Bayram, cont.

I’m taking a break from college essays at the moment. It’s not exactly what I want to be thinking about right now (especially given how beautiful it is right now in Antalya), but I knew that this was a reality I was going to have to deal with. The fact that the American economy just took a gigantic nosedive makes the prospect of a $160,000 investment in my future that much more dicey. I’m not overly worried about the economy, but it’s nice to have something to talk about with people here. Everyone here is pretty concerned that the crisis is going to hit Turkey hard. Credit rates are already extremely high here in Turkey. The common wisdom here is that “when the US sneezes, the rest of the world will get the flu.”

The only good news on this front is that even as the US dollar slumps, so does the lira. In fact, the dollar has actually climbed slightly against the lira since I’ve arrived – wow! It doesn’t really matter because I almost never withdraw money, because I never actually spend money. Like Bulatcan, I get a little allowance for lunch and that’s enough to get me through the week.

I forgot to mention that one of the Bayram traditions is giving money to children. While I’m a little too old for this (I think the age cut-off is about the same as Halloween in America), I still managed to shake down my host father for some money. Yay! The way to do this is by kissing the hand of an elder and pressing it to your forehead. It’s a gesture of respect that, in Turkey, also confers upon the kisser the right to ask the kissed for money.

I recently read the book Snow by Orhan Pamuk (in translation, of course). Pamuk is probably Turkey’s best known modern author, and when I was flying to Ünye I saw plenty of people with copies of his latest book, The Museum of Innocence (I don’t believe an English translation has been released yet). Pamuk, however, has gotten in to trouble in the past for some of his political comments. I believe he holds a professorship at Columbia.

Anyways, Snow was incredible. I highly urge anyone and everyone with even a modicum of interest in Turkey to read it. One line really stuck out at me. The main character is asked his opinion about the city of Kars, where the book takes place. “Very beautiful, very poor, and very sad,” is how Ka, the main character, describes it. I then spent the next four days trying to find some place that reminded me of that description, to no avail. There were beautiful places and there were poor places, but they usually didn’t overlap. And there weren’t very many sad places at all. Still, though, the book was one of the best I can remember reading recently.