Bayraming in Eşme

At the end of Ramazan, there's a four-day holiday that we all had off of school. Some of my friends went hiking, some went to Istanbul, and some of us went with our host families to see how they celebrate the holidays. I'm in the latter group, and I went to Eşme, a small town outside of the larger town of Uşak, which is about two hours from İzmir. The town looked to be about the size of Davidson, NC, but the population geography is so different that I'm guessing blindly. We're staying with my host grandmother, who is very sweet but also has a dramatic voice that's a lot like my host mother's.

Host mother, grandmother.

My host family's house is pretty suburban. We share walls with neighbors but have a large garden area behind the house, where everything from cucumbers to plums to orchids are growing. The house itself is up some steps from the garden, but on level with the garden there are several storage sheds and a room that's used for cooking with a wood fire. When I woke up Thursday morning (after having crashed almost immediately upon arrival Wednesday night), I found my host mother and grandmother in that room, cooking lokma. The wood fire also was used to roast eggplant and onions for one of our evening meals, which was delicious.

Plums growing in the garden.

On Friday, a number of different groups of people visited my host grandmother's house. I learned the Turkish equivalent of the South-Asian touching an elder's feet to ask for a blessing. Here people kiss the back of an older relative's hand and then press the back of that hand to their forehead. Like the South Asian equivalent there was some ambiguity on who was enough of an elder or a close enough relative. Most of the visitors, for example, didn't seem to expect it.

The inside of a cafe in town, the Saklı Bahçe (hidden garden).

I also got to explore the town a bit, both on my own and with my host relatives. Thursday night my host sister and host uncle took us to go buy the board game Okay, which is basically gin rummy on a Rummikub board, and in the process we ended up seeing a park under construction and a number of çay places. Friday, I borrowed a bike from my host family, and got to bike around and see the area better. It's mostly suburban, but there are also larger fields a little way out from the town center. I made a friend who biked with my for a bit, but then he had to run home to help his mother with something and was busy the next few days, so we didn't actually get to hang out.

Dinner with the fam.

My host grandmother has four daughters, one of whom couldn't make it and another who I met here. The latter has a son, who is around my age and named Baki, who lives in İzmir. On Friday we went out and about for a bit, trying to find a place to play billiards (we ended up not finding one, unfortunately), and I was able to see that despite the size of the town there were quite a few game cafes. I wonder about the economic reasons for so many of those existing, but it might just be as simple as they're cheap and distracting. I could tell that both my host sister and host cousin, as well as my biking friend, felt the town itself was a small place, after being used to larger cities like Bursa, Istanbul, and İzmir. I sort of felt the same way, but it was nice to have the variety. We did manage to see more or less all there was to see, though.

Baki, my host uncle Gökhan, and me.

Each evening, after eating the evening meal (which interestingly moved later after there was no more need for Iftar), my host family and I hung out in the garden, drinking çay, eating sunflower seeds, and playing Okay. I was not really able to follow the conversation when people weren't talking directly to me. I did, however, win two rounds of Okay in a row.

On Friday, I got the chance to pick plums with my host mom for the neighbor across the street. One cool thing about Eşme is that there are gardens and fruit trees everywhere, so it's pretty common for neighbors to help out older neighbors when they can. On Saturday, when the over-25s got back from doing mysterious work in the family's old home village (out in the köy), we also got to enjoy a post-Bayram tradition of chopping up wood and putting it in storage for use when cooking. I picked up a lot of chopped logs and put them into wheelbarrows. All the yard work felt very seasonal and traditional, trying to get a good start on the harvest time or the new year or whatever was starting.

Chopping firewood. Clockwise from left: Host mom, host aunt, host dad, host sister.

Of course, while I did help out with that sort of work, I was also able to relax quite a bit while I was here. I averaged ten hours of sleep per day and read (not just fanfiction either! I downloaded Actual Books before I left Bursa, including a Stephen Hawking book). I was a little alarmed upon arrival to discover that there was no WiFi available (which, in hindsight, should not be surprising), but luckily I was able to find a cafe in town called Saklı Bahçe, where I was able to check email, and my host uncle let me have some WiFi siphoned off his Android.

Shore, river, mountain

This past weekend had a lot more natural beauty than I expected. My past experience with Turkey had been primarily Istanbul, so it was awesome to be able to see a lot more of the natural beauty of the country rather than the city.

Sunset over the Black Sea in Şile, Istanbul district.

This weekend, the program group took a bus to Şile, which is a town on the black sea coast that is part of the Istanbul metropolitan area. I didn't get to take a lot of pictures of Şile, other than one truly incredible sunset over the Black Sea, but it was a fun weekend. I got to climb some rocks, discover nifty coves (well, get shown them by Tommy), play frisbee in the sea (with our friend Deniz catching more shots than we did), visit a lighthouse, try some rakı (which is actually good when mixed with a reasonable amount of water) and see a small-town Ramazan market. We even tried to talk in Turkish most of the time, though it was just us American students. There was a bit of a scare with bedbugs in the hotel, but otherwise it was a blast.

