Short Pearls

Some things I learned in Turkey, on this my last night:

1. Whatever you think it feels like to be "full" is only one quarter of the "full" you will feel in Turkey.

2. When crossing streets, its best to just close your eyes, run, and pray to whichever God you think is most likely to get you across safely.

3. If you're ever homesick, find the nearest shopping mall. There are plenty, and they're likely to be playing American top 40 hits. Just hide in a rack of clothes for a while and it might feel a little like home.

4. Or, alternatively, you could relish in the Euro Pop reminiscent of shiny shirts and half-mullets and just jam the hell out every time you hear "I Love Dans."

5. Turkish is difficult, but people greatly appreciate that you're even trying.

6. In a battle of wits between yourself and a nineteen year old Turk to see who can convince your host mom which of you put back the last piece of bread, you'll probably lose due to language barriers. Just pointing at him and shaking your head furiously won't do the trick.

7. fil means Elephant. Fiil means Verb.

8. Yogurt can improve almost any dish.

9. The Turkish language has hilarious instances of literalness. For example, "nostril" in Turkish literally translates as "nose hole."

10. I am going to miss it here.

Istanbul tonight, flight early tomorrow. My mother, my dog, and a Mountain Dew on the other side....thanks for reading ;)

-Katie

Food Post Par Deux: Mantı and the Art of Proper Posture

As you probably gleaned from my previous post, Turkey does food well. Turkey has forced five extra pounds upon my already pudgy midsection and dragged me not unwillingly into the hellish depths of a fullness so severe it gives me back pain. Today's story is about one of Turkey's guiltiest culprits: Mantı.

Mantı is a strange little dish. It is eensy little fingertip-sized ravioli filled with ground lamb meat, onion, and black pepper. You then pour yoğurt and a butter/red pepper sauce on top and enjoy until your stomach explodes. My new host mom (yes, new) insisted that we make mantı today, and she didn't have to twist my arm. "EVET! EVET! TABİKİ!" I practically screamed at her when she suggested it.

So today I hurried myself home after buying a much larger bag to take home all my extra crap in (I have a LOT of extra crap, it seems...) and immediately set to work...on my Turkish composition. Hah. But after that, I went to the kitchen to start helping with the mantı. My host mom, Yasemine, already had five or six cups of flour in a bowl. She added salt and water, both without measuring, and kneaded the dough with the sort of nonchalantness that only a seasoned professional can muster. I tried a few kneads myself, clumsily losing chunks of dough on the table top and getting bits of it stuck in my fingernails. I inherited my mother's inability to handle pastry products, so at first sight of a glob of dough I usually tense up out of fear I'm going to mess something up. So it goes.

Yasemine rolled out the dough first with a tiny rolling pin that kind of made me giggle, and then with a huge dowel that you could easily whack someone with. Every so often she'd say something to me in Turkish, usually just one or two words to make me remember. All I took from it is un, or flour, and kıyma, or ground meat. Once the dough was about twice the size of a medium pizza, she sliced it into tiny squares very quickly, sliding the knife down and across the dough in the same way that I wish I could precisely cut wrapping paper.

It is very very hot in the kitchen. The stove wasn't on, the windows were all open, but without central air conditioning most of Turkey is doomed to suffer a sort of perma-sweat all summer long. We had to keep paper towels at the ready to dab our foreheads, lest we drip on the mantı. Eew. Yasemine then took tiny globs of the onion/meat mixture and dabbed it on each individual square of pastry. She'd scoop her index finger into the bowl of meat and bloop deposit it on the square with such speed it was like she was more machine than be-scarfed woman.

She then took a tiny square, held it up, said something in Turkish, and pinched and rolled it in one quick move. Mantı. Like a little baby Tortellini. I asked her to do it again. Tekrar, lütfen. She rolled another, this time much slower, and I watched the corners of the little pastry slide under itself and tuck into the bottom. Çok tatlı! I said, and she laughed. We made a couple hundred mantı, me working at about a quarter the speed Yasemine was. She could effortlessly simultaneously pinch and twist, while I clumsily fiddled with the edges of mine, trying to keep them closed while still managing something slightly resembling correct.

After we had a nice pile of mantı going, we boiled all of them in a large pot for about twenty minutes while Yasemine prepared the sauces. She made her own yoğurt (after some trouble and a trip back to my dictionary she managed to communicate that it was organic yogurt), and on the stove she melted about a stick of butter and mixed in finely ground red pepper.

The finished product is like no pasta dish I've ever had. Nor is restaurant mantı anywhere close to homemade mantı, something I wouldn't have known if Yasemine weren't so freaking awesome. Eventually my host dad Adnan and my nineteen-year-old host brother İbo came home and the whole family sat down for dinner. They thanked me for helping with dinner (my pinch-and-twist technique, or lack thereof, apparently lost on them) and I tucked in to a delectable buttery meal that I'd helped make.

