Sorry about the wait....

It’s been a while since I last blogged. I have a couple of reasons for that.

The first reason is that I simply haven’t felt like blogging very much. School is draining, and by the time I get home usually all I want to do is sleep or eat, and frequently both. I’m no longer the celebrity at school I once was. Random people still wave hello to me, but a wave is where it stops. I’m no longer invited to people’s homes at every turn, or constantly followed wherever I go.

In my mind, there are a lot of random people at school. There are thirty-one people in my class, and I probably know about six names. Turkish names are very hard for me to remember, so I see the same people every day and recognize their faces, but I never have names to associate with them. Asking for people’s names makes me feel really stupid, because usually it’s someone I see every single day, and frequently have conversations with. Occasionally people realize this and ask “do you know what my name is?” It’s really embarrassing, but at least they usually tell me what their name is. Today a girl who rides my bus asked me her name, and I muttered “oh, shit” before finding another friend (whose name I do remember), and getting him to tell me. Catastrophe averted.

Another reason is that I was actually gone for a week. AFS Turkey had a camp in Izmir, ostensibly to learn Turkish but actually just a great excuse to see all the other exchange students. There are 35 of us, and it was hard to leave them. The day we all left was incredibly hard – nearly everyone was in tears. I’m not sure whether that’s because we all genuinely liked each other, or just because 4 more unbroken months with our host families is really, really scary.

The camp in Izmir was jam-packed with AFS sessions. They’re the kind of activities that seem really corny and stupid when volunteers in the US try and do them with students before they depart. Now that we’re here, however, they make much more sense. It also helps that all of the volunteers at the camp were younger than 25, whereas in the US nearly all the AFS volunteers are 40-ish or older. Most of the volunteers, in fact, skipped a week of university to go to the camp.

The camp was interesting, yet also frustrating. We’d stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning talking about things that seem ridiculous when brought up over breakfast the next day.

“What did you talk about last night?”
“God.”
“Uh-huh… anything interesting?”
“Yeah, kinda… I don’t really remember what I said.”

I could write for days about the camp, but… this looks like a good segue into another reason I haven’t updated my blog as often. College apps are still going on, and they’re stressful (surprise, surprise). I’m writing this instead of working on college essays, which, I am now promising myself, I will work on tomorrow or Sunday. I’m not sure which, because on the weekends my host family usually decides to surprise me with plans. Things aren’t planed ahead in Turkey.

And finally, the reason I’ve been saving for last. Blogger (the website that hosts this blog) was banned in Turkey for a few days. I don’t really know why – all I was able to glean from the Turkish notice posted in place of the site was that there was/is a court injunction against ISPs displaying the webpage.

This isn’t that uncommon in Turkey. YouTube is also blocked, although everyone has ways of getting around it. There are also knock-off Turkish versions of YouTube. If you’re interested, you can always read articles in the English press about this, but keep in mind that you aren’t getting 100% of the facts. I read an article in the New York Times (online) about Turkey three weeks ago, and it seemed almost designed to make Turks angry. Three months ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice if I had read the article, but I can now appreciate how hard it is to write impartially about Turkey for a non-Turkish audience.

I was thinking about explaining Atatürk and what he means to the Turkish people, but I’m a little tired. If I decide I get tired of writing college essays tomorrow, maybe I’ll post about him. Anyways… sorry about the wait, and I hope everyone is enjoying myself, wherever they may be right now.

Dreams

I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. My best guess is to why this is happening is that I’m not able to share everything that’s on my mind – or, during school, basically anything that’s on my mind, other than “where is my German book.” There are thirty German books, and thirty-one students. Since I was the last to show up, since I don’t speak German, and, most importantly, since I don’t speak Turkish and thus can’t complain to anyone who can do anything about it, I don’t have a German book. This makes the lessons kind of hard, because language classes (German and English) rely exclusively on the book. Any other class I could get by without the book, but German, no. German is one of the few classes I’m actually interested in, but I can’t follow it (it’s all in German and Turkish). While I’m interested in learning German, the last thing I need is another language to confuse me.

I wrote that last paragraph last night, just before I went to bed. Sure enough, today at school, I got my German book. My elation didn’t last long, however. I quickly realized that – shockingly – the book didn’t confer upon me the instant ability to speak German. So I went back to doing what I do in every other class: reading, reviewing flash cards, and sleeping.

