— katealaurel

[Posted from İznik, Wednesday evening; written in Edirne, Tuesday evening. Photos forthcoming.]

We finished the semester out in Antep on Friday. After their exams, students stood around outside the building in clumps, taking photos of each other on their cell phones to tide their friendships over until February, grabbing luggage from where it had been stashed under stairwells and in odd corners before taking off for the bus station. My students are — as is typical for Turkey — generally very close to their families, and their impatience to go home had been almost palpable for the last two weeks of classes. Still, I was touched when some students wanted pictures of me before going, and told me they’d miss me.

It’s been a stressful semester, though for very different reasons than either of last year’s terms, and that’s something I should write about. However, that’s not for this blog post; this blog post is about getting as far away from Gaziantep as I could.

I’m in Edirne, the furthest Turkish city from Antep that I actually wanted to go to (Artvın, on the Georgian border, is probably farther — but also probably less interesting). On Sunday night, I took the 14-hour express bus from Gaziantep to Istanbul, arriving with enough time to have a bowl of mercimek for breakfast and hop on another 3-hour bus to Edirne, on the border with Greece.

This city is cold and beautiful and nothing at all like Gaziantep, which, for the moment, I’m exceedingly grateful for. The narrow streets around the city center feel old in a way that most of Gaziantep, a booming city full of new wealth and poorer new migrants, has covered up with growth; little Ottoman houses, wooden balconies still in good repair, lean out over streets with shops selling traditional fruit-shaped soap and ubiquitous fried-liver restaurants. (I bought some soap; liver still makes me ill.) Three restored bazaars house modern shops under their white domes, though luckily, it’s mostly not tourist stuff— instead, cheap clothes, pastries, and mountains of yarn fill the stalls. Alleys turn around cemeteries with cylindrical Ottoman gravestones leaning crooked. Old brick-and-stone coursework juts out of the corners of modern buildings.

And the architecture! Oh, the architecture. Mimar Sinan’s greatest mosque is here, the Selimiye Camii, with a dome a few centimeters broader than the Haghia Sophia’s; the Eski Camii’s walls soaring with painted calligraphy; the Üç Şerefeli Cami’s mismatched minarets. Edirne feels rich in beautiful buildings in the same way that İstanbul and Şanlıurfa are; that is, it shows plainly all the wealth and time that went into making the city what it is, all the layers of people who built and improved and restored. It’s only fitting, since Edirne was an Ottoman capital for a long while, and a major Byzantine and Roman city before that, but it’s still startling and satisfying after two months more or less staying in Antep.

People have been extraordinarily friendly. A woman on the bus from İstanbul walked me to the hotel area, pointing out all the best places to try liver (sadly, I didn’t have the nerve to take her up on her advice). A bead-seller and a plastic bag-seller outside Selimiye took it upon themselves to give me exhaustive directions to the museum around the corner. A corner-store guy, when asked about postcards, sighed heavily and mourned the days when we wrote to each other on holidays instead of sending a text. An older couple walked with me for a kilometer from the bakery to the mosque complex at dusk, making sure I didn’t get lost. The gate-guard at Beyazit let me visit the whole museum at leisure even though I arrived fifteen minutes past closing time, pointing out rooms I missed, complimenting my Turkish and calling me “hocam.”

I woke up this morning to snow, which has shown up on the second day of my winter break travels both years now. (Probably because I’ve gone north both years, but that’s neither here nor there.) All day, wandering around the crooked streets, admiring 19th-century administrative buildings with their flourishes and pastel colors, trying to keep my scarf on and cricking my neck to stare up at calligraphied domes, squinting to read epigraphy in the museum courtyard, everything’s been graced by little flurrying snowflakes hurrying down, making the cold worthwhile.

