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.