Video - Call To Prayer

This is from one of my favourite web comics, Cat and Girl.  I thought, given the way I've indulged in the belowmentioned sweet this summer, I might post it to see if anyone else thinks it's funny. 

And, now that I'm back in the states where there's no national YouTube block, I can give you videos!  Here is the call to prayer, finally.

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!

Leaving

Well, this may be the last opportunity I have to post until I get back to the States.  We fly on Sunday, but my host family is actually off to America for a holiday tomorrow, so I'm staying with my host-grandparents until Friday night.  Our bus to İstanbul leaves Ankara at 1:30 am Saturday.  I am stunned by this information and have no comprehension of why anyone let alone (or even?  Some of them are pretty nuts) AFS would schedule such a thing.  No matter, we shall reach İstanbul early and spend an exhausting day basking in its glory before flying home Sunday.  I'm excited to see the İstanbul NSLI-Y group, and the other AFS Turkey summer people who weren't on this scholarship, and the 12 days I have at home are something I'm looking forward to

(Things I am going to eat: blueberries, rare meat, spelt bread, lobster, Maine mussels, greens from my family's garden, pork, distinct from bacon, and a lot of fruit desserts)

And I'm half-scared, half-excited for this nutty school I'm going to.  But, guys, I've just spent my summer in Türkiye.  I am just beginning to feel confident with this language, as if I could really do well if I could study it more.  The heat doesn't bother me as much as it used to - at the beginning of this trip, every day on the bus I would feel this slick of sweat on my back just slide hotly and roll down the backs of my legs, and now I can actually make it through the day conscious of something other than 'God, what did this part of the world do to deserve this?' - and I adore the food like nothing else.  The people are friendly and, for the most part, not too creepy, and I love my family and my teacher and my new friends. 

Oh, I dıdn't realıse I was leavıng NOW. 
Bye.

İstanbul, The Drug (Alternatively, Give Me A Bag Of Hot Chestnuts And I'm Yours Forever)

It was not a weekend you'd want to get in a fight with.  Thankfully, we got on quite well, and the only blow it dealt was to whatever energy reserves I had left after four weeks here.  And, don't mısunderstand me, that was a blow I'm stıll recovering from now, on Thursday, but, god, ıt was worth it.  İstanbul... imagine whatever you've heard about that heady, glorious, ancient, modern, ridiculous, exquisite city, and then think of your most recent sauna experience.  İstanbul never sleeps.  hiç.



It's late, so this is going to be a really disorganized post.  In no particular order, here is what we (my host mother, sister, various friends and an aunt, and me) did.

We ate kokoreç, a sandwich of grilled sheep intestines.  They sell it on the street as a sort of snack food, 24 hours a day, due to the insomniacal (word?) nature of İstanbul.  It's actually really tasty, and my only problem was that it was very spicy.  There were also mussel shells stuffed with lovely rice all around the mussel, and deep-fried mussels on sticks.  I must bring these techniques back home to Maine, where we have, in my completely objective and unbiased opinion, the best mussels in the world.  Türkiye comes in a close second.

Went to both the Aya Sofiya and Sultan Ahmet mosques.  Aside from being impossibly beautiful, my favourite thing about them is the way one resulted in the other.  Aya Sofiya was originally a cathedral, and when the Ottomans came in they built the Sultan Ahmet mosque directşly opposite it to show the Christians what was what.  The two make this gorgeous mirror of one another, and there are fountains and corn and chestnut (oh, the chestnuts... I'd only seen them sold by the Paris metro before, and how I love them.  Chestnuts were the last thing I ate in 2009,  The first thing I ate this year was sea urchin roe) vendors and rose gardens in between.  The Aya Sofiya is a museum now, and the inside is not only gorgeous but going through a centuries-long religious identity crisis.  It's got arabic written all over it, and the tiling and wall art is typicaşlly İslamic, but there are still paintings of Mary and Jesus and the angel Gabriel on the ceilings. 

The Sultan Ahmet mosque is still very much functioning as such.  When my host mother and I went in, we were given plastic bags for our shoes and big squares of light blue cloth for our heads.  The inside is carpeted and just as enormously impressive as the Aya Sofiya, but differently decorated.  There were tourists all over, it beıng a very famous spot with good reason, but also some people praying, etc. etc.  The women have to pray in this tiny enclosed area with high wicker walls, and I think it's just awful.  But it was incredible to see the two buildings one after another.  I really wished my Dad (the, um, biological one, in Maine) had been there to see it.  He's an architect and would have loved the whole thing and driven me nuts with all the history of the building techniques and all.