And this is what is so wonderful about the food culture in Turkey. They are so proud of their food. They want nothing more than to plop you in a chair for two hours while you watch them prepare food. Restaurant owners will stand outside the doors of their restaurants beckoning you to come inside. Buyrun! Hoş Geldiniz! So now I sit here, my back aching and the skin around my stomach stretching past its limit, a cup of hot green tea on my desk with one remaining unused sugar cube because damnit I have to do something healthy. Every time I eat this much I insist that I'm not eating ANYTHING the following day to make up for it. One guess as to how may times I've kept that promise.

Nomz

I would like to talk to you about fruit. Specifically, this fruit:

This peach, şeftali in Turkish, represents what I will miss most about this country: the food. It is terrifyingly easy to walk down the street and find a lunch that will not only melt your taste buds right off your tongue, but cost less than your average McDonald's value meal (which, by the way, are extravagantly priced here. Yes I've checked). Turkish food is heavy in (if I had to narrow it down) beef, tomatoes, eggplant, yogurt, and bread. I realized that I'm extraordinarily bad at describing food. My attempts usually involve a series of unintelligible guttural noises and maybe crying a little. But suffice it to say that sitting down to a plate of İskender (pita bread chunks with lamb or beef slices, tomato sauce, yogurt, and a green pepper) or sweet Jesus Gözleme (paper thin tortilla-like bread with cheese and potatoes in the middle) has been as close to a religious experience as I've had in my life.

But all the dishes in Turkey pale in comparison to the fruit. In the last month and a half, I have consumed probably four times the amount of fruit I consumed in the entire year prior. I am definitely not exaggerating. Turkey is fertile and it's summertime, which means I have at my disposal the most jaw-dropping fruits imaginable, on every street corner, and for pennies on the dollar it would cost in the US. I ate the giant peach above while sitting outside a Çiğ Köfterestaurant, peach juices dripping down my face, making a pool at my flip-flopped feet. You know it's a good peach when clean-up means scrubbing down your forearms. I whined a little while eating it, and Tara asked, "What's wrong?" "Oh God. Oh GOD." Was all I could muster.

I had also purchased five small pears, five apricots, another peach, and half a kilo of cherries. They were fresh, juicy, sweet, and cost me just a hair over four U.S. dollars total. I will so terribly miss the comfort of a healthy chunk of fruit whenever I feel like walking half a block to the nearest fruit stand. Don't even get me started on the watermelon. OH WATERMELON. Fruit is quenching. Fruit is convenient. Fruit coddles your taste buds and whispers sweet nothings in their ears. And when I go home to expensive, inconvenient, out-of-season fruit I might cry myself to sleep for a few weeks. I’m not sure there’s anything more pleasant in this world than çay and şeftali. After one particularly grueling five-hour hike in Uludağ Mountain my group and I stopped at an adorable outdoor cafe where I bought a pre-prepared plate of mixed fruits - two peaches, grapes, cherries, figs, apricots (have you ever had a fresh fig? No? Go do it.) For the first time, I actually teared up a little while eating. It was that refreshing.

I will miss the beautiful scenery, and my group of fellow Americans, but my mouth will literally water at the very thought of Turkish fruit for a long, long time.

Complete photo album from my trip to Ayvalik and Pergamon:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2306876&id=17204221&l=609b46900d

A Not Entirely Pleasant Post

Ennui and restlessness rear their heads often in a person's life, regardless of geographic position, company, or level of happiness. Eighteen days before the end of my two months in Turkey, I have a strange combination of boredom, anxiety, exhaustion, frustration, anger, and confusion.

The dynamics among a group of nineteen people that spend the majority of their time with each other would offer spectacular fodder for a reality show if only we all did hard drugs. (Only some of us do. Kidding. Maybe. I think.) And finding yourself under the thumb of not one, not two, but three bureaucratic entities makes accomplishing small tasks and making menial decisions a monumental task (Let me restate once again that this blog in no way represents the thoughts or opinions of the United States Department of State...heh.) Details are unnecessary because really the point of my story is that sticking a group of relatively random people together in one city under the blanket of one foreign language and sending them off in buses to do the same things together every other day is a psychological test case waiting to happen. And what's most fascinating is that none of us probably has any idea whether or not we really like anyone else in the group - not one of us is in our element, so to speak, and I can certainly speak for myself when I say that the true depths of my personality have not surfaced properly, but the true depths of my annoying tendencies have definitely come out in full force.

My anger largely stems from not knowing the language. I'll often misdirect my anger at either my teacher, my textbook, my pen, or the poor person who happens to speak to me next. Sometimes someone will speak a sentence to me in Turkish and I can tell, I can hear, that I know every single word they're saying. But Turkish's sentence structure is entirely different from English's, and it's an agglutinative language, so actually piecing together the meanings of sentences still feels like doing a math equation in my head. I usually have to ask them to repeat it again slowly, sometimes four or five times, and few people I've encountered actually have the patience for this. My peer buddy does, thank God, but imagine how annoying it would be to try to have a simple conversation with someone who needs everything you say repeated slowly, over and over and over. I annoy myself.

