In Need Of Your Wisdom

I need to rename this blog, maybe even change the url.  I don't know what I was thinking, choosing such a specific title, and now, post-Turkiye, I feel rather foolish.  So, what should I do?  Give me some advice here, please.  That's what comments are for.  I want to turn this into more of a photography site, and be able to write about whatever interests me without the expectation of everything applying to the incredible time I spent in Ankara.  I'm at school now, and school has very, very little in common with what I did this summer, maalesef.

Well, September Eleventh does seem to have rolled round rather hard this year, no?  It doesn't help that it's currently Ramazan (Rosh Hashannah, too.  Happy New Year, people), but there is no excuse for the bigoted way in which some Americans are behaving.  It makes me very glad to have dual citizenship to hide in. Burning the Quran, indeed.  Of all the horrible, stupid ideas... Since being in Turkey, which is politically not an Islamic country but is populated with the most wonderfully friendly people I have ever had the good fortune to meet, the majority of whom happen to subscribe to Islam to some degree, American ignorance about Moslems grates on me even harder.  I hope what I've written about on this blog has done some good in that regard. 

I've got a shoot now, scheduled with a most beautiful classmate, and one does try to keep these appointments.  Therefore, though I cannot withdraw without regret from the company of you, my dear readers, withdraw I must.  We shall speak soon.  May we all be a little less prejudiced by the next time we talk.

Back to the MSSM

Sorry, but the Beatles are the best.

I am back.  And not projecting from the future.  No, Turkish-speaking-Bacon-eating bloggirl is back online, and how*.  Let me work backwards for a bit here.

I came home this weekend because I of that eye appointment/fair, and I missed school yesterday.  Thank god I didn't have math class, because that would set me too far back for words.  No, but it'll be tough enough catching up with Chemistry.  Chemistry!  I have a science class that I like.  Someone is messing with cosmic cogs and levers at the moment, and I am liking, you know, math and science.  Earth-shaking.  Oh, actually, I saw my math teacher Anyway, I get home late Thursday night and on Friday I hung out with a couple friends, made blueberry peach cake, watched The West Wing and totally failed to take enough pictures of the beautiful town I live in and never really appreciated before.  Stayed up until about 2 a.m. making pie crust and talking to someone back at school - it sounds like I'm missing a wild weekend.  This morning I baked that pie (blueberry) and took it over to the fairground to enter.  My old school's jazzband plays for the harness races every year, but considering the torrential nature of this morning, the horses were kept home and the band played their set uninterrupted.  The bad director, whom I'd been a little scared to face after leaving him so suddenly - if temporarily - second trombone-less to come to this school, saw me and went and dedicated a song to me, with a cheery 'wishing her good luck at school up north'.  The man's either trying to guilt me into tears or okay with my leaving.  Either way, it was great to see my friends play, and after helping them break down we spent a couple hours doing Fair Things.  This means we spent a couple hours alternately cooing at cows and piglets and llamas, and eating.  How we ate.  I again forgot my camera, but I'm kind of glad because I do not want to remember what I've eaten today.  It was wonderful.  Smoked ribs, sticky buns, incredibly high-qual sausages, lobster roll, lime fizz.  Then I brought home my pie (came third this year - very happy) and ate some of that.  It was a little runny, which will be why it didn't take first, but all parties pronounced it yummy and that was fun.  This evening I didn't eat dinner, understandably, except for some cake my parent brought home from a neighbor's wedding.  I still have to do battle with chem, though.  And if you're thinking 'my god, this girl's a food slut,' you're only kind of right.  Because the food at school is frankly Not Good.  There's a kitchen in the dorm, and I cook myself stuff every day, but it's hard to find time to eat as much...it took my performance today to convince my mother that I'm not developing anorexia.  This state of affairs, combined with biking class (we got through the most gorgeous rolling fields and toxic clouds of ozone) and maybe, maybe, my new tendency to NOT eat ten pieces of baklava every day, makes this weekend a total non-problem.  I'm actually feeling rather svelte.