In İstanbul, there are burqas everywhere.  Here in Ankara you see plenty of headscarves, but I've only seen about two full-length anythıngs in the five weeks I've been here (I know.  5 weeks...one week left and I don't know how I'll leave).  But in İstanbul, so many women go about with just their eyes showing through a slit, walking a step behind their husbands.  They're mostly tourists from İran, Pakistan and other nearby İslamic countries, but gosh.  Everywhere.  I almost died from the heat and humidity in my shorts and tank top, and I just can't imagine what it's like to go around day after day wearing long, heavy black - or, in one instance last weekend, purple - robes.  As if it weren't enough, you couldn't tell if most of these womens' husbands were secular or fanatically observant from the way they dress.  Insult to injury, or just plain cultural misogyny? 

The Grand Bazaar and Taksim (this incredibly long shoppıng street, probably the busıest in Turkey) are amazing, too.  I bought some spices, a(nother) cushion, too much Turkish delight (which turns out to be a) actually from Turkey and b) delicious c) screw C. S. Lewis, those books were preachy and boring) and a couple other presents for my family, and there are these men sellıng ıce cream that ıs somehow stretchy.  They throw ıt around on sticks to atract customers. 

Let's see, what else... The U2 poster is just somethıng I saw around İstanbul...I went to their 360 concert in London last August, and it wsa great, so it was cool to see they're coming here. 

There are a lot of stray cats everywhere ın Turkey.  Oh, and I figured out the colour settings on my camera!  I feel so stupid for not finding them for a whole month and a half...got to read that manual one of these days.  Anyway, my life is a bit of a black-and-white fest at the moment.  I got henna-ed, apparently ın the Pakistani/İndian style (turkish henna is oranger, I'm told) yesterday, which was lots of fun for 5 Lira. 

Oh, and my host-aunt, the one who lives in the Black Sea region, is pregnant!  We might go back up there this weekend to see her. 

It's too late to arrange all these photos, I'll come back and edit this post later.  For now you'll just have to figure it out.  You can do it.

İyi geceler.

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!

A Post With A Ridiculous Number Of Pictures

Selam, everyone.  It's the end of a beautiful hot day, and I'm packing right now.

AFS has very strict rules about what you can bring, and I have to keep my luggage under 44 pounds.  I'm culling my clothing selections to make room for the America and Maine-themed things I'm bringing my family.

On Saturday night, I went with my family to dinner with some friends who used to live in Turkey.  They put on a wonderful evening, and we watched a slideshow of photographs projected on a sail outside.  It kept billowing back and forth in the wind, and we made a lot of jokes about all the earthquakes in Turkey.  We ate the most delicious turkish food - grilled meat, aubergine, and feta cheese wrapped in phyllo and deep fried.  I made baklava for the first time, and was very pleased with the way it came out.

I spent yesterday with two lovely friends from the AFS orientation.  One of them, Silvia, is from Indonesia and going home next weekend after a whole year in Augusta.  The other, Danielle, lives here in Maine and is going to Turkey on NSLI-Y as well, for a semester.

We cooked Indonesian fried rice, which was absolutely delicious, and a lovely syrupy middle-eastern dessert.  Silvia stayed the night, and only just left.  I went to work babysitting for a couple hours while she hung out with my mum and some other mothers and kids at my house, and when I got back we went to the beach.  We waded, caught hermit crabs, and drew maps in the sand of the US, Indonesia and Turkey.

We also wrote our names in the sand.  She did hers in Arabic, and I wrote my hebrew name, לאה (Leah).  I think Arabic is far more güzel than Hebrew.

Some guys from my school showed up at the beach, and I introduced her, and when we left we put flowers on their various cars (identifiable by the college bumper stickers they sport.  Notable is the Harvard convertible) for them to find.  Then we went kayaking, which Silvia had never tried before.  She got quite good at it, and we were very happy and tired by the end.

I am SO excited about going to Turkey.  I fly to New York the day after tomorrow for the orientation, and on Friday to İstanbul!  I've found my host mother and sister, Didem and Alkım, on facebook and we've added each another as family.  They seem so nice, I just can't wait to meet them.  My host father is a chemical engineer, my anne studied psychology and works as a sales manager, and Alkım loves rock and plays the piano.  They've been to London, too, which is really great since I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

These rocks are just some pictures I took at the beach, but I am so enamored of the sharpness achieved by the Lumix that I couldn't help it - even if I kind of am echoing Ian's posts.  Whatever, he does it better.  In any case, I implore you to click on these to enlarge them and marvel.

And with that, my dears (sevgilim in Türkçe), I must away to my suitcase and figure out how to make it all weigh something that I am capable of lugging around Türkiye on my own (I'll have you know that I lugged some pretty damn heavy kayaks today, through the stickiest mud thusfar traversed by womankind).  I'll try to fit in another post before I leave, and then I'll be writing from Ankara!  I imagine that I'll be quite a mess when I first get there, so you must bear with me.  And just because this is a post with a ridiculous number of pictures, I'll throw in just one more:

İyi geceler.