But my RD accuses me of complaining too much and making too many excuses, and she's right. If I really really wanted to get good at this language, I'd go march out my door right now and talk to every single Turkish person I see. I'd walk into every store and chat with the person at the register. I'd strike up a conversation with the person next to me on the bus (granted he wasn't a male under the age of 30 - there's a collective staring problem in Turkey, it seems, and a tall American blonde is a prime target). But I don't do those things, because I am an unproductive combination of lazy, shy, frightened, and high strung.

But then, then, at what appears to be my lowest point in this whole process, one of two things happens. Either I manage to successfully communicate something to a native Turkish speaker (native is important - they're much more difficult to understand than Americans speaking Turkish) and also understand what they say to me in response, OR...I find a really awesome plate of mixed fruits, and sink into an indescribable haze of juicy ecstasy wherein I don't give a crap if I can speak Turkish or not. I guess if I'm going to drown my frustrations in something, fruit's not a bad choice.

And in eighteen days I'll go back home and probably never see anyone from this program again. That's just statistically likely. (Except maybe the Chicago boys, who happen to live in the same city as the Newberry Library). And I will miss it all so terribly as I'm hauling myself and my stuff and my dog seven hours away from home to Minnesota to start a whole new adventure all over again.

Anyone who expects life to slow down at some point has been sorely mislead.

Why I'm Here

I want to say a few things about Turkish. Not Turkish food: I could say nine billion things about Turkish food and still not express the deep love I have for it. Nor do I mean Turkish people: I am torn between a confused sort of admiration that I have for the people in this country whose boundless patience with me and my bumbling nature humbles me deeply, and increasing displeasure at being stared at on buses and having random people take my picture with their phone. Instead, I want to try to express what the Turkish language is like for me.

First and most obviously, it is foreign. Yeah yeah yeah, that sounds stupid. Of course it's foreign, Captain Obvious. But living in a country where you cannot communicate is a special sort of stress that few people will ever experience. The last time I was in a non-English country it was Italy, and I had the double benefit of both traveling with someone who speaks some Italian and only spending about a week total there. I had no need to learn the language, and even took some juvenile pleasure out of counting to ten in Italian while skipping down the streets of the island of Lido. (I probably wasn't skipping...but I likely looked dumb anyway.)

I don't have the Tourism Get Out of Jail Free Card in Turkey - I am not a tourist, I am a student. And a student of the Turkish language, no less. It is my job, my ONLY job, to learn this language. I certainly don't look Turkish (hence all the unadulterated staring), but the second I speak a single word of Turkish most people start spilling words at me that I cannot but barely grasp before my brain goes into meltdown.

Turkish sounds like no other language I've heard. It isn't just different words, it's a totally different sound. French has a sound, German has a sound, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese...sounds I'm at least somewhat familiar with, sounds I could differentiate from each other. But it became abundantly clear to me once I got here that I was not at all aurally familiar with the entire body of Turkic languages. It sounds thick and full like English, but harsh like German (also like German, I always think people are speaking angrily at each other when in fact they're probably just discussing the weather or something). There are lots of K sounds, lots of Ch, Sh, and the Ö the sound for which my poorly trained mouth still cannot produce correctly. Though the Turkish language has nine vowels, it is sans some English consonants, notably W and Q. They also do not have the Th sound, so if you ever ask a Turk to say the word "throw," you will produce some frustration. The tongue does funny things in Turkish thanks to those vowels, and sometimes at the end of the day I'm so tired of speaking it my tongue literally aches.

The great thing about Turkish, and something that English severely lacks, is simple pronunciation. Each letter has one sound, and never makes any other sound ever. None of this short e, long e, short a, long a CRAP English tries to pull on foreign speakers. An E is an E, an A is an A, an even though they aren't the English E's and A's we're used to, they'll never change. As long as I'm reading, I can pretty effectively sound like I know Turkish. So each time I whine in class (read: all the time) about the difficulty of the Turkish language, my teacher goes to the board and writes the word "Through" to remind me just how difficult she had it when she was trying to learn English. She makes a valid point.

The thickness of Turkish makes it sit heavy on the brain, and at the end of the day it kind of feels like swimming through pudding. The other day my Resident Director Tara insisted that I put myself into more situations where I have to speak Turkish, and to help me along she kindly grabbed my arm and flung me into the nearest restaurant. She told the cooks I was learning Turkish and that they should sit and speak Turkish with me. As most people in this country are, they were happy to oblige, and thankfully one of them knew exactly what I mean when I say "Please speak slowly." She had thrown me into the deep end of the pool with naught but my water wings-knowledge of Turkish to keep me afloat. After an hour I was pouring sweat (helped not at all by the complete lack of central air in Turkey) but I had downed two cups of çay and had managed to convey that I had two sisters, I liked çay, Turkish food is tasty, I am from America, and I think Turkish is hard. It was probably the most boring hour-long conversation those poor people had ever had. But the woman who presumably washes the dishes told me to come back the next day so we could talk more. I shook my head and laughed, but all I could manage to say was thank you. Why in the hell would she want me to come back here? To tell her more about the weather and my classroom and what time I wake up in the morning? I may not be able to swim in Turkish, but I have plenty of life rafts, it seems, to keep me from drowning.

