iyi şeker bayramlar

so. my first turkish bayram (literally "holiday") was şeker ("sugar") bayram, meaning the end of ramazan when everyone basically visits family + friends and eats a ton of CANDY (especially baklava & similar honey-drenched desserts) at the various stops. kids also go door-to-door trick-or-treat style, kissing the hands and foreheads of elders in exchange for sweets. while most of my foreign co-workers headed for istanbul's hostels and sights, i totally lucked out with an invitation from my 26-year-old co-worker to go to her mother's house in istanbul to see what a traditional bayram involves. translation: 4 days of eating really good homemade food, peering around turkish apartments, and memorizing turkish commercials as i drifted in and out of mental consciousness between the perpetual presence of television and the intense level of turkish around me. although i still haven't seen the blue mosque or a single hamam, such an intimate, homestay-like experience was great. here's bedra and her super-fashionable mom (anne in turkish):



and bedra's anne showing off the beautiful traditional turkish breakfast awaiting me each morning in her pretty amazing apartment (on the asian side of istanbul):



over the course of the trip i developed a mysterious bond with one of bedra's anneannes (grandmothers.) bedra translated for us for a while, but eventually her anneanne was content to simply sit on the couch and hold my hand, occasionally waving her mug around for me to refill with su (water) or çay (tea.) not only did she give me two of her old rings but (!!) she also complained (loudly) that her grandson should have married me instead of his new wife. here she is reading bedra's future in her coffee grinds:



we did head over to the european side twice to meet up with bedra's friend and thensome of my american co-workers; in just a few hours i fell in love with istanbul's beautiful architecture (especially mosques) even from afar.



both times we stuck around taxim, (one of) the city's centers.



from a rooftop teahouse we saw a drizzly, overcast, Pamuk-esque view of the city:



& here we are waiting in line with bedra's friend for the year's final iftar (breaking of the daily fast.) during ramazan restaurants offer deals on giant plates of food and, just before sunset, hand out dates to the lines of fasters winding up and down the streets so they can eat immediately as they wait. iftar dinners are fun; apparently it's common to gain weight during ramazan thanks to the giant helpings of pide and the like.


the juxtaposition of secular, non-fasting turks (i.e. bedra) against those that do fast and are religious to varying degrees (i.e. her friend pictured above) is subtle. the bus ride from ankara to istanbul was interesting - turkish bus-rides, by the way, are incomparable with the typical american greyhound experience; most companies serve complimentary drinks, food, and moist towelettes, show movies, and stop at privately-owned rest-stops. on the ride, food and drinks were served twice - once for non-fasters and then again just at sunset, accompanied by a call to prayer played over the bus' speaker system. when i was in zanzibar over ramadan in 2004, the entire archipelago (save travelers, the ill, menstruating women, and others exempt in the koran) was fasting to the point where it was impossible to find food before sunset. not so in turkey. my extremely rough estimate (based on informal surveys of my students) is that less than half the urban population fasts, and eating in front of fasters is not an issue.

in other news, my fellow foreign speaking skills instructors and i (finally & somewhat amazingly!) moved into our new 5-story building overlooking ankara. my 2nd-floor apartment is small but fancy and probably the nicest place i'll live for a while:



totally brand-new kitchen:



bathroom (insane storage on the right wall - described as an "entertainment center for personal hygiene"):



mandolin-playing-couch overlooking the city:



laura is next door & constantly cooking me things like curry-apple-eggplant-bulgurwheat stir fry. here she is posing next to a starry-painting she gave me and my ridiculous new knee-high BOOTS bedra talked me into buying. i love them.



You can see more pictures from the trip (mostly tipsy karaoke-related action-shots) here.

according to bedra's anneanne, my coffee grinds say i'm emotional, moody, and take things as problems when there's really nothing to worry about - i should get happy news from my family, "hug a male friend," "talk with a female friend," and in general have a çok ferah (very open/bright) future. i hope she's right. i'm trying to keep in mind a quote my former next-door neighbor mille recently sent me in a letter: be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle (supposedly by plato.) she's an amazing, spunky, elderly woman who just suffered major injuries after being hit by a car - and, in her bed-ridden state, she's thinking about quotes like that. sometimes, when i'm walking home from work alone through the cold mud of a deserted field feeling especially lonely, incompetent, and lost, i remember i'm in turkey and hopefully growing somehow - and incredibly lucky to be here. i know there's a reason why i'm here, but i still have to figure it out.

