“Make sure your class shows up.”

—-

Today was supposed to be the first real lecture section of the first real college course¹ I’m teaching: Introduction to Greek Mythology, for the first-year literature students. (Yesterday we met to go over the syllabus. I talked too fast.) I’ve been worrying about it, of course. Although I’m confident that I’ll do a good job [with a lot of worry and the help of my mentors], I still wound up tweaking powerpoint slides and scribbling quotes in the margin of my lecture notes 15 minutes before class time. The topic (”What is myth? What are the origins of myth? What can we learn from myth? What are the ethics of myth? What about myth and art? What are our sources for myth?”) was broad, complicated, and difficult to reformulate into something manageable for my students’ level of English– but I was looking forward to discussing it with them.

So a fourth-year student (A) was dispatched with me to help me find all the projector cables in the classroom. We showed up two minutes late– to a room empty of people and papers except for three students’ books. Oh, no. Truancy is rife here, and it’s quite common for students to skip the first week of class altogether– but I had about a third of the class yesterday, and they knew our first lecture was today. What could have happened? A and I set to work on the projector, with me hoping (albeit pessimistically) that my students were just mysteriously late.

The projector turned out to be pretty mysterious, too. A keyboard, mouse, and remote control were locked inside a metal cage, on top of another cage housing the main body of the computer. I’d forgotten the adaptor necessary to hook my computer up to the projector directly, so we wrangled a bunch of wires and cleared a space to plug in my flash drive, only to discover that the computer wouldn’t turn on. Pressed the button. No luck. Replugged the plug. No luck. Defeated, I went to reattach the projector cable before locking everything up again– and accidentally discovered the exposed wiring with my thumb.

Ow. The casing had come off the core of the projector cable, and something somewhere was carrying enough electricity to give me a pretty sharp shock. So I spent a few seconds dancing around the classroom and biting back my surprised swearing for the student’s benefit, then locked the locks, gathered my things, and headed out of the classroom with A in ignominious defeat.

At the bottom of the staircase, though, I spotted two of my students. “Where were you?” They started to explain– only be interrupted when an unreasonably bright flashbulb went off about ten feet from our collective faces. A photographer, brandishing a big DSLR and external flash, started directing us to cluster together, move up the stairs, move down the stairs. I was not particularly cooperative. “…hoca istemiyor?” Indeed. I escaped to the bottom of the stairs, and waited while my students were asked to troop down the flight together twice, flashbulb going off over and over. Apparently, the English department is the only non-hazırlık department currently in session, and the university needs promotional photos for the Erasmus Programme. Finally, my students escape.

The explanation? Some of their other classes today were canceled due to a meeting, so they thought mine was, too. Whoops.

I guess we’ll make it up next week. What an absurd comedy of errors.

1: I love my hazırlık students, but my English classes are functionally the same as teaching high school; I don’t think even my students– who routinely neglect to bring paper, pencil, or book– consider them university courses.

Headed to bed.

On the other hand (δε), my evening class was remarkably successful. This was our first week spending five consecutive hours together, and I was afraid it was going to be a disaster– there are some chronically badly behaved students in the group, and even my best students get worn out and apathetic by the end of the fourth hour, understandably. Five hours feels like begging for trouble. For some reason, though, they seemed invested in the lesson– more so than usual, even. The group that usually leaves after the second hour to go eat actually came back for the end of class.¹ We got through all of the material we needed to get through tonight. The idea may even have made sense by the end. So for the last twenty minutes or so, we played Apples to Apples (not the best game in the world, but excellent for teaching, and even directly relevant to the work we were doing on descriptive paragraphs), and everybody left the room happy and chattering. It felt like a minor, merciful miracle.

I am not yet a good teacher, though I aspire to it. Sometimes my activities fall miserably flat, sometimes I forget what I’m doing in class despite the clearly-marked lesson plans in front of me, sometimes I fail terribly at classroom management, sometimes I worry that I’m not giving them anything more to learn from than me talking. I had a tiny bit of experience with this juggling act before coming here, but in very different contexts, and I’d originally expected to actually be doing the work of my title here (English Teaching Assistant). Instead of an assistant, though, I am an honest-to-god classroom teacher all on my own, struggling and winning and failing with maybe less preparation than normal. Day to day, I often have no idea what will work and what won’t, despite seeking out help and poring over resources. I know that’s to be expected, but I feel like I should have more to offer. Two months in, this is not so terrifying. Two months in, this is still so terrifying.

When this post was bouncing around in my (tired, tired) head, the old cliche of the “little things” came to mind at first. Yet even though class only took up a small part of the day, everything else revolved around it. Teaching is the Big Thing, the mass at the center of my life here, shaping the orbits of my social life, my travel, language learning, bureaucratic frustrations, cultural understandings and misunderstandings, and on and on. Whether it’s recognized or unseen at any given time, it’s exerting its pull on the nature and structure of whatever else I do. It has to– I owe it to the work. And besides, I don’t yet know enough about it to be able to climb out of the gravity well.

