Tamam, Tamam

OK! All right! It's ok. I'm ok. I don't need anything else. I don't know how to say anything else on the subject so please stop asking questions. Tamam is a very useful word.

We had our first Turkish lesson today at the Turkish-American Association near the center of Ankara. My host father took me to "school," and even bought me a bottle of water and packet of kleenex on our way to the bus. I haven't been taken care of like this in a very long time (when I got home today, the new pyjamas had been folded on the bed along with my clean laundry), and it's a bit disorienting. Our class was short - we took an preliminary test, went over the answers (I think I would have scored a 60% at best, had it counted) and casually chatted with our instructor for about a half hour.

After eating a huge lunch (I had the Iskender, which was delicious) at Kebabistan, we spent the afternoon walking around Ankara to get a feel for the city and buy our Turkish cell phones and sim cards for the summer. I felt a bit awkward at first, walking around in such a big group of Americans, but I got over that pretty quickly. I'm trying this new thing where I just try to let things be as they are. It's very useful, actually, and surprisingly easy.

I bought my sim card and a new faux-moleskine notebook (to jot down Turkish vocab words as they come up) and left the group to wander around with one of the other girls from the program. We looked in some shops around the Kızılay area and walked up to Kocatepe, the largest mosque in Ankara. The mosque, which is similar in design to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, is gorgeous, and there's an open space by the main entrance that overlooks a large portion of the city. We managed to find some long skirts and scarves to borrow, and we went inside to admire the tiling in silence.

I came home (relatively) early to hang out in the apartment for a while before eating dinner. I've spent the last part of the evening in the living room with my host family, typing this entry while watching Turkish soap operas, drinking cups of tea, and sharing my opinion on Swine Flu (Amerika'da skandal var mı?), which was, quite simply, Umurumda değil. Or rather, that I couldn't care less. And so I've found another thing to be happy about - I won't have to come across any swine in Turkey this summer!

Everything is tamam.