–––– OOO –––– OOO ––––

Things seen:
• iced-over streams of water in the bronze fountains on the main pedestrian street
• little boys ducking under cars in a snowball fight
• dogs curled up nose-to-tail in the lee of a wall
• soap shaped like figs, grapes, strawberries, watermelons, bananas, peaches, plums, apples, pears, and every other fruit
• elegant little boxes of badem ezmesi (“almond paste,” presumably similar to marzipan) in pastry shops with neon signs
• a man washing his bare feet in the şadırvan despite the ice all around
• lovely white-ground lekythoi from excavations at Ainos
• a young man hunched against the cold and waiting (for no one, he said) in the courtyard of the Muradiye Camii
• in a reproduction Ottoman medical text, a miniature illustration of two surgeons and a hydrocephalic boy, all smiling beatifically during the operation
• the lights flickering on in the minarets, through the snow, across the river, and up the hill, from the window of a dolmuş headed home

“Are you Turkish?” count: Four! In two days! Maybe red hair and blue eyes don’t stick out as much in northern Thrace; maybe hunching into my scarf and hat helps disguise me. At the archaeology museum, I eavesdropped, amused, as two guards argued in whispers— “Look, she’s reading the sign!” “Yes, but—” “Shh! She understands!” — before finally approaching. “Excuse me, can we ask you something? Are you Turkish?”

–––– OOO –––– OOO ––––

Edirne: highly recommended.

• Lodging: I’m staying in the Otel Aksaray on Maarif Cadd., which is serviceable, cheap, and friendly, though nothing special (and has neither breakfast nor internet). Unfortunately, Edirne doesn’t really get enough tourists for true pensions or hostels, as far as I can tell.

• Food: Park Köfteci Osman, a bit down the hill from Selimiye Camii on the south side of the park. Walls plastered with newspaper clippings and photographs; plain, simple, perfectly cooked, mouthwateringly delicious köfte. Final Pastanesi, on the main pedestrian street, has good sahlep and two upper floors, as well as tasty cookies (including a traditional local almond variety). Cafe Pena, next door to Otel Aksaray, is kind of hilariously “hip” and Western (red-painted walls, old wooden tables, reproduction 50s movie posters on the walls, playing Cake and “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane”), but has a wide variety of okay coffee drinks, plus good internet. Lots of good little börek places on the main streets; Kardeşler Yıldırım Börekçisi has friendly people and a tiny upstairs room good for people-watching, just down the street west of the Eski Camii. I couldn’t bring myself to try liver again (I know, I’m a wimp — hey, at least I’ll eat brain!).

• To Do: Edirne has five beautiful major mosques/mosque complexes. The Eski Camii, Üç Şeferli Cami, and Selimiye Camii are all clustered near the city center and open to visit— a good guidebook will tell you more useful information than me. Muradiye Camii, off to the east of Selimiye, appears to only be open at prayer time, and it was too cold for me to trek out to the top of the hill twice. The Beyazit Külliyesi is a mosque complex including a medical school, hospital, and insane asylum — highly recommended. My guidebook (Rough Guide) dissed the medical museum housed there, but I found it both fun and hilarious. Granted, I study ancient medical history (and am thus also interested in Ottoman medical history), but who doesn’t enjoy seeing the ubiquitous Turkish museum mannequins cauterizing patients or playing the kemence to soothe the insane mannequin in the next room? Besides, the architecture is unusual and lovely, and the reproduction manuscripts and well-signed explanations are definitely worth seeing. The combined “Arkeoloji ve Etnografi” (Archaeology and Ethnography) museum behind Selimiye was surprisingly good — the archaeological sections in particular were very well signed, even with (Turkish-only) translations for the inscriptions. Apparently there’s been an upswing in archaeological activity in the region recently; some of the finds (including small bronzes, some decent burial steles, and quite a few coins) are very nice for a regional museum, and made more so by being able to easily place the dig sites relative to Edirne. I couldn’t find the Turkish Art Museum mentioned in the guidebook, and the staff at the archaeology museum had no idea what I was talking about.

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“Something about being in transit opens up a space for thought in between the layers of it that occupy my mind day to day, as if the bus that’s cleaving a clear path between the yellowed grassy hills and the low grey mist is running through my mind as well. Leaving Gaziantep pulls me out of a little nest of issues and commitments and obligations, reminds me why I’m in Turkey, what the bigger picture is beyond my narrow teaching routine in the hazırlık.