I am learning slowly, much more slowly than I would be if I were more proactive about going out and actually talking to people. But my social awkwardness that is so readily apparent in America is multiplied by ten billion in a country where I am both a linguistic and physical anomaly. But I can understand when someone calls me pretty, and I can understand when someone says I am speaking Turkish well. And that makes me feel at least a little bit accomplished for half of a half of a second, before I snap back into reality and find myself once again treading with my head barely above water. It's scary, but I will survive. This confusing and new and varied language is treacherous, but there are no casualties. Problem yok.

A Vacation into Mythology

The funny thing about Greek ruins is, not all of them are in Greece. This is a good thing for someone who is near Greece, but cannot actually enter it. This weekend a gaggle of American students studying Turkish visited the area around the Dardanelles. A short history, from someone who knows nothing about it:

During WWI Turkey fought against allied forces including Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand. This took place in the Dardanelles, the strait that connects the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, and surrounding the Gallipoli Peninsula. The Turks were defending Istanbul from invasion, something the allied forces wanted to accomplish in order to have more direct access to Russia. This took place in 1915 and is considered one of the most important events in Turkish history. Not only were many lives lost in the biggest military campaign Turkey has ever participated in, it was also the moment Mustafa Kemal Ataturk burst onto the scene - he was a commander during the campaign, and later went on to transform Turkey by becoming its first President after the end of the (extremely long) Ottoman Empire.

*phew*

Ok, enough of that. So we visited a handful of somber museums and graveyards and memorials commemorating the campaign, all nineteen of us (and our peer buddies) shuffling on and off the bus every fifteen minutes or so. Apparently Americans are dawdlers, because by the third or fourth stop the tour guide laughingly threatened to make us pay him five Lira every time we were late to the bus. Ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, and by the end we had bussed around a good portion of the area around Çanakkale.

Visiting places like this really puts into perspective the importance of bodies of water in human history. Not far at all from where one of the bloodiest battles of WWI took place is the ancient city of Troy where, for those of you who saw the Blockbuster film, Brad Pitt was forever etched into the tableau of history for having really bitchin' calves. Troy is by far the strangest place I have visited so far. Barely a hundred years ago nobody even knew for sure if it existed - Homer didn't exactly provide us with GPS navigational directions to the place. But there it is, all nine layers of it dating back well into the BCs, its geographic position near the Aegean so vitally important to the economy of the area that humans just kept building and building and building on top of the same spot. The feeling of stepping into a place that was once considered by many to be mere mythology is bizarre. And so like the good little tourist I am I took photos, and followed the predetermined walking path around the ruins of a city where empires have been made and destroyed over and over. I still get all giddy when I do stuff like that.

In Assos, many years ago, Aristotle opened an Academy. St. Paul also visited there. I like to think as they hauled themselves up the intimidatingly steep hill toward the Temple of Athena, they too passed dozens and dozens of little street stores selling magnets and glass bead jewelry and postcards. From the ruins of the temple you can see for miles - apparently on a good day you can see the famed island of Lesbos, something more than a few of my male compatriots pointed out. A short bus ride and additional calf-burning uphill walk later we also visited Zeus's altar, which is even higher up on a hill. You cannot help but sense the grandeur that these places naturally exude - looking down over the Aegean from so high up makes it extremely easy to believe that some all-powerful dude in the sky could zap you with a lightning bolt any minute. You just get that sort of feeling.

I am always so happy to see Greek ruins because of how inexorably tied they are to the mythologies for which they were usually created. Seeing these places in person blurs the line between fantasy and reality in a way that is a little unsettling, but most definitely pleasant. I plopped myself down on a rock from atop Zeus's altar and wondered to myself what it would look like to watch the history of this very spot on fast forward since the dawn of time. There's always been something particularly important about hills, not to mention hills near seas. They're grand, and beautiful, and serene, and so uplifting you sort of feel like you could stand up and just keep on floating.

And now I find myself back in Bursa, memorizing verbs and trying to communicate to the guy in the nearest bus stop station that I need twenty lira on my bus card so I can get to class. What a strange experience.

A view of the Aegean from Zeus's Altar

Temple of Athena

One last look...

Troy

One of many Trojan horses

Memorial commemorating Gallipoli Wars

The Lull

It has arrived. I have established a fairly consistent routine that involves waking up at 6:30 a.m. to get ready for school, busing to Bursa (an hour's ride) while listening to my iPod or reviewing vocab (more often the former than the latter), sitting in class for six-odd hours, perusing the mall across the street, then busing home.

I will point out one delightful caveat of life in Turkiye that I hadn't expected - breaks. Lots of them. Every hour, on the dot, we take a 10-20 minute break from class. One might think this would irk the teacher, who would rather we full steam ahead and learn as much as possible, but my öğretmen is out the door faster than any of the öğrengilar are. Clearly, the Turks cherish their down-time. I've grown very accustomed to these breaks, and even though I now only do classwork in small spurts, I get an insatiable itch for çay every 40-50 minutes.