I've tried LARPing (Live Action Role Playing, for those of you who, like me, don't know *censored* about that particular facet of 'geek culture').  It's a huge deal, played with swords and spears and various other weaponry composed of plastic piping, foam and duct tape.  I hate sig figs because they made me fail a quiz, but I feel like I did all right on a chemistry test on Wednesday.  I love my AP composition class to death, and the teacher is starting a photography club!  I'm starting to save for a new lens...one that, um, zooms?  And I've taken hundreds of photos already... god knows my classmates' antics are worthy of being recorded.  I also just heard that I got into the a cappella group, which practices for four hours every weekend.  I auditioned Wednesday and didn't think it went very well, but I'm really excited to have gotten in.

Oh, god, what else.... have I made it completely clear that I love it there?  The classes are extremely demanding and I'm doing three to four hours of homework every evening, but the other students are fantastic, the teachers actually care and there's not this feeling of just going through the motions.  Last weekend there was a dance where people actually danced, and this week it was horribly hot.  This hurricane was preceded by the most awful, stagnant heat, and inland Maine is like the midwest anyway - there's no medium, it's either stifling or bitterly cold.  I feel a little boxed in there without being able to smell the sea, and I'm sure winter will be hard... but I'll worry about that when it happens.


And now that I'm back to dull old Maine again, lots of my friends are flinging themselves across the planet.  AFS is heart-wrenching for those left behind.


Well, I have to go be excited to go back to school.  Or, rather, do maths homework.  Both.  I actually can't wait.  I missed my friends here like mad, and it's been fantastic to see them this weekend, but I'm ready to go home now, for another two weeks.


And there are other ukulele people!  One girl has an electric one...and I'm playing ukulele in the band!  Marilyn, move over.
And I do apologise for this post: haphazard even by my standards.  But there is no way I'm reading it over.  Just don't care that much about sentence structure tonight.
Herkesi sizi seviyorum!


*blame Lorna Lilly for that particularly contagious bit of the '50s

Home Again - Temporarily

Ah, well.  I suppose this is just a time to catch my breath between Turkey and School.  It's all so impossibly short.  But hey.  I am back on my laptop, and the funny thing is that I'm having trouble adjusting back to US keyboards!  I keep reaching up to the 1 key to type an apostrophe, and I'm almost nostalgic for all those ı characters now.

Home is a funny place to be now.  The last six weeks were full of a lot of food, music and new friends - people I feel incredibly fortunate to have met.  I have been conscious in the last few days of just smiling at one memory or another, and having to snap out of it quickly before somebody decides I'm in love or up to no good.

I miss Turkey, and everything is still so fresh in my mind that I can't quite convince myself in the mornings that instead of going to school to see Arzu Hanım and wander Ankara with my friends, I am going to go downstairs, see the granola in production, and leave to babysit my darling five month-old friend from New York , and prepare for school, something I'd completely put off thinking about while in Turkey.  It's not that I'm not happy to be home.  I am.  But when I get on my computer, all I want to do is look at photos from this summer, and all I want to speak to people about is Turkey, in turkish.  Part of my head thinks I'm still there, but Im slowly catching on.  Today I will eat no simit from street stalls, catch no sweaty buses, and I probably won't even sweat. 

After my host family went to America, I moved in with my grandparents.  They and my eight-year-old cousin from İstanbul, who was also staying with them, don't speak much English, which was great for me.  I caught a dolmuş home in the afternoons instead of the bus, which was a little different and fun for the three days I had to do it, and, despite my host mother's fears that I would be fed to death, it was all great.  

Last Friday (I can't believe I was so far away a week ago) we had a party at school, with cake and certificates and many hugs with our teachers and waiter and a lot of photos.  The previous day we'd given Arzu Hanım a present - a lovely vase, flowers and a framed picture of the class and her, from my camera, and everything was pretty fantastic.

