty disgusting, but is actually quite good. I'm excited to see how exactly it's made.

I think my Turkish started getting much better in the last few days - I've spent a lot of time with my host sister and Ceren this week - and I hope I can still improve it in the week I have left. I'm worried that I'll forget a lot once I'm back in New York, but it's nice to at least be able to communicate more effectively during this last portion of the trip. I'm really happy in Ankara right now, and I'm going to miss quite a few things about my life here - the food, the pace of life, the people...

When I first heard that I'd be coming to Ankara, I was actually quite upset. Like everyone else, I wanted to be in Istanbul and I heard nothing but bad things about this city in the months leading up to the summer. Since coming, however, I've realized that while Ankara is a horrible place to visit, it's a wonderful place to live. It's a big city, but it's not crowded. It's easy to get around, and it's easy to live in. Most importantly, it's a very Turkish city, perfect for a foreigner who wants to learn the language without speaking too much English. Ataturk picked Ankara as the capital of the Republic not because it was a great city, but because it it's centrally located. Since his day, it's developed into Turkey's second largest city. There isn't anything particularly exciting about it, but I think that's why I like it so much. People here are just doing their thing, and the city isn't trying to be anything it's not. I respect that.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it..... we're in a Turkish newspaper...?

So a reporter from Haber Turk came to our performance on Tuesday night and actually followed up with a story in today's paper! In it, we're praised heavily for our interest in Turkish culture and badass dancing skills. I'm paraphrasing, of course.

In the bottom right corner, you can see me (along with some other students from my program) dancing backstage before the show. It was, ironically, the one point of the whole night at which we were not performing a traditional Turkish dance. What you see here is the "I'm awesome" Dance. The dance was invented in early 2007, and it's purpose is to boost the self esteem of the dancer, who, while gleefully singing I'm awesome awesome awesome, I'm awesome, I'm awesome, etc, must dance about spastically in the hopes of killing anxiety with absurdity. We were dancing it at this moment to help one of the girls with her stage fright. Clearly it was the most appropriate picture to publish with this article.

On an unrelated note, I spent the evening at a friend's house, and when it came time to join her host mother on the balcony for tea, was (somewhat) able to hold my own in a Turkish conversation. I feel like my speaking ability has improved a lot during the past week, and it's a shame that we have to leave so soon. I've lost most of my motivation as far as our Turkish class is concerned, but I could definitly stay in Ankara for a while longer. The summer has (as expected) gone by extremely quickly, and I need to start plotting my next trip back to Turkey!

Here's a better version of the dance performance from Tuesday night.

The TAA Talent Show!

After weeks (ok maybe just a week and a half) of preparation, we finally performed our songs and dances at the "talent show" last night! It was a very long day leading up to the show, and I was worried at times that I wouldn't make it.

I started the morning by walking out of my room towards the bathroom, only to be told by my host mother that su yok - there was no running water. Ok, I thought. I had been looking forward to a hot shower to clear my sinuses, but I'd make it through the day. I pulled my hair into a bun and did my best to forget about it. An hour later, on my way to school, I realized that my cold was worse than I had thought as I wheezed and coughed my way to the city center. I became winded after only ten minutes of walking. When I finally reached the bus stop, I stumbled into a supermarket to buy water and tissues, grabbed a bottle of fresh squeezed orange juice from a local vendor, and jumped into a cab for the rest of the trip. I was already late, and needed to conserve my energy for Kolbastı! :)

After barely making it through four hours of lessons, I decided that I deserved a treat, and proceeded to stuff myself with yogurt kebab (see below) at our regular lunch place. I felt pretty sluggish after that, and even more so after completing a mandatory assessment exam in the un-airconditioned TAA computer lab. At that point, I met my host sister and her best friend Ceren in the cafe downstairs and the two of them did their best to teach us all the proper steps to Kolbastı. After developing a painful dance wound (in the form of an enormous blister on the ball of my right foot), I was ready to collapse from exhaustion, both mental and physical.

But the show had to go on. So I rallied, with the help of a quick dinner (a healthy mix of a banana, chocolate Kinder bars, a redbull, and painkillers - for my cold and for the blister) and we managed to put on a surprisingly impressive show. To be clear, it was impressive because I had extremely low expectations. We've been treated like middle schoolers for most of the summer, and, I feel, are often expected to perform like them as well. It's been kind of fun to graduate college and then be forced to act like a kid again. So I went into the "talent show" with the attitude of a 10 year old. It was fantastic.