we must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. we must learn to sail in high winds. - aristotle (maybe)

butterfly cloud

on sept 29th, four other speaking skills instructors (i.e. similarly-aged foreigners on my program) and i trekked down the street to middle eastern technical university to meet up with some turkish co-workers & see the wonderfully fun/wildly popular yugoslav goran bregovic with his wedding & funeral band. it was in an outdoor stadium and quickly turned into a full-fledged dance party once the crowd broke through the gates - the video below (not mine) gives a sense of the atmosphere.



this is a fairly good (& haunting) recording of one of the more somber pieces from a performance in Plovdiv:



but this (found on youtube and insanely edited - you've been warned) video from the night in ankara gives a much better feel of the whole thing. it was a great time.



other recent highlights include fancy taxpayer food & drinks at the u.s. ambassador's fulbright party (and the blissful realization that i can wear silly, colorful, barely-formal clothes and still hold my own among fancy-smancy government types), going out "drinking" with some turkish co-workers (most of whom drank energy drinks, re: ramazan) followed by the equivalent of an adult sleepover at a teacher named bedra's apartment and cozy turkish-style breakfast in the morning, and the promise of moving into our new apartments this wednesday.

teaching + planning lessons for 20-hours-a-week of english as a second language classes is surprisingly draining. on fridays i leave work after seven solid hours of conversation in a zombie-like burnt-out haze; it's amazing how much i cherish the time spent zoning out on the bus to and from work as part of my coping strategy. (a steady dose of chocolate and pomegranates are also involved.) still, there are moving moments: last thursday i walked into my dreaded uncooperative 8:50 class (of several hyper-masculine, somewhat intimidating 20-something male students) still red-eyed from the expected occasional sobbing that accompanies culture shock + loneliness mixed with mild heartache in the morning (not a good combination) and was shocked to find a class of suddenly eager, hilarious, good-natured students practically falling over themselves to speak english: ghost stories about haunted hamams, where i should go to get the best doner kebab, and why they call ferit (a student) "little cow." i guess life has a funny way of making sure you get what you need. without those students i really don't know if i could have made it through the day.

bedra invited me to stay with her and her mom in istanbul for bayram which means i'll probably be leaving this wednesday night until next sunday afternoon. i'm excited to get my first shot at istanbul with a native istanbul-er and maybe go to the istanbul biennial while i'm there. finally moving into my apartment will hopefully help settle things a bit - until then i'm off for another unpredictable week!

virtual overview of my first day of teaching.

finally.

waking up & getting "professional" at 7am with my roommate laura. . .



and leaving the beautifully-painted dorm i'm temporarily living in:



for the bus to my east-campus BUSEL teaching-unit-room (note my desk in the lower right-hand corner! looks like. . .a desk.)



and then my classroom!!! - just before it was filled with my first ever pre-college "intermediate" BUSEL students. . .



and finally. . .afterwards. . .seeking refuge in my beloved main-campus library to hole up and read about new media theory and the history of digital technology.



I started taking two graduate classes this week: "Theory and Method in Media, Visual and Cultural Studies" and "Body, Movement and Vision in Immersive and Interactive Media 1." They both seem as potentially wonderful/chaotically interdisciplinary/borderline -unorganized as they sound; so far the readings are great. i'm gonna write a paper with hypertext and i'm kicking myself for not learning (at least) HTML (yet?), but TURKISH classes start next week and i've only got time for one language (if that!)

also, my official work address:

N Building
BUSEL School of English Language
Bilkent Üniversite
Bilkent, Ankara 06800
TURKEY

my first day of teaching was a bit frazzled around the edges but - still encouraging. tomorrow i'm teaching 7 straight hours so another report will soon follow - - - !

"Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such a small (and mute) foreign element may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from personal life. There too we may find ourself anchoring emotions of love to the way a person butters bread or turning against them because of their taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be. . .

In the more fugitive, trivial association of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change: from finding camels where at home there had been horses; from finding unadorned apartment buildings where at home they had been pillars. But there may be a more profound pleasure: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new, but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland could provide. . .

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home."