OK, breaks during class. That's not so unusual, right? I mean, we're cramming a year's worth of language learning into our brains in less than two months, we don't want to overload and blow a circuit or something. My real shock came when I attended my first movie in Turkey. It was a film in Turkish, which means that the entirety of the plot (to my understanding) was about a number of people introducing themselves to other people (because introductions are all I can confidently understand right now...hello, how are you? nice to meet you!). About an hour into the film, the reel stopped suddenly and the lights came up. My instinct was that the projector broke. My instinct was, as has so often happened in this country, very wrong.

"Intermission," someone behind me said. Intermission? This film isn't even two hours long! And so I stood up, stretched, went pee, and to my surprise felt reinvigorated and ready for another bout of movie watching once intermission was over. I shall add film intermissions to the list of things Turkey has taught me I need that I didn't know I needed before. (Currently on the list, three cups of çay a day, rice pudding, clothes shopping.) It is both a pleasure and a source of bewilderment to see just how good the Turks are at being laid back. The familiar clink clinkity clink of teacups fills the air, small-framed men with trays of eight or nine teacups dangling from their hands sprint across the streets, paying no attention at all to the traffic that I am now convinced will eventually kill me. I don't know where these men with tea trays are coming from, or where they're going, but I know they're delivering tea and that's very important.

As I drag myself up the six flights of stairs from my classroom floor to the roof of the building, each person I pass politely says Merhaba, and asks, Nasilsin? I answer with a wide grin, because it's one of the few things I really know the answer to: İyiyim! Sen nasilsin? They mutter the requisite Ben de iyiyim as they pass me on the stairs. I may not look Turkish, I may not SOUND Turkish, but damnit at least I can convey the notion that I am, indeed, good, and ask how you are in return. What more do you really need?

Üç tane çay, lütfen, my Turkish-speaking American friend Matthew says once or twice a day, ordering teas on behalf of himself, Abby, and me. I'm still hesitant about speaking Turkish out loud to strangers (which is exactly the wrong attitude I'm supposed to have about it) and today Matthew threatened to make me order my own tea soon. He'd do it, too. I may not have the confidence to order myself tea at a strange restaurant, but I do have the confidence to convey a number of other equally important sentiments, including but not limited to: I'm hungry, I'm full, I want to watch TV, and I want some watermelon, please.

I also have tanned arms. Ostensibly an uninteresting tidbit of information, but those of you who know me know what an accomplishment this is. I currently have an abundance of freckles on my arms like a field of çiçekler on a güzel ılkbahar day. Now if only I could tan my legs...

Please enjoy my photos from Bursa and surrounding areas, via facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2299710&id=17204221&l=ede0bdf82c

We spend our breaks on the roof of TÖMER, enjoying a view of the city.

These two lovely people have the honor of my frequent company. Matthew happily (perhaps not happily, maybe begrudgingly) translates Turkish for Abby and me. It's why we keep him around. That, and his dapper fashion sense. Abby is eating one of four hundred and ninety seven thousand berries we consumed between the three of us that day - Cumalıkazık has such amazing fruit it should be illegal.

Language Barriers

So, I have some language barriers here. Apart from the people I go to school with, and a handful of people that work for the language institution at which I am studying, nobody here speaks English. Not even four fifths of the people I share a home with.

This is problematic for obvious reasons. But never is it more so than when I want to communicate my appreciation to my host family. Today my host mom and two sisters went down by the shore of the Gulf of Gemlik. It is very pretty down there - the shore is lined with big rocks and a wide walkway runs a long length of it with a few playgrounds and brick outdoor grills here and there. Günce and Nehir ran to the nearest playground, and after a trip or two down the twisty slide I sat on the rocks next to Gönül.

One might expect us to chat. One would be on the right track, but one would definitely be neglecting the fact that Gönül speaks almost no English, and I speak but a smattering of Turkish. We sat there awkwardly for a couple of minutes. I looked at her, she looked at me. She held up a bag of sunflower seeds and offered me some in Turkish. I said evet, only because holding up a bag of sunflower seeds and pointing at it pretty effectively communicates what you're getting at, even if your words are not understood. I took some and popped a handful in my mouth, and she burst into laughter. What? What did I do? I thought. Then she took a seed, carefully wedged it between her front teeth, and bit down, simultaneously sucking the seed out of the inside. (Bear in mind, Turkish sunflower seeds bear little resemblance to American ones. I don't know why.) I shrugged, and pulled an empty shell out of my mouth and flicked it on the ground. She laughed even harder.

We spent the next hour alternating between laughing hysterically and looking up words in my Turkish/English dictionary. There is something truly hilarious about not being able to communicate with someone. As long as you're not in dire straits and there's no reason for the language barrier to be a serious issue, it's actually pretty fun trying to find every means necessary of getting across something as simple as "I want more seeds." All I can manage at this point is "Daha istiyorum." (I want more.)

We talked about the sea. We talked about seagulls. We talked about rocks. And by "talked about" I mean we said things like "There is the sea." "There are seagulls." "There is a rock." Sometimes I'd look up a word and try to pair it with the one or two verbs I happen to know from wandering around Turkish towns for the last week, and I still won't manage to relay my point. That's when she just throws her head back and laughs, and I throw my arms in the air and say "anlamıyorum!" ("I do not understand!"). She laughs at me every time I say "evet," "tamam," "çok," or "az," because they're the only words I'm really sure of at this point.