Unfortunately, the videos I have of the show are taking extremely long to upload. I've tried for about 24 hours now with no success. If I have time later, and also manage to find videos of the end of the show (in which we invited audience members onstage to hop and skip around to the traditional Halay dance), I'll try again. In the meantime, check out this video that one of our instructors took.

After the show, I hung out with my host mother, my host cousin Zeynip, my host sister, and Ceren outside of the TAA building, trying to cool off and recover from all of the dancing under the hot stage lights. When Zeynip's husband arrived to pick us up, the six of us quickly piled into his compact car for the ride home. During the drive, I really enjoyed the view of Ankara the from the back window. I also enjoyed the view of the car itself: my host cousin in the front seat, smoking a cigarette and talking loudly on his cellphone; Zeynip, next to him, controlling the radio; the rest of us, crammed on top of each other in the backseat, dancing to the traditional music blasting from the tiny speakers behind us.

I'm really going to miss this place.

This is why we're fat

lunch today....
It's worth the pain.

Russian tourists in a not-so-Turkish place

Alanya was wonderful, and it was very sweet of the state department to pay for our holiday there, but I'm very happy to be back in Ankara right now. It feels much more like Turkey here. Turks will actually speak Turkish with me, and there far fewer Russian and Scandinavian flags flying about.

We took the overnight bus on Wednesday, got in to Alanya pretty early on Thursday morning, and headed straight to the harbor to board a boat for an amazing day of scuba diving and swimming. Although the weather was extremely hot and humid, the breeze out on the Mediterranean made a big difference, as did the water itself. We took our boat around the small peninsula that juts out from the city to a small cove where we joined and tied up with two other boats of other (mainy Russian) tourists. We spent the better part of the day chilling in the cove, taking turns jumping into the water and going on short dives.

I was a bit nervous to dive at first, and the more I thought about the lack of breatheable air 8 meters underwater, the more I began to psyche myself out. After a brief mini-panic attack during my first few minutes underwater, I managed to calm myself down, focus on my breathing, and enjoy the swim around the bottom of the cove. The instructors took us out in groups of about five people, and led us around the seafloor pretty slowly, stopping at the end to put on a little show, which included the group leader blowing air rings up to the surface while lying on his back. I had never been scuba diving before, and it was amazing to be able to touch the various rock formations and plants that hang out on the ocean floor. I almost managed to touch a fish, but it was, of course, too quick for my grasp. Our second dive was very similar, the only difference being that we swam a few meters deeper and saw slightly different rock formations. I'd love to dive again somewhere else in the world, especially in an area with more diverse fish and coral life.

After heading back to shore, we took our showers, had dinner (a pathetic excuse for Turkish food served buffet-style at our hotel) and wandered for a bit around the neighborhood before settling down in a nearby cafe for a drink. We were all a bit frustrated at our inability to communicate in Turkish with most of the restaurant owners, and so we picked the first place that didn't annoyingly force English, German, or Russian onto us. The area of downtown Alanya and its surroundings is hardly recognizable as being Turkish. It's a budget vacation destination for a lot of Europeans, and is filled mainly with mediocre restaurants, trashy boutiques, and travel agencies trying to lure customers into swiming with the dolphins or paying too much for a boat cruise. For most of us in the group, it was frustrating to be in a place so abused by tourists, where Turkish shop and restaurant owners play into orientalist fantasies and where the Turkey we've come to love and appreciate seems bastardized and cheapened in some way.

The waiters at the cafe we picked were happy to hear us speak Turkish, though, and treated us very well. The prices were reasonable, given the location, and they even entertained our requests for some Kolbastı music. A few of us from the group started dancing when the song started and were cheered on by the owner, staff members, and even some of the other customers. I think we'll be decent enough to perform on Tuesday - most of the Turks were impressed enough that we even knew the song, so I don't think many of them will judge our technique too much.

