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.