I'm glad she's entertained. I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds this whole situation simultaneously hilarious and infuriating. I mean, all she wants to do most of the time is feed me, and even THAT can be a chore. Despite the fact that Gönül is Jane Goodall to my chimpanzee-like state, we seem to have a very basic understanding of each other. I can tell by how much we end up laughing like idiots.

A Busy Day of Nothing

I expected to start classes today, but I didn't. The more advanced students had to take an oral language test to place them in the correct class, which meant that those few of us who hadn't started learning Turkish officially at all had nothing to do today.

It did start pouring rain in Bursa, however. That was exciting. I hadn't seen rain like that since summer in Tucson. And like Tucson, Bursa has no gutters or drainage system. Within minutes the streets were so flooded cars couldn't pass through and water was washing up in waves onto the sidewalks. Of course, I was out in the rain when it started, and my Resident Director and I ended up having to grab a taxi cab just to get to our destination, which was two blocks away, since the streets were impassable by foot.

When I got home, Günce helped me practice vocabulary.

"Edermisin?" I asked her. Can you help me? She came and sat by me on the couch.

"Bunun adı nedir?" I asked, having to peek at my notebook each time to remember how to say it. (Eyüp was on the other couch, continually reminding me of the proper way to say my undotted I's). What is the name of this?

Then I drew a series of pictures in my notebook, and Günce wrote the Turkish word for it below. She found it delightful, and I found it extremely helpful. The beginning of a wonderful and fruitful symbiotic relationship! Mouse. Fare. Sun. Güneş. Moon. Ay.

And also, Nehir sang me the most adorable freakin' song in the whole wide world.

Acar Household

This is the story of how I found a new family. I did a number of exciting things today, including visiting the Grand Bazaar in İstanbul, where I bartered (and still likely paid too much) for a number of pretty but unnecessary items. I also took a ferry across a small gulf to eventually reach my new home of Bursa. But none of those are the interesting bits of my story.

We arrived via bus at Tömer Institute in Bursa. Since my host dad words at the institute, he and his entire family were already there waiting for me. Eyüp, his wife Gönül, nine-year-old Günce, and four-year-old Nehir. It was clear from the moment I walked into the door the little girls knew who I was. Apparently Eyüp had shown them photos of me from facebook, and they picked me out of the crowd immediately. Nehir buried her face in her mom’s legs, and Günce just stared at me with big brown eyes, smiling only when I smiled at her first.

Introductions were decidedly short. Since my Turkish is still limited to the few phrases I’ve learned to get me by, and since only Eyüp can speak English, there wasn’t much communication to be had.

“Nasılsın?” I asked, after saying merhaba to each of them. Luckily they answered in the only way I could understand – iyi, or çok iyi, (“How are you?” “good,” or “very good”). Nehir still wouldn’t unbury herself from her mother.

Eyüp had to help my fellow students find their respective families, leaving me in his office with the rest of the family, none of whom I can communicate with. They ended up teaching me how to say my age in Turksish, and it took a good solid two minutes for me to deduce what Gönül was trying to tell me, which was that there are thirteen years between our ages. There was a lot of nervous laughter, and me shaking my head and mumbling “Oh, God” under my breath while still maintaining a smile.

Nehir and Günce are adorable in the best sense of the word. They both have straight brown hair and dark, almost black eyes. I squeezed in between them in the back seat on the way to Gemlik. Nehir immediately started poking my arm, and when I’d poke her back she’d giggle and squeal. We also practiced our counting together – bir, ikı, uç, dırt, beş, altı, yedi, sekiz, dokuz, on. But, in a cruel twist of irony, the four-year-old could count much higher and much faster, my talents dwindling around twelve or thirteen and hers shooting well into the eighties and nineties. I bet she thinks she’s a genius.

Günce was relatively quiet, until she reached up and touched my hair. Oh yes, the blonde. Right. So I leaned in, and she took a handful and ran her fingers through it. Then a strand of it fell in my face, as per usual, and she immediately brushed it out of my eyes. As Nehir leaned over and rested her head on my arm, pretending to sleep, I started quizzing Günce in order to build my vocabulary.

I pointed to my tooth. “Diş,” she replied.

I pointed to my lip. “Dudak.”

She took the initiative and circled her finger around her mouth. “Ağız.” I had to repeat that one a few times (the accented G is silent, the undotted i is a whole other beast I have yet to tackle).

Then she was on a roll. Nose, cheek, chin, ear, eye…burun, yanak, çene, kulak, ilik. And then she helped me spell all of them using the Turkish alphabet, not the slightest hint of frustration or impatience in her demeanor. It is a bizarre notion that these two children can simultaneously accept the fact that I do not speak their language, and yet never once grow perturbed or ever tire of helping me learn. If you want to learn a language, hire a kid. They have infinite patience, and you could probably pay them in gummy bears or something.