On Friday, we drove out into the local mountains to go river rafting in the Manavgat, which is famous for its beautiful blue water and surrounding landscape. We paddled down the river with inflatable rafts seating about ten people each. We had a lot of fun, despite the fact that we were led in a group of about fifty other people, were forced to make every stop and undertake every activity under the direction of the "fun nazi," the unnecessarily harsh Turkish guide leading the group, and were splashed just a bit too many times by the other rafts, specifically by one carrying a group of Turkish soldiers on leave and by another carrying a group of testosterone-driven Iranians on vacation together. All in all, it was an in interesting use of tax-payer money. I'm not sure I'd recommend it for CLS programs in the future.

Saturday was our free day, so we slept in, spent some time at the beach, and generally rested before heading back to Ankara on the bus last night. Again, we arrived very early in the morning and I went straight to bed until 2pm. I plan on lounging about for the rest of the day, spending some time with my host mother, recovering from the trip (and the cold I've managed to catch), and catching up on the homework due this week.

The facebook album of the trip can be found here.

Alanya for the weekend

I'm heading down to Alanya tonight and I won't be back to Ankara until Sunday morning. I'm looking forward to the weekend, which will consist mostly of swimming, scuba diving, and river rafting ... in one of Turkey's top vacation destinations. Your tax dollars, may I remind you again, are financing the whole trip.

I'm really going to miss this food

Nothing of particular importance happened today, save a few memorable meals. It was one of those days during which I'm constantly reminded of just how delicious and comforting Turkish food is.

It started out at breakfast. I woke up (without an alarm, at 7am! what world am I living in?), took my shower, and joined my host mother in the kitchen, where she had already prepared the morning's spread of fresh feta cheese, diced tomatoes, sliced cucumber, homemade candied apricots, and tea. She was at the stove, finishing up the Turkish omlette that was to be the bulk of my meal. A few slices of bread were warming in the toaster. I sat down and began to fill my plate with vegetables before my host mother plopped half a skillet's worth of eggs and parsley alongside them. I ate my meal as slowly as the morning would allow, ending it with an open-faced candied apricot sandwich and a big gulp of hot tea.

After a bit of trouble with the buses, I arrived at the TAA building a little bit late and wasn't able to get my water from the local market. During our first break, I ran downstairs to buy a bottle, along with some cold peach nectar and a roll of hazlenut-creme cookies to share with some of the other girls. The rest of the morning went by relatively quickly, and it was lunchtime before I knew it. One of my favorite parts of the day.

We've been going back to the same lokanta for lunch almost daily for the past two weeks. It's close, reliable, and incredibly cheap. For about three lira, I can fill up on lentil soup, salad, fresh bread and tea. For a few extra lira, I'll often split another dish with a friend. Last week, we ate a lot of lahmacun, a type of Turkish flatbread cooked with minced meat, spices, and parsley on top. Today, it was the yogurt kebab. In my opinon, it's the king of all kebabs, and probably my greatest temptation in all of Ankara. There's no way it's at all healthy. But my god if it isn't the most delicious thing on the menu.

The yogurt kebab consists of three (arguably four) layers of relatively simple ingredients that are irresistible when combined. On the bottom is a round loaf of flatbread (pita would be its closest relative in the bread family), slightly toasted and cut into square-inch pieces. On top of that, a layer of full-fat (of course) yogurt. The final layer consists of tomato sauce and chunks of kebab meat, placed on top of the bread and yogurt to create convenient little stacked bites. It's served with spicy green pepper and parsley, both of which add just the right amount of crispness to the dish. I devoured my portion of the kebab (we split it between three people) after having finished my standard bowl of lentil soup.

We had a longer lunch break than usual, owing to a special lecture that was scheduled for the afternoon, so some of us wandered down to the commercial area for some MADO ice cream after our meal. It's a Turkish chain that makes some of the best ice cream I've ever had. I'm currently obsessed with the banana flavor - it's not artificial in any way, and I often find chunks of banana in it. I had some with chocolate today before heading back to the TAA building for our lecture. This afternoon, I walked around for a while with some program friends, trying to find clothes for our trip to Alanya tomorrow, and then made my way home to rest for a bit.

