Odds and Ends

This picture has my survival kit for Turkey. This is basically all I will need to live here indefinitely. It has a small hot water heater replete with spoon, my new coffee cup for Nescafe and soup, my tea thermos on a homemade coaster, my travel spoon/fork/chopsticks from Mitsuwa, and Bratz wipes for cleanliness. I guess I didn't include my Swiss Army knife in the photo, but it is also an important travel dealie. (You can imagine it in the blank space at the bottom of the photo.) I am very, very glad I have the travel cutlery and tea thermos. They are two of the most useful things in the universe. I highly recommend everyone travel with them.

Speaking of really important things, here is the kitchen. Please note that on the right there is an additional 2L hot water heater which I bought yesterday. I take hot water very seriously. There is also a giant bag of tea and a box of sugar cubes on the table which you can't really see, but they go hand in hand with my survival kit.


Here is a photo illustrating that my sheets match my computer. They also match my coffee cup and plate.


And here is my whole bedroom, which has two beds. The rules of the building include "No visitors overnight except your mother and siblings", but after we put up quite a fight they said Fulbrighters could use the extra bed for one or two nights if the need arose. Then the landlord looked at us very angrily, suggesting we should not actually take advantage of this special permission. We shall see.


The building also has roughly 1,000,000 (bir milyon) security cameras, and at night a little old woman watches them like a soap opera ("Life's Hallways" would probably be my title for it). We have to sacrifice a bit of privacy to have a beautiful apartment, I suppose.

Uşak, A History

Uşak University is being built from the ground up, literally. The building which houses the foreign language office had no railings on some staircases on Monday, and on Tuesday a man wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit was sawing metal tubes to make the railings with no protective equipment whatsoever, sending sparks flying across the hallway towards unperturbed students and teachers. The chemistry labs have sinks and gas feeds laying on the ground in boxes waiting to be installed. One of the two access roads from Izmir Road to the campus is still gravel, and is almost unnavigable. It's incredible. The guest house, however, where we stayed for the first five nights, is complete, not to mention utterly beautiful inside. My pictures don't do it justice so you'll have to take my word on that.

Campus construction.


Uşak as a town is almost equal parts rubble and new construction (inşaat), with the currently used and maintained buildings of course in the majority. According to our department head, 30 years ago (otuz yıl önce), Uşak was a "village" of about 30,000, but there has been rapid development in the past 20 years. I have no concept of how old the buildings are or what alleyways are interesting. As it is, I can just manage to find my way back to my apartment from the grocery stores on Izmir street and/or "Compulsory Street" (Ismet Pasha Caddesi).

The lands around Uşak, in addition to being home to packs of wild dogs, are dry rolling hills. Today on the bus ride to campus we saw a herd of sheep on the side of one of the hills. It is very scenic (as one of the men who met us on Saturday said, "If you like The Nature, you will like living Uşak"), but I really miss being anchored (pun intended) by some kind of large body of water.

The Four T's (Things in Turkey Take Time)

Many things have happened in the past few days since I was on a cross-country bus using free Wifis. Many things...and nothing. I'm still not teaching for confusing reasons, and our housing situation is unclear at best. These hiccups aside, here's what's been happening this week.

My fellow American and I arrived in Uşak at 4PM on Saturday (Cumartesi). Three people from the university were there to greet us, two spoke excellent English, and all were exceedingly kind and helpful. We moved our heaps of belongings into the university guest house and then went to the main street of Uşak, known sarcastically by the students as "Compulsory Street", because if you want to do anything remotely cool you will probably end up on that street. After eating delicious pide and going to a cafe with our new coworker R, we then went to the local Migross-anchored mall (it is tiny and adorable) and met our head of department for ice cream. At this point, being too fat and/or sassy to move much, we went back to the guest house...for sleep.

The next morning (or early afternoon) we took the dolmuş into town and met R at her apartment. We then proceeded to the grocery store for fixin's to made fırında patates --chicken and potatoes oven roasted with tomatoes and onions. We also made tarhana soup (apparently really popular and famous in Uşak) and hazelnut chocolate instant pudding. After this small feast, we went bowling at the aforementioned mall. There are six lanes. This is a six-lane-bowling-alley-in-the-tiny-mall kind of town.