I’m almost always busy here, to a degree that obstructs the travel I’d like to do, and the outreach and research that are also meant to be part of an ETA grant. It’s not something I regret, per se. There was a conscious decision to focus on my teaching and my students, and, particularly, the opportunity I’ve had to change how English is taught at my university. That decision, though, has meant doing less travel, and connecting less with my community outside the university. This year, it’s been further complicated by the long process of applying to graduate school in the US, and of trying to determine with more clarity what my issues, my goals, and my guiding pursuits will be for the next five years. I’m in Turkey, speaking Turkish with my friends and neighbors, so close to so many things I want to see– and my mind is filled, largely, with the minutia of teaching, curriculum design, and applications.

Writing here again is, in part, an attempt to clarify my thoughts and part the fog of the day-to-day more easily, or at least more frequently.”

Saturday and Sunday, I was in Adana with my American friends, taking a much-needed break from Antep after four or five weeks straight in the city. On the bus on Saturday morning, when the clouds were hanging so low that we really seemed to be carving out a path through them, I wrote the above.

It’s been a long, complicated year-and-a-half; surely some of it will come into focus soon, approaching the end of my time in Turkey.

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I teach twelve classes this year (for twenty hours in the classroom each week), all C-level,1 so I teach the same lesson twelve times each week. By Wednesday, usually, all the tweaks and optimizations have been made, and I wind up doing almost exactly the same patter in each class– throwing in the same jokes, using the same examples, glossing the same vocabulary. Classes’ reactions vary, and their levels vary, and my teaching changes to accommodate that, but the structure of what I’m doing remains the same, down to some very small details.

At the beginning of the year, we did a lesson on WH-questions,2 talking about our families and where we’re from. My students are also curious about me– for maybe 70% of them, I’m the first Western foreigner they’ve spent time with; for maybe 90-95%, the first American– but seem to have no memory from week to week of anything I tell them. With 12 different classes asking me where I’m from, and where my family is, and why I don’t live with my parents, the patter for those explanations has become pretty fixed.

“When I was a child,” I say, “I lived in Ohio. Ohio?” At this point, when no one recognizes it, I draw a terrible map of the US. “New York. California. Ohio.” Ohio is a little square probably closer to Illinois, but anyway. “Ohio is a terrible, bad, awful, boring place.

I don’t actually feel that bad about Ohio. Admittedly, I went through a few years of Ohio-hate, after moving to the wonderland that is Portland; these days, it’s more affectionate badmouthing, just on principle (and to tease my parents, who still live in Cincinnati). My students can tell that I’m not serious, thanks in large part to the ridiculous exaggeration and the big smile. One class, though, has actually caught on to the joke.

Yesterday, I was taking attendance in my Thursday night class, and looked up to see one student putting away a netbook as the other tried to make a swipe at it. Seeing me look up, S said,
“Thief, teacher, he is thief!”
A replies: “No! This is lie!”
S: “OHIO THIEF!

I lost it. The students (who, I think, count it as a victory if I’m laughing too hard to talk to them) got ideas.

Later, doing compare and contrast:
Me: “A, where are you from?”
A: “Şanlıurfa.”
Me: “Okay. And M, are you from a different place?”
M: “Ohio!

At the end of class, I started writing the word “Homework” on the board. Turkish tongue-tsking broke out, with a lot of sad shaking of heads. “Ohio, teacher, very Ohio.”

I hope I haven’t permanently warped anyone’s sense of geography. Or humor.

1: Supposedly “elementary” at the beginning of the year. It really is quite uncertain; I have some students in my classes who spoke no English at all at the beginning (it’s the lowest level, so they get tossed in with the others), and some who speak quite good English, but didn’t have an opportunity to take the placement exam.
2: Who what where when why how (also which, how many, etc), in case you haven’t had English grammar recently.

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In the picture: Lauren. Unedited, thanks to taking apart my Lightroom catalogue recently.

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Still relevant to the weather.