Later that evening, while working in my room, I could smell them before I knew they were real. I went to the kitchen to confirm my suspicions, and sure enough, there was my host mother, making gozleme. Gozleme are a sort of Turkish quesadilla made with filo-like sheets of dough stuffed with either meat, cheese, or potatoes, folded into a square, and fried on a skillet. Along with the salad and soup she'd set out for dinner, my host mother was preparing a pile of feta-parsley gozleme, one of my favorites. (I told her that I love them and now apparently she's making as much as she can before I leave.) At the table, I savored each bite of gozleme with a bit of yogurt and salad until I physically couldn't eat any more. I think I was my host mother who actually pressured me into eating the last few pieces, but I can't say for sure.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to take a picture of my lunch or breakfast, but I had my camera ready this evening. Here's what was left of the gozleme after I forced myself to stop eating:

Along with two of the remaining stuffed green peppers my host mother had set out on the table:

I'm guessing my waistline hasn't appreciated the summer as much as I have, but it's been worth it. I won't have easy access to most of these foods three weeks from now (!!) so I figure I need to enjoy as much as I can while I have the chance. :)

As I'm writing, I think I can smell fresh corn steaming in the kitchen. It's already 10pm and I'm incredibly full from dinner... I wonder if I'll be able to say no?

Pointy Hats and Curly Shoes

...It's why we love the Hittites! Or specifically, why one of the girls on the program, an Anthropology major who used to study Archeology, thinks the ancient civilization is just too adorable. I was skeptical of her characterization at first, but I think she managed to win me over a great deal on our trip to the Hittite capital of Hatusa yesterday afternoon.

Not very much is known about the Hittites, who ruled Anatolia about 4000 years ago, other than what can be learned from a vast collection of cuneiform tablets (describing the growth, power, and holdings of the empire) and the little other archeological remains that have been found. One of the major limitations on our understanding of the people is that, as a mentor of our lecturer on Friday once said, "the Hitites lived but they never died." Or rather, no Hittite burial site has ever been found.

We spent most of the day in the bus, driving out to the various sites. But our tour guide was very knowledgeable and the time looking at the ruins was well spent. We saw a few open air temples before eating lunch and heading out to the main site of the capital city. There isn't much left in the way of ruins beside rock foundations, but we were able to see a few city wall gates that were relatively intact (barring the absence of a few statues that can now be seen in various museums throughout Europe) as well as some well-preserved artifacts that were on display in the local museum.

On the three-something hour bus ride back to Ankara, one of our Turkish instructors led us in a game in which we had to name a Turkish fruit, vegetable, or animal. One person was to choose a word; the next person then had to find a word starting with the last letter of the previous word. And so on. Once we had exhausted our limited knowledge of household pets and foods, we decided to move on to verbs (or verb stems, rather, as all Turkish verbs end in k). Now, one of the great things about Turkish is that most nouns or adjectives can be changed into verbs through the simple addition of -la, -lan, or a similar suffix. Or you can ___ olmak (to be ___). Also, a lot of verbs (most of them borrowed) are simply formed by adding etmek (to do) to the original word. Like dans etmek, which means "to dance." As we started to run out of familiar words, the game of coming up with new verbs turned into a cyclical game of finding words that start with the t from etmek or the l from olmak and simply adding etmek, olmak, or another suffix (often meaning "to become") to invent new "verbs." Our instructor had to cut us off when we started to invent meaningless terms like nargilelenmek, which we decided must mean, "to become more and more like a hookah." We had become very tired at that point anyway, so we decided instead to practice one of the traditional Turkish songs we're all learning to perform at the TAA in a couple of weeks. We all know the chorus much better than the rest of the song, especially the few lines in Greek. We're working on it, though.

Update: I've just finished making an album of the trip, which you can see here. And if you're interested in a short piece I wrote about my time in Paris, check it out on onajunket.com, an independent travel writing site.

Kolbastı

I've found a new obsession. And it's far better than the last, because I like it more than just ironically. I've decided to put my c-walk and tecktonick-ing on hold to pursue the finer art of Kolbastı, a newly-revived Turkish dance from the Black Sea region. The music is fantastic, and the dance is extremely infectious. (please let me know if the link doesn't work... I can't access youtube here so it's hard to verify these things.)

Nobody really knows where the dance came from, or why it's become so popular in the last few years, but I don't think that really matters. Unlike Tecktonik, for example, which grew out of a pseudo-youth-rebellion movement in Paris, Kolbastı is a family dance. At the festival I went to a few weeks ago, it amazed me how many different types of people knew the moves. Even my host mother enjoys it, and readily dances alongside her daughters whenever given the chance.