Actually, though, it was what happend after school on Friday that made the day a little special.  I walked a different route to Kızılay with two classmates, and we found ourselves looking at the magnificent Kocatepe Mosque, perhaps Ankara's only beautiful building.  A man came up to us on the street and somehow we ended up following him inside this mosque, which was perhaps even as stunning as the Aya Sofia and Sultan Ahmet ones in İstanbul.  We left our shoes at the door and I and my friend - the other was (and still is, I suppose) a boy - were brought headscarves, and god.  That place was beautiful in a way that made me understand religion a little bit.  If there was a faith centred on building places like that, I would be a crazed believer.

We are Americans.  This means that every experience, every day, no matter how authentic, fascinating or ethnically correct, must include Starbucks.  We walked to the one on Kızılay.  It was there that this gorgeous baby girl who was just learning to walk stumbled up to us and started to play with me.  Maybe I was still high on that mosque, but she made me so happy just by putting her snacks in my lap and letting me feed them to her, and after a few minutes, her mother called me 'abla'.  Big sister.  Lovely.

(I'm making it sound as if I really adore babies, aren't I?  Actually, I don't... they're here, and I'm here, and we get along all right, but don't pull my hair too hard or it's back to Mama.)

It was there that the goodness stopped, though.  I walked from Starbucks with a friend to his apartment to pick up his power adaptor so that I could charge my camera before going to İstanbul the next day, and on my way back to catch the dolmuş I saw a kid get hit by a car.

Turks drive like maniacs, and I heard a scream on the other side of the street and saw this little girl - she must have been about six - on the asphalt with the wheel of a taxi almost on top of her.  A huge crowd gathered as her mother grabbed her and dragged her to the pavement.  They were both screaming, which was a relief - at least the poor thing was alive.  I didn't realize until later that i understood what her mother was screaming at the taxi driver, as I watched people check this child over, pour water on her, pull out their mobile phones to call an ambulance.  I was thoroughly shocked, but there were at least fifty people there and I couldn't be of any help.  I carried on getting home, but was really shaky the rest of the afternoon.

That night, or the next morning really, at 1:30 am, we all met up at the bus station to catch our otobus to İstanbul.  I said goodbye to my grandparents and got on, and we all drifted in and out of consciousness for seven hours.  Then we got to İstanbul and I wished I'd slept solidly,  because what followed was a half hour of lugging overpacked bags through that crazy city, which, at eight in the morning, was just beginning to spill its hungover soul back into the streets and start to party again.

What followed was a day of sickness, reunitation with the İstanbul NSLI-Y crowd (we were a lucky group - they fought the whole six weeks and there was some t e n s i o n), more Starbucks, a gorgeous nighttime boat tour of the Bosphorus, and crazed hanging out in hotel rooms until five in the morning.

I was not destined to sleep the next day, either, for flights are delayed and shit happens.  And the strangest thing happened after we had 'de-planed'.  What a word.  Anyway, a turkish woman heard me talking to one of the other AFSers about my school, and she interrupted to say she knew it!  Turned out, she was a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology and had a student who went to MSSM a few years ago!  The world just keeps getting smaller...

Anyway, I'm home now and have far too much to do.  I have to go now, so I'll put a thousand pictures on this post later.

Oh, and isn't this just the Summer of Gay Rights?  Argentina, Mexico, now California again?  Keep it coming!

Hoş çakal!

Kapadokia, with notes on How To Deal With Bus-Stop Creeps

Ah, so much that's gone on.... sorry ıt's been so long sınce I posted.  My host sıster and father were away thıs week, but my host mother and I stıll were very busy and I couldn't seem to get to thıs.  Last week I was approached twice ın a really uncool, not-flatterıng way at the Kızılay bus stop by turkish guys... the first saw me snapping pictures while waiting for the bus, which is how I got this one of him, and he wanted to know my phone number and, I think, where I lived.  The second time I didn't let it get that far and just looked at the ground when he came up to me and started to ask me if I spoke English... It's not as if my clothes are particularly revealing, the way I dress is downright conservative when you compare my clothes to those of some of the turkish women on the street.  And I don't generally engage with people, except to ask for the occasional photo or, you know, buy something to eat.  But when I'm alone (sometimes one of the NSLI-Y guys catches the bus at the same time, and nobody comes near girls when they're with boys or men) and tall and kind of fluorescent compared with everyone around me, I guess I just stıck way out. 