Anyways, I started this post writing about dreams. (I just put on “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac.) One of my most vivid dreams occurred while I was in Ünye. I was with all the kids I used to ski with, most of whom at CVA now. I had just finished a half-marathon. I remember really distinctly that my time was two hours and sixteen minutes, and I was extremely excited by this. I didn’t remember doing any specific training for the race, I just ran it and finished. I don’t know anything about running. 2:16 isn’t that great a time over 13 miles, I understand. An Ethiopian just set a new (full) marathon world record of 2:03 – thanks, Wikipedia News Feed for that tidbit. I was so proud and excited to have run it that I didn’t want to wake up. Then I did wake up, and I was depressed to realize that even in my dreams, my subconscious realized that the odds of me running a full marathon are basically nil, and settled for the half. It’s kind of like Sarah Palin saying women are going to break the “highest glass ceiling of all”: Vice President, of course.

I just ate Burger King for the 3rd time since I got here. I probably have gone to Burger King three times in the past three years back in the US.

Alright. I’m writing this to put off writing more college essays. I need to get back.

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.

Bayram

This past week was the Bayram holiday. Calling it “Bayram holiday”, though, is slightly redundant, as Bayram means “religious holiday”. To Arabs, the end of Ramadan is known as Eid al-Fitr. Here, Ramadan is called Ramazan, and the holiday marking the end is known as Şeker Bayramı. Şeker means sugar, and the entire festival is basically a bacchanalia of eating sweet things. The actual date of the holiday changes every year in accordance with the lunar calendar, so I was lucky to get an entire week off. Depending on what the religious officials in Ankara deduce through their telescopes, the government decides how many days the holiday lasts. What’s kind of amazing for me is that this decision-making process takes place only a few weeks before the holiday begins – imagine trying to plan Thanksgiving while not knowing when to make your travel reservations until two weeks before.

Traditionally, one travels and visits family for Bayram. My host family and I went to visit my host father’s family in Ünye, on the Black Sea coast. Ünye is a town of about 70,000 people (which, in my book, makes it a city, but not in Turkey). We stayed with Bulatcan’s aunt and uncle in a big, cold cement block. Like many of the houses in Ünye, it seemed half-finished. Bulatcan’s grandparents lived on the second floor, and Bulatcan’s aunt and uncle lived on the third. The first and forth were literally just bare concrete.

Turkey follows the same convention on floor numbers as France, so I live on the “first floor” even though I have to climb up a set of stairs. The floor you walk in on is “zero”, but for the sake of simplicity I just used the US way above. The process of mental metrification continues apace. Length and weight aren’t very difficult – I can estimate things in meters and convert to kilograms without breaking a sweat. Temperature, however, is still difficult, and I don’t even try to deal with gallons and liters, much less litres. In my opinion, here’s why: when you think about length or weight, even if you are given a measure in feet or pounds, you still have to think about what it truly means. If you are wondering if you can lift the suitcase and someone tells you it weights forty-one pounds, you still have to think what exactly does 41 pounds mean? With temperature, however, 78 degrees is a much more visceral and absolute measure, one that can immediately conjure the appropriate mental image.

But I’ve digressed slightly. The Black Sea region produces about 70% of the world’s hazelnuts. We went to see “my” village in Turkey, where the hazelnuts are grown. (I’ll try to get some pictures up.) Bulatcan’s great-grandfather still lives there. It was pretty cool to see four generations of Bulats sitting together. I found it very amusing to see Bulatcan’s grandfather, who is probably 70, smile and yell “baba!” (“dad!”) when he entered the room.

Bulatcan’s great-grandfather is probably over 90, but he doesn’t know exactly. When you look at old tombstones, it’s a bit confusing because the Ottoman Empire used the Islamic calendar and the Turkish Republic uses the Western Gregorian one. Thus, one can frequently see birth-dates in the thirteen-hundreds and death-dates in the nineteen-hundreds.

I’m going to try and upload some pictures. I still need to find something to use for a senior photo, although I’m sure that I’m ridiculously late by now. The next month is going to be a little rough as I have a bunch of college applications, so I probably won’t get to the blog as often as I should.

Pictures

I started to add a few pictures, but the upload speed here is very slow and my connection keeps getting reset.

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2003538&l=169c5&id=1218840221

You should be able to access the pictures even if you don't have a Facebook account, although this means that anyone who wants to access the pictures at FHS (anyone, anyone?) will have to wait until they get home. I might try and upload my pictures somewhere else, because Facebook is slower than death.

I'll write more tomorrow?

EDIT: Ta-da! I have a new image for the head of the page. It was taken on the road to Kemer (the next town along the coast) while a storm was brewing.