After dinner this evening, some of my program friends and I tried the dance for the first time under the direction of my host sister and her best friend Ceren. The two of them have tried to get me to dance Kolbastı before, but it was usually in public. And of course I try to avoid completely outing myself as a foreigner as much as possible. In any case, I was ready for the challenge tonight, and began to hop and jump around the room to the music as soon as Ceren showed me the way. I was able to do a few of the steps with only mild awkwardness, and I think I'll be ready to perform them (as long as I'm not alone) at the TAA student "talent show" next month. After dancing until the point of exhaustion, we drank tea on the balcony and went for a short walk around the neighborhood. As we were walking back to the house, Ceren took out her cell phone to play the music and we danced down the street together. She and my host sister have a whole routine choreographed, and I'm still working on the easiest of the steps. It was a good way to burn off some of my senior week/Turkish food pounds though, and I've had the Kolbastı song stuck in my head since then.

The apartment has been pretty quite lately, with my younger host sister and host father both out of town, but I think it's actually given me a better chance to get to know my host mom... So I kind of had this fantasy before coming to Turkey that I'd spend hours in the kitchen, learning how to make traditional Turkish food while learning all about the culture and language of the country. And I've done a pretty good job of doing that so far. But I think my dream really came true this evening as I stuffed grape leaves on the balcony with my host mother, actually finishing sentences in Turkish (with help of course) as we went about our work. It was a beautifully cliché moment. It'll only get better when we actually eat the dish for dinner on Thursday night.

I went to see the new Harry Potter movie with some friends after class today, and we spent the rest of the day hanging out in a local cafe. It was one of those perfect, warm summer evenings, spent outside, drinking a beer or two, and postponing the night as much as possible. I grabbed a kebab on the way to the city center, and decided to take a cab for the last portion of my trip, as it was already dark out and I was feeling pretty lazy.

I had a breakthrough moment in the cab, in which I managed to hold a conversation (with little difficulty!) for the entire 10-minute drive, somehow leaving the driver with the impression that my Turkish is actually legitimate. I even managed to talk him into a price I thought was reasonable when he realized upon arriving at my apartment that he'd forgotten to turn on the meter. It was an overall win for sure. Especially considering the fact that I'd been speaking and listening to nothing but English for the 6 hours preceding the interaction. Hurray for slow (but noticeable) language improvement!

We left for Istanbul on Wednesday evening, (theoretically) sleeping on the train during the night before arriving at 7am on Thursday morning. I'm not the type of person who can function on four hours of broken sleep, and so I was considerably delirious for a large portion of the day. When we got off the train, we took a ferry across to the European side of the city, walked to the hotel, and, as it was still too early to check in, tried to change and get ready for the day in the hotel lobby bathrooms.

After breakfast, I split up from the group (which was going to the old part of the city to visit the Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, etc) with two other friends who had also already been to the big landmarks. We wandered up a busy pedestrian street (Istiklal Caddesi) and had amazing cappuccinos at a local cafe before slowly walking across the city to meet up with the group on the other side of the Golden Horn. We ate lunch near the Blue Mosque, and I spent the rest of the afternoon making my way back to the hotel with a few friends, stopping to buy spices (which I now know how to use!) and a half pound of pistachio lokum (Turkish delight) in the spice bazaar. I ate most of it in our hotel room before napping and getting ready for the evening. We met up with one of my friend's Turkish friends to get dinner and a few drinks before calling it an early night.

The next morning, we went down to the Bosphorus as a group to get a guided tour of Dolmabahce, an Ottoman palace built in the mid-19th century. The building is a bit ostentatious, but the waterfront gardens are gorgeous. Also, Ataturk died here in 1938 (his bed is covered with a Turkish flag and the clock in the room is still set to his time of death) and so it remains a very important landmark for the Republic.

After leaving the palace grounds, we caught a ferry up the Bosphorus to Anadolu Kavagi, a small town located just south of the Black Sea. The program paid for our lunch, which consisted of fresh calamari, mussels, and fish, and we stayed long enough to walk up to the nearby castle ruins, from which you can see the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. The view was breathtaking, and well worth the hike even in the hot and humid July heat.