1: It is very common and totally acceptable in Turkey to just leave class during the ten-minute break between hours, so that you can go eat or hang out with friends or what-have-you. In the US– by my perception, at least– that would be considered incredibly rude. Here, there’s a certain number of state-mandated hours that you’re allowed to miss class, and most students use them to leave early on Fridays or go get dinner during evening classes. It’s been, surprisingly, one of the hardest things to adjust to in the classroom.

• (1) On the minibus ride from Antep to İslahiye (the nearest town), we started with only myself, a young family (whose son kicked the back of my seat incessantly), and an old man. Generally, while driving out of town, you pick up additional passengers from the side of the road: people waiting on the edge of the highway who live somewhere near the bus route, or who were dropped by a bus coming in from elsewhere. You pass clusters of potential travelers: women in village garb with şalvar and old-fashioned scarves, elderly men smoking and mumbling and clicking their beads, families with high school kids headed home from the big-city dershane, people from town coming back from a day shopping, all standing in little groups at unspoken bus stops. Any gathering at a corner or a storefront is a possibility, so lay on the horn! The bus attendant will open the side and hang out gracefully, one hand clutching the roof of the van, and call, “Hatay-Hatay-Hatay-Hatay-İslahiye-Hatay-Hatay-Nurdağı-Hatay!” (or substitute your end destination and midpoints here). Most of the time, most of the people will just click their tongues and raise their eyebrows to send you on your way. There are so many little groups, though, that by the time we passed the outskirts of the city, the minibus was crammed to the gills, including a three-year-old boy half on my lap¹ and two old men on plastic stools in the aisle.
• (.5) In İslahiye, I exercised my Turkish with surprising success– both asking and (mostly) comprehending directions, figuring out where things are going and when, and (though this is not new) giving my standard biographical spiel. My understanding-mumbly-elderly-men skills are improving, too, which is much more of a necessity than I originally expected. We make progress. (Yavaş, yavaş.) This is not really a vignette, of course, and doubtfully exciting to anyone but me, but I am going to broadcast my progress whenever I goshdarn make any. (To be fair, I understand some new everyday utterance every time I leave the house. Today, I finally comprehended what the hell people say to me in shops: “Başka bir sey var mı?” “Anything else?” Retrospective duh.)
• (2) Longer coda to the last: Making friends with people on the bus is not something I’ve ever been skilled at, even in the States. But gradually (yavaş, yavaş, as with everything here) I’m starting to pick it up. Elderly women, little boys, and preteen girls are a social godsend: the first exchange wry smiles over crowded buses or squirmy children, the second try their English² and crow gleefully when I stammer in Turkish, and the third are curious but now old enough to want to help a lost yabancı. Today, I had the trifecta. The grandmother (presumably) of the three-year-old on the bus smiled at me warmly and clucked her tongue at the boy, though we didn’t exchange a word (I mumbled a polite bir büyük çocuk!, a big boy!, but I don’t think it was even heard). In the dolmuş to Yesemek, a preteen girl (Şennur) and her little brother and I managed a pretty long conversation about where we were from and what we were doing. Yes, some of it was just smiling and nodding on my part. But I catch more (and say more) every time.

Maybe because Americans are so often cautioned to suppress our instinctive smiles at strangers, I worry overmuch about being friendly in public. In Istanbul, or Ankara, or even in Antep, I do feel out of place when I try to make conversation– they’re cities, and people have city things to do. But in the towns and villages, once you have the least opening– the least reason to smile and nod– well, a smile is a smile. Even when I can’t communicate anything more, that connection keeps me from feeling adrift.

1: Other particularly interesting things that have been in my immediate proximity on the dolmuş or minibus in Turkey: 1) four or five large plastic bags of extremely recently butchered raw meat, during Kurban Bayramı last weekend, and 2) a chicken in a cage (the last time I was in Turkey, in 2008). Normally it’s just, you know, two three-foot-long PVC pipes tied together and women carrying enormous metal plates wrapped in newspaper.
2: “WHAT IS YOUR NAME? WHERE YOU FROM?”

And a small-print anecdote: while walking in İslahiye, I came across a sign in messy red paint, hanging from a dingy, windowless one-story brick building. “Sünnet yapılır. [phone number]” Colloquial translation? “Circumcisions done here.”

Found while grading writing quizzes. About the Taj Mahal, one student writes,

“It’s made of white barber. It has two towels.“

…

It’s a sound-based mistake, of course, though as a friend pointed out, “How can you mistake marble for barber when the cognate in your own language is marmer?” Alas. And the “towels” (towers) just makes it better.

Unfortunately, the assignment wasn’t to write about the Taj Mahal, but rather a building in one’s hometown. And the Taj Mahal was a pre-written example from a similar exercise in the textbook. Sorun var. We’ll talk on Monday.

Easy-Bake Envy:

When I was a kid, I really wanted an Easy-Bake Oven. Cooking’s pretty much the only gendered hobby I ever picked up– my doll and horse phases were brief, I don’t really like to shop, and I almost never wear makeup. (The fact that cooking’s my only gendered hobby actually seems a little ironic, given that my dad does all the cooking in my parents’ house.) In any case, though, I love to cook– it’s a stress-reliever, a way to share with friends, an easy access to sociable company.