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Şanlıurfa, January 2010.

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For what it’s worth:

* I’m back in Turkey, currently in Ankara and soon in Antep, after an extremely eventful two months.
* My rate of posting in this blog shows no sign of changing.
* However! I hope that this year will feature a more even balance between my teaching and my research, my work here in Turkey and my other projects.

To that end, you can probably expect, on the rare occasions that this blog sees any content, to see some content related to my research, to classics in general, to digital humanities, and to almost anything that crosses my mind– rather than the strict (and relatively empty) log of Turkish experiences that it’s been so far.

And more photos, hopefully, too.

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I am leaving Turkey in much the same way that I came to it, in a frantic whirlwind of packing and paperwork up to the last possible minute. (Followed by plane trouble.)1 This week has been finals week for my students in both department, so it’s been chaotic, to say the least, with a great deal of mind-numbing exam observation followed by a great deal of frantic grading under deadline. I was up almost all of Wednesday night, doing laundry, washing neglected dishes, and trying to get boxes packed. Four trips to two different police stations in two days to get my residence permit renewed. Last-minute meetings as bureaucracy and projects were both dealt with panickedly. A hurried move of my collected belongings and inherited Fulbright house supplies, which happened only by the grace of Nazlı, Nurten, and Serdar, who actually helped me pack in addition to cramming the boxes into Nurten’s car and driving them to Nazlı’s apartment. All came o ut well, though: my grades are done and (just about) turned in, projects are progressing forward on their tracks, I got my security deposit back on the apartment, and my residence permit is renewed to let me back in the country without trouble in July.

Yes, back. I am staying in Turkey on a Fulbright for a second year, as an extended grantee. I am so terribly lucky to have this, another year to root myself deeper in this place, improve my teaching and my Turkish and my comfort in this part of the world.

In many ways, by now I feel completely at home here. The culture shock didn’t hit me until April and March, seven or eight months into my life here, spurred perhaps by long, back-to-back visits from my parents and a friend. I agonized over whether to stay when the opportunity was offered to me, miserable over the decision whether to go home to my life in Portland. Suddenly, though, at the end of April, the mental clouds cleared and I remembered why I was here, how much I love this place and these people, the whole strange sea of new culture I am swimming through here, all the challenges I am glorying in.

Somehow, over the last month, I became comfortable. Perhaps because my Turkish is finally conversational (stumblingly, awkwardly, dictionary-dependently conversational, but conversational all the same, even for politics and religion). Perhaps because I finally reached a workable cultural equilibrium– knowing what to do in most situations I encounter regularly here, yet confident enough about knowing these rules that I can preserve the Americanisms that really matter to me. Things have fallen into place for next year– teaching, projects, living with Nazlı– and in any case, the path somehow cleared.

It seems natural now to be coming back, and leaving Antep this evening was almost as strange and heart-wrenching as leaving Portland nine months ago. I rode out through the pastel apartment building canyons in the Karataş suburbs, listening to the call to prayer drift in at slightly different places from each minaret we passed, seeing the golden light on the plains fade slowly to purple and down to dusk. Trying to find and see the strangeness that I remembered from when I arrived– tiny rickety buses! enormous apartment complexes! strange vacant lots like wastelands! tall buildings marching up to the edge of the plains and stopping like a wall!– felt so artificial and odd, even though I could still recognize the things that should feel foreign; it just fit wrong over my eyes.

On Tuesday evening, I sat on the balcony of the faculty restaurant with a group of medical professors I taught this semester, and looked out over the whole expanse of the city with my friends as the sun was setting, all bright on the tall walls of the clusters of buildings, with the warm breeze blowing and the sky darkening at the edges. All I could think was, “Why, why, why would I ever leave?”

I’m going home for two weeks. But I’ll come back home afterwards, too.

1: Anadolujet neglected to inform me they’d canceled my flight until after I arrived at the airport. Negotiated a switch to a THY flight in the airport, in Turkish. It all worked out somehow. I am in Istanbul. Hopefully that is my quotient of travel trouble for this trip.

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