Our friends waving as we depart on a boat.

The day after we arrived, on the way back from Şile, we stopped for a riverboat tour. The river was incredibly green, but since my last experience on a riverboat was in Varanasi on the Ganga, the green seemed a lot more life-affirming than scummy. The river runs right out next to the sea, but apparently runs alongside the coast for a while. When there's a lot of rain and the river floods, it mixes with the Black Sea's water, but most of the time it's freshwater next to a beach. We saw turtles sunning themselves, lovely touristy riverside restaurants where some of us ate gözleme (we had had a big lunch before we left Şile, so I stuck with çay), and then we headed back to Bursa.

Turtles are called kaplumbağa,

On the way there and back our bus took us along mountain roads with incredible green vistas and picturesque small towns with clusters of red-roofed houses gathered around a central cami. (Take standard eastern European town, find/replace religion.) I don't have a lot of good pictures through the bus window, unfortunately.

A small snapshot of the landscape we crossed.

Whenever I don't spend time in altitude-varying places, it can be easy to forget how depth feels. The hills of western Anatolia might be visually beautiful in abstract, but when you're on a bus too big for the road riding along close to the edge of a many-meter drop, the size of the landscape leaves a deeper impression.

Şükrü and Ayberk on the teleferik. Neither are at all fazed by the huge drop or the beautiful vistas.

I had that experience twice this weekend, in fact. On Sunday, the day after we returned from Şile, I went to Uludağ (the giant mountain right outside Bursa) with my language partner Şükrü, my friend Tucker, and his language partner Ayberk (who is besties with Şükrü). To get to the top of the mountain, one takes a cable car (called a teleferik in Turkish) from a base in Bursa up 1500 meters (over 4.5 kilometers, which is a 20 degree average incline) to a landing on top of the mountain.

That big brown blob in the background? That's Bursa. This should give you an idea of the scale of the teleferik.

Which is to say, we were in a mostly glass box dangling a dozen meters above the ground for a good twenty minutes or so. At first, we were able to watch Bursa disappear behind rising forests and rocks, and then we were hovering over a massive trackless forest for a while. Our height above the ground varied somewhat, from more or less even with the treetops to the sort of distance where you just have to trust the cable to hold. According to Tucker, my eyes got really big when the teleferik swung out over one particular instance when a forested valley dropped down beneath us.

It's pretty chilly up on the mountain. More like Seattle in the late fall than a Mediterranean summer.

When we arrived at the top of the mountain, the first thing that we noticed was the weather shift. In Bursa it had been a hot sunny day in the low 30s, but a kilometer and a half up the temperature dropped ten degrees and the humidity approached dew point. When we got moving and hiking it was perfect weather, though.

Friends don't let friends fall into streams. Ayberk and Tucker help Şükrü across river rocks.

Several of our friends were hiking ahead of us, and the four of us spent most of our time following them, even though that meant hiking along a non-path that was where the forest had been cleared for a new teleferik line. We ended up calling Katie, who was in the group ahead of us, half a dozen times to confirm we were going the right direction. Once we even had to follow some electric cables to find our way forward, which was an adventure. We never did meet up the other group, though we did meet Katie as she was returning down the same path, and when we got to the top of the mountain (which was about 3 kilometers away as the crow flies but mostly uphill) we tried to autostop (hitchhike) our way back to the teleferik. We ended up on a dolmuş instead, but that was close enough.

There was a portion where there was no path, but Lauren told us to follow the wires and eventually we found it again!

Overall, this weekend was jampacked with sightseeing excitement. This next week hopefully will be a bit more calm, since I'm planning to stay in Bursa this weekend. I kind of want to return to some of the places I visited during the day over these past couple of weeks, like the Ulu Camii or the Kültürpark. Hadi bakalım!

Note: I was also in Istanbul last week with people from my program. Istanbul is beautiful as always, and we did get to go to pride briefly, though we left before the police violence started. I don't particularly want to talk about it, though.

Small Meditations on Nilüfer and Language Learning

I have arrived in Bursa, and am at home with my host family after our third day of classes. We live in a suburban area of the Bursa district, a place called Dimirci in the area of Nilüfer. Every day, I have breakfast at seven and drive to school with my neighbors, who also are hosting a student from our program (N'aber, George!). I'll post more about the downtown area of Bursa later, I'm sure, but for now I want to talk to you about Dimirci and Nilüfer.

These güzel çiçekler greet us on the way to the car each morning.

Basically, we're in hardcore suburbia. The flats were all built in the past couple of decades, and throughout the area new buildings are being built constantly. The people are mostly middle class young families, many of whom commute into the city. When I ride the bus home through Dimirci, there are endlessly repeating color schemes and architecture styles dotted with weed-filled lots that are soon to be built upon.

