I love Turkish food

...and that's pretty much all I have on my mind right now. I just finished dinner, and almost wish that my host mother had force fed me more food like she did on my first night here. Even though most Turkish food seems to include only a select few ingredients (tomatoes, cucumbers, meat, potatoes, lemon, eggplant, lentils, bread, peppers, cheese, olives, spices ... I think that's almost it), there are far more ways to prepare it than I had ever imagined. It's all just so delicious.

We had class this morning at our new time (9am) and spent the afternoon meeting with representatives from ARIT (a Turkish-American research institute) and the American Embassy. The ambassador from the embassy was quite the nutjob, and I was slightly embarrassed when I found out that he had recieved two of his degrees from Columbia. He gave us a lecture on Turkish culture and politics, somehow ignoring key facts about the Ottoman empire as well as failing to distinguish between forms of national identites within Europe. He told us that all European countries based their identies on a shared culture and language, that they were all structured in the same way. This bothered me mostly because a large portion of my Comp Lit thesis focused on the difference between French and German national identities. It was painful to hear them lumped together as "European." He seemed to be excited about Turkey, though, and we managed to listen quietly while rolling our eyes at each other.

I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging around Ankara with friends from the progam and a Turkish friend of a friend from back home. I'm looking forward to a quiet evening in the apartment with my host family, and maybe I'll even get to sleep before midnight tonight.