On Monday (Pazartesi) we went to the police station with our other coworker F, and the driver for the Rektör (head of university). The driver knows everyone in town and how to navigate anything in a Fiat SUV. I wish I could keep him around all the time. In any case, two cups of tea into our residence permit application, the police officer abruptly stops and says (in Turkish of course), "There is another American from Chicago here!" He then proceeds to call her from the number in the registry, instead gets her Turkish husband, and moments later said Turkish husband is sitting in the office with us enjoying a cup of tea. He puts his wife on and she informs us she is actually from Nevada, she met her husband on the internet, and she has been living in Turkey for some time,would we like to go on a picnic sometime. Her husband then takes his phone back contentedly and shares a cigarette break with the police officer. This is how Turkey's bureaucracy stays alive.

On Tuesday (Salı), we went to the police office again to get our completed permits. They are like tiny passports just for foreigners in Turkey. We tried to open a bank account but we need tax ID numbers from Ankara, which will take time. We returned to campus with the hope of meeting the Rektör himself and maybe getting our teaching schedules, neither of which happened. However, our head of department decided to make up for it by taking us on a magical mystery tour with our coworker, R. (I don't know if I can call her a "coworker" if we have yet to do any work and do not know if we will ever work due to bureaucratic concerns, but still.) We got in our department head's car and he started off towards Izmir, begging the obvious question, "Uh...are we going to Izmir?" (Izmir'e gidiyoruz, hocam?) He said,"Oh, maybe not tonight," thereby keeping the mystery alive through awkward use of English. Eventually we ended up at a very surprising place-a Turkish truck stop.

At the truck stop/rest stop, we were treated to some of the most delicious homemade pide, grilled chicken, and grilled (whole) fish I have had in a long time on shabby tablecloths and with bent tableware. Our head of department said "No need to be polite here. I come here to rest, they know me, they care for me." Then we had three cups of tea and talked about movies and the difference between "diseased" and "deceased", and also about how American accents are the worst (good thing they're paying us to teach people to talk real 'merican!) Then we drove back to Uşak towne and went to a cafe to play backgammon (super popular in cafes here). Then, more sleep.

On Wednesday (çarşamba), we finally met the Rektör and had a trilingual conversation with him. We mostly spoke French, but sometimes English and Turkish would slip in on all our parts. Basically it was the best conversation I've ever had (maybe not content-wise, but, you know, details). Our housing problem was somewhat solved as a result of this meeting, but I am still wary of unpacking lest our situation change again. We shall see.

More details on all of this forthcoming. My internet situation is shaky at times so I haven't been blogging much. I will post pics of Uşak U as well. Until then!

A well-oiled machine

I am writing this post on a Pamukkale bus line. This cross-country bus...has free internet access. This is a bus in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between Ankara and Uşak...and I am on the internet.

Pamukkale is one of the more reputable Turkish bus lines. They make some attempt to regulate how the drivers drive (such things as 'staying in lanes' and 'obeying speed limits'), but of course all other drivers still pose a major threat. Turkish buses are many in number and variable in quality, but I am really impressed with what I've seen of them today. The drivers get personally fined if they do not leave the station on time, so at 10:30AM (my bus left at 11), the station abruptly emptied of buses, and five minutes later new ones pulled in. It's amazing.

As I was leaving, our main Fulbright liaison asked if I was excited. I said yes, and she said, "I know, it is a new life!" And now I'm on a bus in Turkey, using the internet for now, but about to start re-reading The New Life. How ridiculous is this?

MacGyver would be proud

While the overall intent of this blog is to provide some informative observations on Turkish culture and a way for people at home to keep track of me, I must take a brief moment for self-congratulation. (It's actually couched in a story about how things in Turkey are not always perfect, so I guess it is still blog-worthy without my disclaimer.)

Last night when I returned to my room at about 10PM, none of the lights or electrical outlets were functioning. Since it was late and I was lazy, I decided that, rather than ask the front desk or somesuch for help, I would play it by ear. Now, the bathroom is a separate room into which no light from the outside world penetrates when the door is closed. How could I bathe in abject darkness? Simple: I took Lil' Brudda into the bathroom (normally a terrible idea, but you know what they say about desperate times), turned his screen up to its full brightness, opened a blank word processing document so the screen would be white, and voila! -a bathroom with enough light to bathe by.

