The roller coaster that is my life

I think within the exchange student community, comparing one’s life to a roller-coaster is perhaps the oldest cliché in the book – like a Valentine’s Day poem that is some variation on the theme “rose”.

Some people like roller-coasters. I, however, am not one of them. When I went with my family to Disney Land (or World, whichever one is in Florida), we had the special pass-tickets that let you ride Space Mountain first thing in the morning, before the regular riff-raff get their turn. I rode it once, and managed to survive. Because there was still no line, I felt obliged to ride it again – I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ride Space Mountain twice in five minutes! Of course, the second time around I threw up.

Right now I also sometimes feel like I need to vomit from the whiplash between the highs and the lows of my life. Our fifteen-day term holiday ended this Monday. My two-week break was a pleasant, if extremely boring, respite from the (also boring) school day. I hung out with the other AFSers in Antalya and a few others who came with their families here on holiday. It was… pleasant, I guess. It filled the time. I wish that from time to time a male student would come, though. There are three other girls in Antalya, and so far the only students who have come to Antalya have also been girls. Now, I have nothing against the female kind, but the fact that all the girls have 7:00 curfews makes everyone’s life pretty boring, especially given that I was in the habit of sleeping until noon.

And there’s also the fact that I always feel guilty hanging out with the other foreigners. Nothing against them, but I’d much rather be spending my time with Turkish people. Unfortunately, spending time with young Turkish people is hard, as I’ll explain, albeit in a roundabout fashion.

Today in school we had a 100-minute practice test for the ÖSS, which is the Turkish university entrance exam. I decided not to participate, since I don’t need to practice for a test I’m not going to take, and instead just sat in my school’s “garden”, which in fact is just asphalt surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire. Some of the better schools have actual signs of natural life in their gardens, but not ours.

Actually, I kind of marveled at this fact at the time. In my school, pretty much what I do is up to me. I go to all my lessons and sit quietly, studying Turkish, reading, or (occasionally) sleeping, but I don’t think it would really make a difference if I decided to stop coming to my lessons. My school doesn’t really do anything special to accommodate me – so my report card for the first term, which I’ll hopefully be able to pick up tomorrow (long story) is going to contain a lot of 0s (the lowest grade) and 5s (the highest), because teachers either decide that since I haven’t done anything I don’t really deserve a grade (the 0s) or they just decide they like me and they don’t really care (the 5s). In theory, AFS and my school are supposed to work out a way in which I receive alternate assignments, but neither one has shown any signs of doing so, at least not yet. I’m definitely OK with the current state of affairs; I have basically no school work, besides the ever-difficult struggle with learning Turkish.

But anyways, I was thinking about the ÖSS, and some conversations I’ve had with Turks. The test, unfortunately, basically makes being a teenager impossible. After school, students generally go to private study schools for the test. In a 10th grade class like mine, they usually will go two or three days during the week, and sometimes one day during the weekend. By the time they are in the 12th grade, they’re probably going five days a week. In Turkey, there are no after-school activities, except for studying. When students don’t have classes, frequently they just go home and sleep or study, filling out book after book of multiple-choice ÖSS test-prep questions.

Nor is the ÖSS the only test. In order to “win” the ÖSS and gain admittance to a university (the ÖSS not only determines which university you get to go to, but also if you are in the lucky 1/3rd of high school students who get to attend university at all), you need to be in a good high school. There’s a test for this, too, taken in 8th grade. So 7th and 8th graders have their own private courses to go to. Sometimes they start even earlier. All this combines to make my social life a bit limited. Sometimes I can go to a café (regular café, internet café, or the ever-popular PS3 café) after school with some school friends. But the activities I’m used to in America – sports, clubs, etc. – don’t exist here. I’m trying to find an organized activity to do after school; maybe I’ll take music or dance (yes, dance) lessons.

Now, pretty much everyone here dislikes this competitiveness, and I’m sure most of my readers probably don’t like the sound of it either. But the unfortunate reality is that there really isn’t anything else that can be done. What do you do when there are three people who apply for every one spot in a university? There simply isn’t money to accommodate more. An objective test like the ÖSS is pretty much the only way they can sort out who goes to university and who doesn’t.

I should note as well that if you are a Turkish citizen and you win the ÖSS, you get to attend university for free. (Everyone says “win” the ÖSS, not “pass” or, “do well at”, in Turkish you also talk about “winning” money if you have a good job.) So people who might think that the American system is a panacea should consider that you can attend the best university in Turkey for free, while an American university comparable to Boğazıçı University or Middle East Technical University would probably cost upwards of $40,000 dollars a year.

What else: today, in particular, I saw that Turks my age really believe in conspiracy theories, especially ones that involve Israel. Israel isn’t all that popular in Turkey at the moment… actually, my understanding is its pretty unpopular everywhere save Israel and the US now. The things I’ve heard range from the Da Vinci Code to that Nicholas Cage movie where he finds the secret Masonic treasure to some things that probably have their roots in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – although I should say that as a Jew who draws a clear distinction between Jewishness and Israeliness, I have never gotten in any arguments here. A lot of people also seem legitimately interested in the possibility that the US could conceivably go to war with Turkey.

I also have to deal with the fact that, apparently, my life in America is EXACTLY LIKE every single Hollywood movie in the minds of my Turkish schoolmates. (Sometimes I try to explain what the American stereotypes of Turks are – first of all, Turks and Arabs are one and the same, and second of all… Midnight Express.) Of course, no one has heard of Maine, and people find the idea that I live in a town of 8,000 extremely quaint. So people want to know what kind of drugs you can buy on the streets in America. Or how the relations are between white people and black people. Have I been to Harlem? What are the “Red people” (Turkish hasn’t really caught up as far as political correctness, I’m afraid) like? Can I teach them street language? Do I have a gun? I have tried to explain the size and heterogeneousness of America, but now I usually just settle for yes-or-no answers that are usually gross oversimplifications and frequently out-and-out lies. That’s probably how these stereotypes get started in the first place – bored exchange students with nothing better to do than make up hilarious stories about how you can buy heroin in the super markets in America, and you have to carry a gun to protect yourself when you go to get the mail. I haven’t actually said these things. But I’ve thought about it.

So I guess my spirits are good at the moment. My sense of humor is with me. I have a killer headache that I haven’t been able to shake for a few days, probably because my sinuses are ridiculously clogged and no one in Turkey uses Kleenex. Ah well.