(Actually, a lot of people here try to speak to me ın German...especıally when I'm sunburned!)

In better news, Kapadokia!  I went on Saturday with a neighbor's brother who's in the State department here.  We left ankara at seven in the morning, and drove for three hours, with a quick detour to Turkey's enormous Salt Lake (no mormons there, though).  For some reason (halophilic bacteria, maybe?) it looks reddish from a distance, but when you get your feet wet ıt's clear and sparkly, and the salt beach has only the faintest tinge of pink.  Yes, I dıd taste ıt and it ıs ridiculously, burnıngly salty, and the lake bottom was sharp!  This enormous lake, so big you can't see across it, is about a metre deep at ıts deepest poınt.  Great thing to see. 

İf you don't know about Kapadokia (sometimes also spelled wıth 'c', but that makes a /j/ sound in turkısh so I'm using the native spelling), ıt's all these incredible volcanically-formed cones of rock with caves and cathedrals carved into them and, less famously but equally importantly, underground cities honeycombed into the mountains.  It wsa mostly christians who lived in these caves, a couple thousand years ago, and some of these mountain-churches still have paintings intact.  I was shocked by how un-touristy some of the places were.  We went to one absolutely spectacular spot with caves and paintings and saw two turkish famılıes.  On a summer Saturday afternoon with beautiful weather and barely any charge at all to get in.  Honestly, it was about 5 Lira.

                       

Brief sentence in which I am happy that the BP oil mess has been capped, that Argentina has legalized gay marriage and adoption, and that the Obamas visited Bar Harbor, ME, about an hour from where I live, all in the last week. 

I taught my host mother to make pie-crust spiral cookies - just the type made out of leftover dough and cinnamon sugar - and she took some to her office last week.  One of the people who work under hre, who graduated from the Cordon Bleu cooking school, asked for the recipe!  I was so delighted to hear that, because I really like my pie crust and I've worked on the recipe a lot. 

We of NSLI fame have also discovered a new place to have drinks after school.  It's sort of faux-hawaiian, but ıt doesn't matter because the smoothies are so good, and ıt's at the top of a very steep hill, so they're actually heaven after the climb.  Lots of fun, and now I must go to bed. 

Another Poşt Fröm Thış Weırd Keyboard

Merhaba...good news! I was checkıng to see ıf I could access blogger from this computer (the one in my room) and, for some reason, I now can log in, which I wasn't able to do before. This is great. I don't have to borrow my anne's laptop now and email myself every picture I want to put up... slow file exchanges are never fun, so to celebrate this marvelous event I have decided to put up a short video. It's rather unprofessional - I took it on my Lumix* after a walk one night... but I want you to hear what the call to prayer sounds like. There are loads of mosques in this city, and it sounds slıghtly different from each one - they use loudspeakers with different recordings, I think.

Aaah, ıt's not working...I'll keep trying, though!

 Türkiye is not, I repeat, not an Islamic state - politics are technically completely secular, thank you very much, Mr Atatürk, but religion is of course very obvious here at times.  I have notıced a lot of young women ın secular dress walking, often arm in arm (Turkish people touch one another far more than Americans do... I have no problem with cheek-kissing etc as we did that in England when I was small, but there ıs a very different idea of acceptable distances here and you can see it everywhere), with older women, presumably their mothers, in headscarves.  I think this is really interesting... A sign of a changing society? 

Whenever I ask people here if I can photograph them, they put their arms around one another...another way Turks are more openly affectionate, I suppose. Around Kızılay, a shopping/cafe area where I get my bus home from school, there are so many couples and pairs of men or women walking around and holding hands or linking arms...

 I just wısh I'd gotten their shoes in this shot. 