Hopefully I can bring this kind of resourcefulness into the classroom when the time comes...and that time could be as early as Monday. I have my bus ticket to Uşak in my purse already. Heyecanlıyım!

Hittites Rule! Lydians...well, they're OK too.

Come with me, won't you?

...to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara!

Here is the artifact that Ankara adopted as its seal. There is a much larger (and younger) version on Ataturk Boulevard.


I just liked this little guy:


The open-mouthed one on the upper right is my favorite in this pic:


And, finally, a fertility goddess, flanked by two tiny musicians and holding...a pomegranate! It was hard to photograph it with no flash but it was too beautiful to not get a picture.


The museum also boasted many amazing large-scale reliefs and carvings, some cuneiform tablets still in their clay envelopes, and a model Catalhuyuk dwelling. For more information on Anatolian Civilizations, consult your local library, or better yet just visit Turkey!

Soaking it up

Recently I had the privilege of going to a hamam, or Turkish bath, with some of my fellow Fulbrighters. There is a cafe in the Bachelievler neighborhood (where the hotel is) called Chadır Cafe, and some intrepid members of our band managed to befriend the owner through bumbling, pantomime, and trading a Turkish/English dictionary back and forth. After spending hours there and adding some people to the group including yours truly, we had formed a bond that led to him invite us back to the cafe to watch the big futbol game (Beşiktaş v. Fenerbache) that evening. We did, and after the game he had tea with lemon with us and chatted about America, English, and a tiny bit of politics. We somehow mentioned that we wanted to go to the hamam, and his eyes lit up and, knowing the best one of course, he offered to take us the next day at 6:30PM, after our classes.

So six thirty arrived and 9 of us (4 guys, 5 girls) headed over to the cafe. The owner decided to drive the ladies and make the guys follow us in a cab. On the way, we were treated to Turkish driving the likes of which I have yet to see (I love the way they drive here...), and eventually started spiraling down in a parking garage. One girl has studied Turkish extensively, so she functioned as our translator and ambassador, and I was able to understand bits of the conversation myself. This is relevant because as we entered the parking garage, he started to "joke" that he was kidnapping us, that we couldn't get cell phone reception underground, and have we ever seen movies like this? I eeked out a half-joking Turkish phrase, "My father doesn't have any money!" Luckily, it soon appeared, three stories underground- a real Turkish hamam.

After he fetched the boys from the surface world we each entered our respective gender's half of the bath. After gesticulating and translating, we were led to small changing rooms. For women, typically wearing your underwear (just bottoms) is de rigueur in hamams, although some women wear swimsuit bottoms- it's your preference (or whatever you have). After undressing, you wrap yourself in a thin towel and head to a large bath room with many spigots and basins. You douse yourself with water in this steamy, incredibly hot main room and more often than not socialize with the other women present (if you speak their language, of course). You may also find a future mother-in-law in this way, but that is less common these days.

After this, you move into a sauna to really open your pores. Once you cannot take the heat of the sauna any longer, you are led to a large marble slab and the best parts begin. A woman uses a kese to scrub you to the utmost, sloughing off more dead skin and grime than you thought your body could ever possibly contain. After your whole body is rigorously scrubbed, you rinse. At this point one can choose to have a massage or other services, or to to lather and leave. For us, we opted to have both a Turkish coffee massage AND a bubble massage, what with Fulbright moneys burning holes in all our pockets.

Coffee massage. Just think about this. I am in a country where people spend part of their lives more or less BATHING in coffee. The masseuse rubs a mixture of seltzer water and coffee grounds into your freshly exfoliated skin, including on your face and neck. If you know me, you also know that this is quite possibly my favorite experience ever. I think that this massage alone made me smarter, faster, better at sports, cured me of all known diseases, and cleansed my heart of all prejudices and anger. I only exaggerate slightly.

This is followed by the soapy massage which included some stretching the legs and wrist and arms, and a shampooing that made me think I was drowning, and then a rinse and ta-da, I had been to a hamam. At some point the woman doing all this to me introduced herself, and when I responded "I'm Emily, nice to meet you" in Turkish, she said "Ooooo!" and gave me a soapy kiss on both cheeks, as is customary between Turkish friends (minus the soap). The whole thing feels great, and your skin is the softest it could conceivably be afterward.