We took the ferry back down to Istanbul, rested for a bit in the hotel (where I finished the Lokum from the day before), and went out in Istiklal for the evening. I ate dinner with a small group before meeting up with the rest to figure out our plans. After an awkward and difficult discussion in the middle of the road, we decided to split up into smaller groups and planned to meet up later on. I ended up in Balik Pasaj, a very busy and narrow street filled with fish vendors, souvenir shops, restaurants, and bars, with a group of about 8 people, including one of our Turkish instructors and some of her friends. We managed to find a table on the 4th floor of a bar (the rooftop patio), where the center area was eventually cleared to make room for a dancing. The DJ played a great mix of oldies, pop, salsa, Turkish folk music, and even humored my requests for Michael Jackson. The atmosphere was amazing, as was the view of the street from our table.

On Saturday, I took my time getting ready, had another cappuccino, and grabbed a ferry with one of my friends out to the largest of the Prince Islands, located in the Sea of Marmara. We were supposed to meet some friends of ours and were envisioning a relaxing day on the beach to eat and nap in peace. When we got there, we were confronted with crowds of tourists (most of them Turkish), many of them overweight and unecessarily under-clothed, and could find no place to get out of the 90 degree heat. Eventually, we met up with our friends and had some lunch and ice cream before leaving the island. The experience overall was disappointing, but it was a very beautiful place (apart from the crowds) and I'd like to go again some day to get a better impression.

I spent the last few hours of the day wandering around near the hotel and trying to rest. I bought some more pistachio lokum and devoured it as quickly as the last bag. (I've fallen in love with the fresh (by the kilo) lokum and plan to bring as much as I can back to the US at the end of the trip. If you'll be in New York and you have any requests for flavors, let me know.) We caught the night bus back to Ankara, on which I spent another sleepless night before getting back home at 6am and collapsing for the better part of the day. I've slept about 10 hours of the last 16 (although I did manage to make this album of the trip), and I'll probably be heading to bed fairly shortly.

The trip overall was exhausting, but I was extremely happy to be back in Istanbul. The city is beautiful and fascinating, and it wasn't until we got there on Thursday morning that I even remembered it's most of the reason I decided to learn Turkish. Since then, of course, I've added many other reasons. But it was on my second day visiting city two years ago that I first thought to start learning the language. And as we were leaving, I decided to add living Istanbul to my to-do list for the next five years. The list isn't very long, but it already includes living in Berlin, and I'm starting to realize that I make most of my life decisions based on where I want to be and not what I want to be doing with my life. But then again, I think living in these cities is what I want to be doing with my life.

İstanbul'dayım

I'm in İstanbul for the weekend to feast on Turkish delight and enjoy as much of the Bosphorus as I can before heading back to landlocked Ankara on Sunday. I'll post again when I'm home.

Türkçe zor mu?

Is Turkish difficult?

I'm still trying to figure that out. At times, I think that the language, with its lack of gender, articles, and irregularities, isn't all that bad. I'm getting this, I say to myself. It's totally kolay, easy. Five minutes later, I'm forgetting my vowel harmony again, as I trip over the third of what seems like ten suffixes added on to whatever word I'm attempting to pronounce. I've been told that Turkish is a 3 (out of 5) on the "how hard it is for a native English speaker to learn" language scale,* so it's right between Spanish and Arabic (*that's the technical name, I'm sure). I've been told that French and German are probably both a 2, so in theory this should be the hardest of all the languages I've studied.

I had a long-ish conversation with my host mom and older sister this evening about the many differences between English and Turkish, specifically the ones that are hardest for each of us to learn. For example, they're stumped by the many translations of the locative suffix (always -DE in Turkish), which include in, at, on, near, etc..., and they both agreed that English has too many verb tenses and words for az, which can be translated as little, a little, less... For me, these are the advantages of Turkish. So many words and constructions seem to be catch-alls, applicable in any number of situations. One of my favorite Turkish expressions is çok güzel, which can describe just about anything in life that's nice, good, pretty, or generally enjoyable.