- Alain de Botton writing of Amsterdam and Egypt in "On the Exotic" from The Art of Travel, which I highly recommend.

i'm into this video. ("Reverse Graffiti : Graffiti ao contrário" - nothing to do with turkey.)

a few new things i'm experiencing for the first time in my life:

- growing out/dealing with longer hair (this is a bigger deal than one might think)

- exercising with a rowing machine

- actually, really attempting to exercise/jog regularly

- really feeling the significance/difference of my (culturally american?) individualistic mindset, particularly in regards to gender performance and specifically amongst my mostly female co-workers

- TEXT MESSAGING allthetime

- feeling uncomfortable/embarrassed of my body/lack of "turkish" style, especially while wandering around the super-cool kızılay area of ankara (i don't even wanna think about istanbul)

- grocery shopping as a weekly highlight. . .

- . . .and developing a soda-water-habit (which i just recently "got" after being puzzled my whole life over the whole carbonated water thing) - - - especially cherry-flavored. and also getting good at opening bottles without bottle openers.

classes start tomorrow. . .and teaching officially begins thursday!

pomegranates grow on trees (!?)

merhaba from (the wireless zone along the sidewalk of) my new location on bilkent university's campus: a slight downgrade to a tiny dorm room shared with fellow-fulbrighter-laura and surrounded by international undergrads. the dorm i had been living in was needed for students but the apartment building i'm supposed to move into isn't built yet; from the looks of it, i doubt it will be ready for at least a month (or few.) most BUSEL interns got put in fancy faculty apartments, , ,but a few of us are mysteriously out here with a communal pots-and-pans-less kitchen. . .no internet. . .or english-speakers. . .or elevators to move our stuff to the third floor! the good side to all this is that we'll have ample opportunities to practice our turkish and hopefully make some friends (i got offered hazelnuts in the laundry room today) AND: i have the top half of a bunk bed, which i love. i just hope none of my soon-to-be-students see me struggling with the endless embarrassingly difficult domestic tasks i face daily: can i borrow your pot? how do i get the stove to turn on? why isn't the water boiling? wait, how do i cook brussels sprouts anyway??? (why did i buy them in the first place?!)

just before the move i had a 6-day vacation for which i pretty much cashed out the majority of my salary so far and took a sleeper train south to izmir. the ride was an adventure in itself since i cluelessly booked myself into an all-male, painfully-slow, smoking 6-bed (but super cheap!) car and spent the entire 17-hour ride trying to appropriately respond to phone number requests/doting comments/beer invitations from the middle-aged passengers around me (who all, consequently, smelled fowl, snored loudly, kept the windows closed, and walked around in their underwear all night!) despite being terrified from the start of the CAR he rented for the trip - turkey has a high motor vehicle accident rate - i was extremely happy to meet up with my childhood-friend bryan at the train station and begin our trip around western anatolia/mediterranean.



after a quick meal in izmir we were off for ephesus to look at the ruins of an ancient ionian greek city (not to mention the ever-entertaining crowds of tourists and cats slinking around.)



lots of huge, well-preserved structures like this famous roman celsus library. things were especially beautiful in the orange afternoon-sunlight. afterwards we settled into a little backpacker-heaven called atilla's getaway with a nice pool, garden, and hammocks. . .had some much-needed beer and ice cream before trying to sleep alongside the all-night party going on with the backpacker clan outside our door, amazingly too tired to join in.

afrodisias was our first stop the next day - more ruins but spread out across a larger space and far fewer tourists. there was also a museum with great sculptures.



and POMEGRANATES on trees!!!! pomegranates hold a special place in my heart (a totem fruit, perhaps?) so this was actually quite exciting. sheesh.



we then took the longer-drive-than-expected to pamukkale (literally "cotton castle"), a semi-insane geological curiosity aptly described by wikipedia as "thick white layers of limestone and travertine cascading down the mountain slope resembling a frozen waterfall" with ruins at the top. we were greeted by an eager hostel owner who literally escorted us to his cozy house via moterbike, checked in, and drove up the mountain to wander around as the sun set.




low-quality semi-panorama of the upper pamukkale pools:

although the pools are now dirty and filled with bacteria as a result of mismanaged tourism, the whole ordeal was still amazingly beautiful. the pristine sunset played off the white mountainside as the reflections in the pools went from blue to orange to red to purple with the sky; as night fell we watched a meteor shower above.