Other than the computer's epiphany - it wants to help me! - things are going on as before.  I can't call any of it normal, because it's so special, but it's great.  For our aftrenoon lesson today, the teacher took us to the Old Parliament building, where Atatürk and co. dıd a lot of figuring out.  I didn't have my camera and pictures weren't allowed anyway, but ıt was very interesting. 

I feel so great here.  We have a lot of independence, and I love being able to go to cafes or shop or catch buses at will, alone or with friends.  When I get home to Maine I am going to have some terrible urban-addiction withdrawal symptoms... and just a week or two after I get home, I start at my new school, MSSM.  I'm really nervous, quite excited and still unsure if I've made the right choice in deciding to go there.  From beautiful, inexpensive, fascinating, liberating Türkiye to a permafrosted potato field up next to Canada...oh, well.  I suppose I ought to get off the computer and enjoy this while it lasts...actually, I should get off the computer and do my homework.  We're finally getting into verbs, and I have so many to learn.

Not quite sure what my family's plans are for this weekend...I have lots of homework to do, but I'll post if I'm able to.

I hope that your day is as interesting and less hot than mine.

İyi günler!

News, etc.

Selam, everyone. Just a post to let you know that I've gotten a couple emails from NSLI about my upcoming departure - I leave for NY in just 20 days and fly in 22! The first bit of information was a reply to a question I had about visas - all I have to do is hand over about $20 US at the airport to get my visa, because I won't be there for very long. That's abfab news. There was also an email with information about AFS Turkiye, specific things - the type of electrical outlet there, what sort of gifts to bring your family (I'm thinking chocolate chips as they're apparently rare there, Maine maple syrup, locally made granola (http://lucysgranola.com/ try some because it's incredible.), and blueberry jam, as well as some pictures of Maine, etc, but I'm still looking for ideas so have fun in the comments) and rules. The things that could definitely get me students sent home include hitchhiking, breaking Turkish laws, driving and drugs. I can't drive and I don't do drugs or hitchhike, so I'm not particularly worried. The drinking age there is technically 18, but they're very laid-back about enforcing that - we are talking about Europe. One can also be sent home for developing eating disorders, which I suppose makes sense. I am not an eating disorder sort of kız. I love to cook and I love to eat, and I'm not really concerned by the AFS warnings that most people gain weight while abroad. I'd certainly rather eat my favourite foods - things that I cook, not horrid processed foods Go Michael Pollan - than abstain and lose weight. I like clothes, but I'm totally at home in my body ... so 50's figures are out of fashion, and so are the Ashkenazic hips that are my birthright (along with that unburnable olive skin I didn't get). So what? Give me that turkish food, I'm only there for six weeks and I plan to enjoy every meal.
Well, I promised to finish those romance phrases - oh, that's something that IS allowed on AFS - so here's one to tide you over. I promise to tell you the totally important ones about condoms and idiots over the weekend!

Do you want to come inside for a while? Biraz içeri gelmek ister misin?

Oh, and a friend whose family is from Turkey has told me that peanut butter is really hard to find there. Stands to reason, as it's not even that easy to get in the UK. Not much variety or quality. So, that's another potential present for my family. The picture here is of the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Erdoğan, who has called the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara "a bloody massacre ... that deserves every kind of curse."

I've switched my laptop's keyboard to Türkçe! Now I don't have to copy characters from Ğooğle Tranşlate and, hopefully, those annoying highlighted bits will go away. I am a happy kız tonight. Mostly. I babysat my brother after studying for French finals with a friend for a couple hours, and then I baked a cake for another old friend's birthday tomorrow*. It's the chocolate cake from the brilliant food blog Smitten Kitchen, with a potentially dangerous coffee cream cheese icing that I'm really excited about.
Iyi geceler! Seni seviyorum, world. That does not extend to finals, by the way.

*Is it right for a fifteen-year-old to call anybody an 'old friend'?

