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.