After all this pampering, we paid the ludicrously low price of 25 TL (30 with tip). The women masseuses donned their headscarves and trench coats, becoming very agitated that our wet hair would make us catch cold in the 80F Ankara evening. We left the hamam glowing and got back into the car that had brought us, the gentlemen having finished with their hamam experience as well. We headed back to the cafe, talked about American pop music a little, had another meal there and more tea, and after a few games of backgammon we eventually came back to the hotel with a good story and good feelings.

The Founder of Modern Turkey

Are you looking at a picture of Atatürk right now? Have you seen a portrait of Atatürk in the last three to five minutes? Can you think of more than three places you could go to right now to be in sight of Atatürk's likeness?



If you answered "no" to any of those questions, then you are not in Turkey. For fun last night I counted as many Turkish flags as I could see from my balcony. The answer: around twenty three. This is not merely because Ankara is the governmental center of Turkey's secular republic, this is just how it is here. Nationalism is kind of a big deal.

Solid Foundations

Breakfast in Turkey (at least, at the öğretmenevi) consists of olives, lunch meats, cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, buns with butter, jam, and/or honey, cornflakes and milk, cake, and drinks. One can choose from juice, the delicious Turkish tea and instant (Nescafe) coffee. Real coffee (Türk kahvesi) is not served until 10 or 11, after you have breakfast as a solid foundation. This is why breakfast is known as kavhaltı, or, “under coffee”.

By the way, öğretmenevi means "teacher-house". These places used to be available and free only to teachers but the government decided they should be opened as hotels to the public. However, teachers get a sizable discount (I'm not sure how much, but apparently the rates are "quite reasonable"), and there are "teacher-houses" all over Turkey.

This week so far has been a crash course in Turkish culture, arts, beliefs, politics, diplomatic relations, language, and education system, with some Turkey/Fulbright-specific TOEFL thrown in. Needless to say, it has been hectic. Happily I can report that there is almost a universal optimism towards Turkey. The attitude I've perceived from our illustrious speakers is either a tacit or explicit one of, "Yes, there are problems, but we'll work through them! It will work out OK." Turkey, we are told, is a very relaxed culture. We'll see if that kind of attitude plays out throughout the year.

One of the most important people who came to speak to us thus far was the President Dr. Yusuf Ziya Özcan of YÖK, the Turkish Higher Education Council, the group that basically holds the beating heart of the Turkish educational system in its hands. To give one a sense of this man’s importance: he was followed in to and out of the room by no less than four TV news crews. It turns out he was bitten by the foreign language bug in his youth, and he was quite disappointed in what he called a personal and institutional failing to impart this to Turkish students. He expressed a really sincere excitement at having us Fulbrighters in his midst, though, to help remedy the "problem", and his enthusiasm was quite encouraging to us would-be English teachers. Important personal side note: he got his graduate degrees from U of C.

Another speaker of note was Prof. Talat Halman, a famous Turkish art and culture historian, the first Minister of Culture in Turkey (this man is currently 79), and whom I termed "The David Attenborough of Turkish Art". He was perhaps the most eloquent and entertaining interlocutor I've ever heard and seen, not unlike an even more engaging version of U of C's Prof. Robert "Bob" Richards with a keen Ottoman, rather than Greek, sensibility (i.e. Rumi rather than Sappho). Please, read about this prolific writer, translator, and lecturer on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal%C3%A2t_Sait_Halman
...and that will give you the barest hint of how amazing it was to hear him read us Turkish poetry and teach us about love.

In my limited down-time, I have played Turkish scrabble, gone to a Turkish mall and gotten a Turkish cell phone, had my first Turkish coffee (in Turkey) and explored as much of Ankara as possible. I took the Ankaray and the Metro here today but my fellow wanderer and I did not have the courage to step inside a bus, let alone a dolmuş.