Ankara, We Have A Problem

Merhaba. Turkey has just withdrawn her ambassador from Israel, in response to Israel’s attack on a flotilla of aid ships making their way to Gaza. One of them was the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish passenger boat, and Israeli troops boarded it and at least nine activists were killed, many of them Turkish. Turkey was Israel’s closest ally in the muslim world, and Israel has really messed up. The EU and Russia have issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s actions, David Cameron of the United Kingdom (meh) has expressed similar disgust. I can’t believe this. Israeli troops just went and slaughtered at least nine activists. It’s so totally unacceptable, and I don’t blame Turkey and the rest of the world for being angry. This picture of protesters waving Turkish and Palestinian flags…they all wanted the blockade on Gaza to end, and these activists’s boats had been checked in Turkey for weaponry – it’s clear that they were only carrying humanitarian aid. What frightens me, though, is the way anti-Israeli sentiment turns so quickly anti-Jewish. Can’t people tell the difference? I feel completely attacked by the hateful anti-Israeli messagesflying around the internet. Yes, people, I’m Jewish. That does not mean I’m an Israeli soldier, or even pro-Israel. I agree that it was brutal and unacceptable for Israel to do this thing, to board a Turkish ship (‘mavi’ means blue), but at the same time it feels like I’m being blamed, even threatened a little bit.

I really hope this doesn’t mean that the NSLI-Y trip to Turkey is canceled. They’re rioting now, but I’m not leaving for 21 days… I really hope we can still go. There’s a student on the trip who was transferred from the Egypt summer programme because it wouldn’t be safe for them, as they had spent the previous summer in Israel. It would be awful if that person, or any of us, had to be transferred again or even told we couldn’t go. There’s been no word yet from the people at AFS, so I’m just trying to be optimistic. I’ll keep this up to date as things happen… Let’s hope that no more violence results from this, and that the situation calms down quickly.

This is what the United Nation Security Council’s has to say. I’m glad I participated in Model UN this year, because it was fun and I can understand the following... but at the same time I wish I didn’t get it at all.


The Security Council deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force during the Israeli military operation in international waters against the convoy sailing to Gaza. The Council, in this context, condemns those acts which resulted in the loss of at least ten civilians and many wounded, and expresses its condolences to their families.



The Security Council requests the immediate release of the ships as well as the civilians held by Israel. The Council urges Israel to permit full consular access, to allow the countries concerned to retrieve their deceased and wounded immediately, and to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance from the convoy to its destination.



The Security Council takes note of the statement of the UN Secretary–General on the need to have a full investigation into the matter and it calls for a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards.



The Security Council stresses that the situation in Gaza is not sustainable. The Council re-emphasizes the importance of the full implementation of Resolutions 1850 and 1860. In that context, it reiterates its grave concern at the humanitarian situation in Gaza and stresses the need for sustained and regular flow of goods and people to Gaza as well as unimpeded provision and distribution of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza.



The Security Council underscores that the only viable solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an agreement negotiated between the parties and re-emphasizes that only a two-State solution, with an independent and viable Palestinian State living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbours, could bring peace to the region.



The Security Council expresses support for the proximity talks and voices concern that this incident took place while the proximity talks are underway and urges the parties to act with restraint, avoiding any unilateral and provocative actions, and all international partners to promote an atmosphere of cooperation between the parties and throughout the region.

I’ve joined the site LiveMocha.com to work on my Türkçe. It’s a good site, with peer review and a chat option so you can practice languages with native speakers. But yesterday, when I was home sick with wither heat exhaustion or sunstroke or the flu, I got about five chat requests from people in Turkey whose profile pictures were the Israeli flag in flames or torn and bloodied. It’s really unnerving.

My sister’s bat mitzvah went incredibly well, by the way. She did excellently in the service on Saturday, and we had a wild party on Sunday. My family all came from England, and a couple friends flew in from New Zealand and they all stayed in our new house. On Sunday night we had jazz (I sat in for a couple songs with my school’s top combo, who placed fourth in the Nation this year at the Berklee music festival), dancing, a fire pit and so much food. I’ll get some pictures up, my cousin’s a great photographer. Well, this Kız needs to get back to panicking about upcoming finals, and actually start paying attention in Science class instead of blogging. Güle güle.