Illustrated News

Merhaba again, everyone. This is utterly shameful. You are going to think I have absolutely nothing to do, no friends, no life in general, which isn't really true. But I am thoroughly in love with my camera and want to show you everything, and, this being another ridiculously hot day for Maine (it was 90° Fahrenheit yesterday!), I have opted to stay inside and edit photographs just for you. Above are two pictures from the farmers market, my first attempts at food photography. Black and white in Türkçe is siyah ve beyaz.

Below, I demonstrate to you the inconceivably amazing powers of the Lumix. The two cropped shots are just that - little zoom-ins from the original pictures, and look how sharp they still are! I am totally in awe of this. I also like the smaller shot of the arm and hand because, if you don't see the original and don't know these two friends of mine, it's hard to figure out whether the hand and arm belong to the same person.

News: only 4 days until I leave! I didn't receive a reply about my host family, but the old information has appeared back on the site, so I'm guessing there was just some kind of glitch on the AFS web site. I've also gotten an email from my host mother! It's just a short note, in slightly broken english, but very sweet... I can't wait to meet them. My sister in Ankara is 13, just like my sister here, my father is 39 and my mother isn't telling her age - in a goodnatured and humourous sort of way. She says "we look forward you to be a member of our familiy" Well, me too. I am çok excited.

I'm not babysitting today, so maybe I'll go to the beach. I kind of feel like finding a butterfly to photograph, too. And I must do some RosettaStone... If you know how to download video files from cameras, please do leave a comment. I can't figure it out. Teşekkurler!











Tamam (that means OK, I just learned it), Güle güle!

Some More Pictures

So, evet. More photos. I don't know anything about editing, I'm really just messing about, but it's so much fun! Observe original chintzy --> overexposed trippy flower arrangement. I really want to get into food photography, too. I think my camera has settings for it, but I ought to just get good at making things look right. There's a massive number of excellent food photos at SmittenKitchen, if anybody's interested.

I'll soon show you the amazing sharpness that the Lumix manages by giving you a couple cropped shots, along with their originals. The focus is so perfect, despite the fact that the cropped ones are magnified a million times over...a shot of somebody's hand, taken from a photo of a whole kitchen, and there's no discernible difference in quality. I guess that's what 12.1 megapixels get you. I just have to get the permission of the friends in the photos...

But for now, here's something which is, in my totally unqualified opinion, a lovely piece of food photography. I didn't take it, but I made the cake.

One point that's actually related to the theme of this blog (though, really, who am I fooling?): I had my host family, as you know, and I was really excited. But I've checked my AFS account again, and they seem to have taken the info down. I don't know if this is a mistake, or means that I'm not with that family any longer, so I've sent an email to the NSLI-Y people. I'll let you know what goes down.

Hoşçakal

News and non-News

Selam, guys. Sorry it's taken so long to post. I meant to last night, but I was at a friend's house and his in internet wasn't working - probably because of the gorgeous killer rainstorm we had last night. Anyway, News! Last night my mother and sister has a massive fight over leggings or something, and I decided to escape and go for a walk with this friend. My new camera has come - it's a Lumix GF1, and the most beautiful, compact machine I've ever met - and we spent a little while trying to work out how it works. Yeah, yeah, look in the manual I KNOW. But how much fun is that? Another nice guy from school gave me a video-chat tutorial on how to set it up, slide in the memory card, etc, but I haven't quite worked out the video factor yet. But still! I hope to be posting pictures and videos really, really soon.

Anyway, we decided to watch a film at my friend's house in the evening, and before going over I went home to gather some stuff up and confirm some other movie plans for tonight (my social life is just explosive, I know...not), and I decided to check my AFS account, because, well, I have been obsessively checking my AFS account for a week now, to see if my host family information is up yet. Loads of people on the Turkiye Summer facebook group seem to be hearing before me.
They're all "I'm in İstanbul with a daughter my age and a three-year-old!" "Ooh, I'm in İstanbul, too! Their son is 20!" Well, I seem to be the only one so far who's going to ..... (cue Ode To Joy).....

Ankara! My family consists of a mother, father, a daughter who's about twelve years old, a bird, some fish and an engineer. Well, okay, maybe the engineer is one of the parents, but you'd never know it from the ridiculous way the web site is laid out. Anyway, I'm really excited... last night I kept dreaming about it. I don't know if they speak much English, and kind of hope they don't. But that's the current news. I leave in less than a week now!! I have to go babysit (9-12am every morning for a week, it's been....need spending money for Turkiye) now, but I'll post soon with pictures.
Güle güle!

P.S. have you noticed the little vocabulary bar that's on the side of this page now? Do you think it's all too cluttered? I must admit I'm rather fond of the fish at the bottom...