On paper, Turkish is like chemistry. You need only learn the basic elements and grammatical rules (which are hardly ever broken) to form sentences and make yourself understood. Most verbs, nouns and adjectives can turn into each other with the simple addition of a -li or -ci. But to produce these chemistry-like sentences in speech is an entirely different story. Turkish is an agglutinative language, and words can become terrifyingly long very quickly. Mix up one letter in your string of suffixes, and you've changed the meaning of your entire sentence. Forget to harmonize your vowels (there are 8 of them), and people will generally just stare. Learning to remember those subtle changes reminds me of learning to remember gender agreement in French or Spanish, and so I'm assuming it will get easier with time.

Of course, my favorite words and constructions in Turkish are the ones that have no parallels in the other languages I know. These are the parts of the language I'll become most attached to, like fin, machin, quoi, tu vois? in French, frech in German, or awkward in English. I haven't been able to find satisfactory equivalents for any of these words (or many others for that matter), but that's exactly why I love them. One of the best examples in Turkish is the duo of var (there is) and yok (there isn't). They're words that primarily express existence, but often "yes" and "no" as well. For example, instead of saying directly, I have money, you'd say param var. Literally, my money exists. Or if you want to express, all at once, that something is wrong, does not exist, or that you disagree, simply say yooo(k). My favorite verb tense, used primarily for unwitnessed past or unconfirmed knowledge, is also a treasure of the Turkish language, but I'll have to save that for another day.

My mind has been all over the place today, so don't expect a coherent post. I took a long break from life yesterday afternoon (read: nap, blogs, reruns of American tv on my computer) and I've had a difficult time readjusting to the here-and-now. This morning, all I could think about was my (yet to be started) new life in New York, and this evening, I've been going back and forth between that, drooling over Turkish food, and trying to understand my host family better.

In terms of conversation, I'm back in a mostly listening stage, especially since the guest (a friend of a cousin..? I'm not really sure) staying with us this evening talks about as fast as I do when I'm in my high-speed SoCal mode. As she talked, I went back and forth between trying to pick out individual words I understood and playing a game in which I don't focus on actual meaning, but rather try to distinguish each word from the rest while maybe catching a verb tense here and there. This exercise isn't productive when I'm actually trying to understand a conversation, but I think it's useful when someone is speaking so quickly that I wouldn't be able to make sense of it anyway. I noticed an improvement in my listening comprehension by the end of the evening, but the spoken words still didn't come.

Our morning classes today were replaced by a lecture on Ottoman history, given by a professor at METU, the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Being one of the few people on the program that doesn't seem to have a background in any Turkish history, I really appreciated the overview of the empire's rise, decline, and overall structure. The same professor is coming back on Wednesday to talk about modern Turkish history, and I'm looking forward to that quite a bit. I'm hoping she'll be able to elucidate some of the tenets of Turkish secularism, as I'm kind of fascinated with its similarities to French laicite. I was originally drawn to Turkey because of its connection to Germany, but more and more it's making me think of France. Don't tell Sarko this, but I can't help but feel that the French and the Turks have a decent amount in common.

After class, I spent about an hour drinking tea in a local cafe with program friends before heading home. On my way, I ran into my host sister and her best friend, so I turned around and walked back with them to the city center, where we looked in some stores before saying goodbye to the friend and meeting up with my host mom. On our way back to the apartment, we stopped by the local market together, and I nearly collapsed at the sight of about 1/4 mile of beautiful produce stretching down one of the main roads near our apartment. Piles of tomatoes, peaches, peppers, potatoes, melons and more lay next to each other without barriers or any sort of embellishment, allowing what I consider to be the only thing worth showcasing, the food itself, to take center stage. A few signs here and there pointed to the prices, but they were overshadowed by the sheer quantity of produce displayed on the long tables lining the road. We bought a few bags full of cherries, grapes, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and greens before picking up a whole watermelon and schlepping it all up the rest of the road back home. Our dinner on the balcony consisted of mushroom soup, (shepherd) salad, fresh grilled fish, and arugula. About an hour later, my host mom brought out a bowl of grapes and cherries that we quickly devoured before drinking our evening tea. I've been getting worried in the last few days that I might get sick of eating only Turkish food soon, but I think I've still got a while to go before that happens.

On an unrelated note, I've set up a poll on the right to find out what you'd like to read about. Feel free to leave comments as well if there's something in particular you'd like me to write about more. I'm writing this blog in large part for myself, but I'd still like my readers to stay interested. :)