After a few more games of poke-the-girl-who-speaks-English in the car, we pulled up to the Acar family’s flat in Gemlik. Their flat overlooks the Sea of Marmara, so when you open the living room curtains you look out over a gleaming blue sea with a backdrop of hilltop homes and buildings. I mean damn, that’s awesome. A few people emerged from surrounding flats, staring at us. Two elderly women sat on a bench outside the building. “Merhaba!” I said, and they replied in kind with big toothy smiles. Eyüp showed me to my room (complete with TV and my own desktop computer) and showed me around the flat. It’s a lovely place, decorated very modern with a sleek flatscreen TV in the living room and angular white/brown furniture. Immediately I got a taste of the legendary Turkish hospitality. I sat on the couch while Nehir played intently with my hair, pulling it up on top of my head then letting it fall back down, squealing a number of things in Turkish, while Eyüp asked me a series of questions. “You want to eat now? You want to shower first? Maybe you go unpack your things? You want some cola? Chai? Coffee?” Oh God. Uh, let me think. Well food’s probably a given. I’m always hungry. Ok, let’s do that. Shrek was on the TV at the time, dubbed into Turkish. I watched the little birdie explode after the Princess sang that really high note and realized the part where she’s singing is probably the only part of the movie they didn’t have to dub the voices into.

But first, Gönül asked Eyüp to ask me (you can see where this gets frustrating) how tall I am.

“I don’t know, 5’9 or 5’10?” I answered.

“No no no, in metric!” He replied. Great. Another thing I don’t know.

Eyüp guessed I was about 180 centimeters, then Günce took my hand and led me into her and Nehir’s bedroom. She pointed at the side of the bureau where a height measurement sticker thingy had been attached. She pointed at it. I shook my head, stood next to it, and then moved my hand from the top of my head to the bureau to show her I was much taller than the chart reached. She laughed, and then Gönül got the tape measure. She had me stand up against the bureau, and marked my height with a pencil. 176, it turns out – Eyüp was only four centimeters off in his estimation. So let me just reiterate – the absolute first thing that happened the first night in my host family house was I got measured. How awesome is that?

Then Gönül, an absolutely lovely woman, served all of us dinner. DINNER. HOME MADE TURKISH FOOD. I can’t even talk about it. So good. Oh so good. Çok guzel, people. “Do you want more? Have you had enough? Would you like more rice?” Who am I to say no to food? Eyüp took out a digital camera and took a photo of me and Günce on one side of the table. He said something in Turkish, and I asked him to translate. “I said, I’m taking a photo of Günce and Nehir eating dinner with their older sister!”

After I unpacked my bags and distributed my Nebraska-themed gifts (including, but not limited, to Dorothy Lynch dressing, corn cob jelly, and two stuffed animals – a cow and an ear of corn) Eyüp initiated some very enlightening conversation. We had all been warned from day one to tread lightly on topics like government and religion, but I didn’t even have to say anything while Eyüp explained in detail how he felt about a number of things. “I have two little girls! How could I expect them to wear a head covering? Maybe the man should wear the head covering.”

My brain became too fried to function, so here I am in bed, contemplating the true extent of the last thing Eyüp said to me before I went to bed. “Iyi geceler,” I said, good night, and I apologized again for being so tired and out-of-it. “It is ok,” he replied. “You are not a guest in this home, you are our family.”

Having as deep a chasm as language barrier between you and most of the people you share a home with is easily the most exhausting thing in the world you could experience. But I guess if I ever get too stressed I could just ask Nehir to play with my hair some more.

İstanbul and the Bosphorus

I'd rather you just look at my pictures. There's not too much I can say here. We started our morning with a boat tour on the Bosphorus (the strait that runs through İstanbul, separating the European and Asian sides, joining the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara) that took us between both bridges that cross Thrace/Anatolia. Then we docked and had lunch, and toured the major areas one is supposed to tour in İstanbul. Ayasofya (Hagia Sofia), Sultanahmet Camii (The Blue Mosque), Topkapı Sarayı (Palace used administratively by Ottomans for many centures - even has a Harem!), and the Roman Cistern. One wonders how places like this could even feasibly still be standing. The weight of the history resting on these buildings is palpable - maybe that's why they're almost always covered in scaffolding :\ . You could spend hours just lying on your back in the middle of Sultanhamet Camii, staring at the ceiling. Unless you're a woman, of course...in which case the middle is inaccessible to you. ;) İstanbul is a city that has had three major civilizations call it Capital, and as you speed up the Bosphorus on a boat, you really get a sense for why the city has been so economically important for so long. Oh, to dredge the bottom of the Bosphorus to see what I could find...

I walked all day, and now I'm tired. We have to get up very early in the morning to meet with the American Embassy, then I'll finally be off to meet my host family in Bursa. Güle güle, ve iyi geceler!