New apartment buildings. (They're much nicer inside, in my opinion.)

There are convenient stores built on the first floor of many apartment buildings, and individual flats feature multiple balconies (which serve as spaces for interfamilial interaction), beautiful views, and spacious interiors. Other parts of Nilüfer have gated communities and bike paths, hipster coffee shops, and endless daycare options.

Blue skies, less noise, and distant views. It's the great promise of suburban life!

It's a beautiful place, and other than being pretty far from my classes, I'm glad I'm able to live here.

The minaret of our friendly neighborhood cami.

We've also had most of a week of classes so far, and I am learning something about the nature of the process of gaining Turkish skills. I am learning that the language learning process is in large part a matter of mediating my own mental state. When listening to people speak, if I am at all distracted I lose the entire meaning. I often have to ask people to repeat even though when they repeat exactly I can understand. Listening requires practiced, focused concentration. This also explains why I am often far more exhausted after talking to people in Turkish – the mental energy required is just so much greater than communicating in English.

When I'm speaking, too, it becomes much harder to think of words and phrase what I want to say if I get at all frustrated. Of course, if I do, it can be self-reinforcing – I'm frustrated so I can't think how to phrase what I know that I know how to say, and then the inability to communicate makes me more frustrated. That is compounded by having to explain what I'm trying to say in Turkish to someone who doesn't speak English well (like our teachers and Turkish language partners). The good news is that by recognizing this fact, I can also recognize that I already have relevant skills. I can take a step back, take a few breaths, let other people talk, and then try again.

I also can recognize that being far more frustrated and exhausted by ordinary mishaps (not having internet access, losing track of friend on the way to lunch, accidentally deleting the text I was writing on the flip phones) is in part a result of having less mental energy. I can acknowledge that the task I have set out to achieve – improving my ability to understand and speak in Turkish – is a difficult one. I can have compassion with myself when I feel I am less zen about everyday life here than in India, which by most measures was a considerably more difficult situation.

Türkiye, part II

Merhaba arkadaşlarım!

I'm going back to Turkey this summer for more language training, just after finishing my undergraduate life forever (shout-out to my fellow NU 2015 grads!). It's a bit strange because I've ended up missing commencement for orientation, but I think it'll be worth it. It's the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program to Bursa, which is run by the US Department of State, so the obvious disclaimer is that these are my personal views and experiences and don't reflect the United States government. (PS – Vote for Bernie Sanders and for the best local city council member, state representatives, and federal legislators.)

Me and Ashanti, sight-seeing. There is a white building that some people live in behind us.

For the first leg of my trip, we were flown to the exotic capital of the United States, Washington DC. Here we saw all sorts of strange sights, such as brunches and dual-throated guitars painted with the stars and stripes. Apparently in this strange land, it's actually summer in June – the weather was hot and humid, just like home.

In all seriousness though, DC was pretty cool. I met a couple people from my program on the plane (and Fabian, who is in a different CLS program that will be in Vladimir, Russia). We took the DC metro to our hotel (which is in central DC), where we got to meet a bunch of other people from our program and from another three programs, which were going to Vladimir, Beijing, and Gwanjiu, South Korea. The first night we didn't do much other than get dinner at an American place (which luckily had vegetarian soup and green beans), but the second day we had orientation. The biggest highlight was that there was an alumna from the Turkish program who is also a Northwestern alum! She was part of the career panel, as she had recently gotten her PhD from George Washington, and I was able to ask questions about my interests. The twenty of us going to Bursa also got to meet each other, and it seems like a solid group. We have a pretty strong representation of recent graduates and graduate students of various types, studying everything from neurobiology to ethnomusicology to the history of Yugoslavia. There's going to be no shortage of cool perspectives on this trip, I'm sure.

The Mansion on O Street

On Friday after orientation, I met up with my high school friend Ashanti, who goes to Howard University and is interning this summer at the Mansion on O Street. It's this really cool house that's been repurposed as an art space, with tons of donated kitsch and rarities and like seventy secret doorways that are hidden in mirrors and walls. Ashanti is working with the mansion's music department to do things like organize jam sessions and sort the record collection. He showed me around, and there were a lot of really cool historic rooms. Apparently the place is very historic, and all sorts of heads of state and famous people have spent time here, from Rosa Parks to the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish.

This room is called the Amnesia room. We visited it first - or was it last?

This stuff is in the Teddy Roosevelt room.

We took a bunch of pictures because it was really cool.

Ashanti in the Log Cabin Room.

This patriotic instrument was probably played by a famous person.

After that, we both headed back to meet up with other people in my program, and we had a blast until early in the morning. We figured that it'd be easier to sleep on the flight if we weren't too well-rested. It didn't work for me, but it worked for a couple other people at least. Now I'm in Frankfurt using the free WiFi (US airports take note!). We were on the same plane as the Russian program, but we split off now. In about 10 hours or so, we're going to be in Bursa!