I wish I could distill the lessons learned about Turkey from this hectic week into a blog post, but I cannot. I certainly appreciate that the prestige and meticulous planning of the Fulbright program have afforded me this brief but extremely informative theoretical framework from which to look at Turkey--makes one feel much less like a stupid American. Then again, I’ve been in the Başkent Öğretmenevi bubble this whole time, mostly speaking English and only getting professional and extremely educated opinions on things from experts. Obviously what I’ve heard is not the whole story, but it is a very, very good one.

Proof I'm Alive AND in Turkey

The place where I'm staying. More on it later. You can see the Turkish flag in there somewhere.


The AWESOME illuminated banister posts in the lobby.


Some weirdo in Turkey.

No! Really! Thanks!

So far, Turkey is great. It is beautiful and has actual hills and other changes in land elevation, unlike certain states I could name. On the extremely short (40 minute) flight from Istanbul to Ankara, they served us a full meal (!), including the delicious yogurt I can't wait to eat all the time. Also on that short flight I had my first Turkish tea in Turkey (well, technically, several thousand feet above Turkey). The sizable group on that Istanbul-Ankara flight arrived at the hotel utterly exhausted, and we headed to dinner in search of water more than anything else, when lo and behold the extremely attentive staff started trying to serve us a five course meal. After some hesitant bites of the first two courses, muttering "tamam" ("okay"), and general awkwardness, they discerned our meaning and skipped the main course...but they brought dessert out anyways.

But enough about food (ha ha JK! but I have the whole nine months for that). Let's go back in time for a minute to when I was still at the Ankara airport. I had long since decided my bags were too annoying to drag aboard a shuttle bus, so I took a cab with another Fulbrighter. Since we all have pretty ludicrous amounts of baggage, at first the other girl and I thought we wouldn't be able to fit in one cab. Suddenly a small taxi-directing man, cigarette in mouth, appeared at our side, spoke to our driver, and from somewhere a bungee cord was produced, and before we knew it all of our luggage was haphazardly secured bulging every which way out of the trunk and generally ignoring the laws of physics. Turkish driving entails a lot of ad libbing where the laws are concerned, for as our cab driver deftly demonstrated, the painted lane lines are there as guidelines only, and car horns are useful for either alerting other drivers' to your presence in the in-between-lane-zones or to tell a pedestrian they'd better decide RIGHT NOW if they want to run for it or hop back on the median, because this car is not slowing.

Now fast forward to tomorrow, when what basically amounts to an all expense paid vacation in a hotel in Ankara begins, featuring free WiFi in the lobby (YES!), and of course lots of meetings and lectures disseminating information about Turkey and how to live here without causing too much trouble, other than occasionally confusing attentive waiters and the unavoidable suchlike.

Zonsopgang in Amsterdam

I had almost forgotten how delightful the language of the Netherlands is. It's like a more adorable version of English, with more shushing and tsking strewn throughout. Thirteen sounds akin to "dirtteen", making it an unclean teen if I ever heard of one. I have never ever forgotten how delicious stroopwafels are, however, and had the sublime privilege of buying one from a vending machine here in Schipol Airport with Euro coinage I found in my room from way back when I went to Paris, in aught-six. I hope I always have enough foreign currency laying around in the dark corners of my dwelling spaces to buy myself coffee and country-specific pastries in situations like this. Speaking of coffee, hilariously enough, the Starbucks right outside my gate had a sign telling thirsty and sleep-deprived travelers, "Due to a technical difficulty, we regretfully cannot serve any beverages that are made with hot water." Oh-ho, how awkward!

Let me also take a moment while I have nothing better to do to relate my in-flight experience. Despite mad preparations for combating in-flight boredom wherein I got a bunch of subtitled Japanese movies (since reading the subtitles is much easier than listening over ambient airplane noise) and a monstrously large battery for my laptop, I actually never opened my computer (henceforth known by his true name, Lil' Brudda). Turns out the fine folks of KLM provide each of us back-of-the-plane cheapskates with our very own on-screen entertainment center! Each had a remote on a cord that, when turned sideways, became a control for various video games that one can opt to play rather than enjoying the many movies or TV shows from the lengthy onboard film library. This system even offered basic Berlitz language lessons complete with lame and ridiculous review games, which was totally the most awesome part of an already impressive piece of technology. I brushed up on my Turkish words for months, numbers, and some short sentences, and then I tried my hand at Russian for kicks. So, thanks for that, Dutch airline!