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.