See my full photo album here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2298523&id=17204221&l=0580868f23

Ayasofya

Entrance to Sultanhemet Camii (The Blue Mosque)

Inside Ayasofya

Some totally sweet lookin' tiles in Topkapı Palace

(in)authentic Bellydancing

I was issued my official Turkish cell phone today. Having a cell phone in your pocket, even if it's one only a handful of people can actually call you on, really produces a level of normalcy that is comforting. If all else fails, I can pull it out of my pocket and push some buttons, even if I can't actually use it to call anyone at home :)

Our big event for last night was a dinner in Taksim Square, at a restaurant called Sultanas. The sub-title is "1001 Turkish Nights," if that gives you any sort of idea. Taksim Square is a major tourist destination in İstanbul, and Sultanas couldn't have been more kitschy. But a good sort of kitschy :)

It started with a long bus ride from the Asian side of town to the European. This took me once again over the bridge that crosses the Bosphorus, which is easily the coolest thing I've ever seen so far. Since I don't have any photos of it yet, just go Google İstanbul and Bosphorus. We're taking a boat tour today, so that should afford me plenty of opportunity for fantastic pictures.

Traffic in İstanbul is terrifying. Cars dart in and out of each other with little regard for who's around them. There's no such thing as traffic lights, absolutely no attention paid to painted lane lines, and a lot of honking. It's also congested, which is why we eventually found ourselves stuck next to another bus to our left, full of Turks. Some of the girls behind me got a little giggly, since apparently there was a young Turkish guy on that bus looking into the windows of our bus and smiling. Eventually I looked over, deciding that the rule about not making eye contact with male Turks is probably safely ignored if he's locked in another bus next to mine. He's already looking at me, and pointing to me. I point to myself.

"Me?" I'm clearly indicating.

He nods. Then he makes a hand gesture, sort of a fingers-to-thumb Italian looking gesture, then points to me again. I immediately turn around and ask a more fluent speaker of Turkish on my bus what that means.

"I think it means you're beautiful," she said.

I looked back at him, pointed at myself, and he nodded. So I gave him a thumbs up and a smile, and we pulled ahead. Another girl on the bus noticed the gesture we were recreating, and looked shocked.

"That means fuck you!" She said. Say whaaaat?

So after a series of arguments among the students who had been to İstanbul before, each of us on the bus creating the hand gesture and probably getting laughed at by the guy in the bus next to us, it was finally determined that it does, indeed, mean "You're beautiful." I was pleased. Not that it would have really mattered either way, but you definitely get a sense of the deep chasm of language and culture that rests between Americans and Turks when you have to spend ten minutes debating whether a guy has just complimented you, or insulted you. I like to think it was the blonde hair.

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Dinner was, apparently, inauthentic. Not that I'd have any idea, mind you, but according to the well-traveled among us, it was far from legitimately Turkish. But a busty lady shook various body parts at us while we loaded up on food and I tried to choke down some rakı, so I can't claim it wasn't an altogether entertaining evening. Another blog very shortly, as I'm finishing this one having just returned from my first major excursion out into İstanbul. Güle güle for now!

İskender ve su! İskender ve su!

This was the first meal I ordered in Turkish. An İskender is a totally AWESOME lamb kebab, and su is "water." I literally said, "İskender and water." I could have spruced it way up by adding "lütfen" (please), but I didn't want to push my luck.

İstanbul is alien to me. You can see the sea of red clay roofs are visible fairly quickly after driving away from Atatürk Airport, with the occasional spire of a mosque poking into the air, like a series of toothpicks dotting the low skyline. I cannot read a single word on a single sign in the whole city. I cannot understand a single word spoken by a single person I encounter. But it's kind of cool that way.

First, because they expect it. I'm blonde. The natural assumption is that I cannot speak Turkish. I have had to remember not to smile if I make eye contact with anyone, especially males...social norms dictate that it isn't quite the friendly innocent gesture it is in the States.

I am staying for three days at Yeditepe Üniversitesi in İstanbul during in-country orientation. They're going to take us out on touristy-type excursions for a couple of days - Hagia Sofia and the like. I haven't slept for thirty-some hours, my legs feel like jelly, but I'm enjoying İskender with some fellow Turkish learners in the student union at Yeditepe, watching the US v. Slovenia match. It is an unbelievably pleasant experience. Pictures soon!

Some realizations

So here's what I'm realizing as I do more reading about Bursa.

It's perfect for me.

As much as I was interested in going to Istanbul since there's simply more there to see, I was apprehensive about a) spending my time in a really ginormous mega-city, and b) living in dorms surrounded by Americans instead of a host family. Not only am I staying with a host family in Bursa, it's also much much smaller than Istanbul, but by no means short on exciting things to see.

I'm not a "go-outer." I don't, therefore, "go out." I have a general distaste for clubbing and social situations with large groups of people, and anybody I ask about Istanbul mentions its busy night life. Not so much for me. Bursa, however, has more mosques and early Ottoman mausoleums than any other city in the country. It has art museums, archaeology museums, quiet sunny shopping bazaars, and is the HOME (I repeat, the ORIGIN of) the Donner Kebab. Now might be a good time to remind everyone that I am infinitely more excited for the food than anything else.

Not only will I have the benefit of a native host family to show me the ropes, as it were, I will also be in a slower, quieter city where I will likely feel comfortable taking my time, walking around, enjoying the sights, buying Ottoman coinage at various antique stores, et cetera.

So right now, as I lay here waiting for Puppy Dog to get done with his hair cut, I am just really super super excited. It will be a simply exquisite place to spend my summer.