you can find lots of pictures of pamukkale online - and endless caravans of tour buses headed there throughout turkey. having a car was a definite advantage here - we were able to
stay well after dark and pretty much had the place to ourselves.

the next morning we were off on the day-long drive to adrasan, a more remote, sandy beach just over a mountain from the insanely crowded backpacker-haven of olimpos - again, accessibly only by car. we spent a night on the beach watching more shooting stars, followed by a relaxing day swimming in the warm, salty, turquoise-blue mediterranean sea.



in the afternoon we drove over to olimpos to wander around the jungle-like ruins, hang around the beach, and climb a fort to enjoy the gorgeous view.



the ruins were tangled up in trees reminded me a little of angkor wat, although much less spectacular. still, there were secrets to be found: stone path-ways, ancient churches, castles, mosaics, and rivers with clear, beautiful water. afterwards we trudged back to the littered, well-worn path to the "tree house" backpacking village of olimpos (not-so-eerily reminiscent of thai backpacking culture) where round-the-world backpackers come to drop out for a few weeks in a summer camp-like setting. after some debate we decided to stay the night and ended up in the same tree house camp as several others from the BUSEL intern program (AHHH!!!) and one of them finally taught me how to play backgammon.



that night bryan and i hopped in a crowded van for quick drive and a dark 20-minute hike to see chimaera, an amazing centralia-esque mountain burning with a dozen or so eternal flames as a mysterious result of natural gas reacting to oxygen, providing the reason for nearby greeks fire-god-worship. the flames were just seeping out of holes in rocks; if snuffed out, they'd just start up again. the stars were very bright at the top of the mountain as well. the stuff of legends (literally.)



the night ended back in olimpos at the ubiquitous ORANGE CLUB disco for a few hours of dancing to terrible music late into the night with some of the BUSEL interns. always fun. :)

the next morning bryan and i drove off to antalya where our planned excursion to a hamam was foiled after getting hopelessly lost. after a valiant effort, bryan finally dropped me off in the afternoon so he could drive back to the west coast to catch his flight to new york. i had the rest of the day before my midnight bus ride back to ankara, so i went to the antalya museum and was surprised to find one of the best museums i have EVER been to, featuring lots of beautifully-lit sculptures. . .



. . .many passive-aggressive jabs at the international antiquity market such as this display lamenting the US's refusal to return the upper-half of this poor guy's body. . .



and the relics (i.e. JAWBONE) of st. nicholas (i.e. SANTA CLAUS!!!) who was totally from turkey. and real.



i spent the rest of the evening enjoying the beautiful mountains, wandering through the old city among re-constructed traditional ottoman homes, sitting by the marina, and daydreaming about what i imagine san francisco must be like. eventually i took a public bus to the bus station, a fancy overnight bus to ankara, and a dolmuş (literally "stuffed" and a lot of fun to ride!) back to bilkent. where i was exausted & still had to pack + carry all my stuff to the new dorm. and here i am!

today i joined my "teaching unit," got a desk, and started preparing for actual-teaching. although i'm constantly lamenting my college-esque experience out here with dozens of americans, tonight i met another fulbright ETA at a different turkish university (METU, the university i requested actually) who was distraught - she was a lone foreigner, had no one helping her with finding an apartment, was staying in the living room of a random american she met and claims to be resented/ignored by her teaching department. so maybe i'm lucky to be on this end of the extreme.

i also attended a meeting with the rector of the university who said he started the whole BUSEL intern program because his son applied to teach english in China via the Princeton in Asia program (after graduating from Princeton) and was so amazed his son was willing to go teaching in the middle of nowhere for very little money that, hey - turkey can beat that - and throw in some extra perks (grad classes, a major city, and, theoretically at least, nice apts) to boot! he's right, since i came very close to doing the exact same program (in taiwan) until i heard about the fulbright offer. despite my frustrations, this is an excellent program. the rector says they hope to majorly expand their recruitment next year, so if anyone's interested in applying let me know.

if you're interested in more photos, visit my flickr page - you can either view then all "as a slideshow" (upper-right hand corner) or click on the "Western Anatolia / Mediterranean Trip" collection (just below the slideshow option) to see them (hastily) labeled and organized by location.

you can also check out the new york time's recent take on cappadocia - they've got much better pictures but terrible hotel advice!