Alas, my Turkish apartment lacks a built-in oven, as is standard here. Instead, there’s what my friends called “a cooker”– a stand-alone two-burner thing, one hooked to electric, one to a purchasable gas tank. This is all well and good, and since I haven’t bothered to buy a gas tank, I’m even managing fine with just one burner– but I missed baking (cookies, bread, pie, everything) terribly.

So last week I finally got around to buying a counter-top oven, the available alternative. It looks almost exactly like an American toaster oven, but on some kind of magical appliance steroids: it has bake and broil settings, and goes up to 250C. And, amazingly, it works. I made roast Thanksgiving chicken in it (my first roast chicken ever, no less) and apple pie (I bake a mean apple pie), and I couldn’t be happier. It’s quirky and has weird interface issues and is pretty small, but my silly Easy-Bake envy has finally been satisfied by this ridiculous yet effective little gadget.

This morning I finished the snickerdoodles (the power and water were out for three hours last night, so that didn’t work out so well), and handed them out to students and colleagues at work. Everybody seemed shocked that I would bake at home. I can’t wait to share more food.

Turkish Christmas Trees:

After proctoring exams this afternoon, I wound up going to the local mall with friends out of sheer desperation (my shoes were literally falling apart). It is The Place To Go for many people here– the two times I’ve been, I’ve run into big groups of my students– and whenever I ask classes what they did over the weekend, a good two thirds will say, “We went to Sanko.” It’s huge and– to me, at least– terrifying, though I don’t like malls to begin with.

Anyway. We walked in through the gates, and there, in the giant four-story-high atrium, was an enormous metal Christmas tree.

I think I laughed hysterically for a good several minutes. In retrospect, I’m not all that shocked– the idea of Christmas is understood pretty much anywhere American culture penetrates, and we certainly tend to promote a fun, gift-centered, food-centered holiday over the religious midnight-mass version. Without the religious tie-ins, there’s not really much reason not to celebrate Christmas for the fun of it. It was unexpected and shocking, though, and I was baffled and amused to see this wholesale adoption of what is– let’s face it– a bizarre holiday tradition to begin with.

It’s probably going to be a pretty surreal month.

The subject– which I’m pretty confident doesn’t get reused, or I wouldn’t be mentioning it here– was, I kid you not, non-ironic motivational posters. Each student got one more-or-less randomly, and was responsible for telling us what they saw in the picture, as well as the “main idea,” what they thought it represented. Most of the answers were more or less the same, and mostly on-target, though a few interpretations surprised me. A picture of protesters fighting the police, with the caption “Know Your Power,” invariably got the explanation that it was wrong for protesters to try to solve problems that way. As an American reading a probably-American-produced poster, I’m pretty certain the originally-intended idea was the opposite, that protesters should know they have the ability to fight back against ostensibly stronger forces. Coming from a culture where protests are– speaking very, very generally– not the scenes of violent death, I can still understand why the image might evoke different incidents here.

We generally prompted them to relate the main idea to their own life, though, and it was there that the most interesting conversations occurred. It surprises me what my students trust me, and other teachers, with– stories and strongly held beliefs that might rarely be shared in an American classroom. It’s often touching, or sobering;¹ it feels like a rare gift that my students speak about these things with me, when speaking at all is such a challenge for them. When describing a poster labeled “Embrace Life’s Storms,” a student– un-prompted– shared the story of how he’d struggled with medical problems in a foot as a child, and been unable to walk (”or play football,” said with a wry smile) for years. To an outsider, Turkish culture seems a little less open to (and certainly less accommodating of) physical disabilities. Would an American student in that situation have told his story? I don’t know, but I’m doubtful.

The students I teach, even those I most struggle with in class over their behavior and their skills, still surprise me with their earnestness. There is a different culture of teaching here, a perception of the teacher as hocam, my wise teacher, rather than a restrictive force to be battled or escaped. That’s not to say that my classes are angelic, of course; if anything, they’re much more inclined to leave in the middle of a class or talk over me than any American students I’ve worked with. Yet there’s an undercurrent of respect– in both directions– that changes the dynamic of the room. When I get frustrated with students in class, even if I say nothing, they often come to apologize afterward. I know they’re trying, and that their distraction is often the result of not understanding what’s going on, so I build in as much leeway as I can. I want to push them, and they know it; we’re working on it together, bit by bit. Sharing stories gives us all reasons to keep pushing through the hard parts of this partnership.

Tomorrow afternoon I’m proctoring exams again, though it’s paper grammar exams this time, unfreighted by emotional content. In lieu of conversations and stories, I’ll share with them the snickerdoodles I’m baking. Not much, but at least they’ll know that I know what they’re doing is tough, and that they deserve a reward, even if it’s unspoken for now.

1: On the other hand, two students told me last week– in a discussion of leaders, and the qualities of a good leader– how much they admired Hitler. That was more on the disturbing side. I pushed them on it, but there’s a limit to how much I can pause class to deal with it, and I am not currently close enough to either student to drag them into more than a brief conversation after class. We’ll see what happens over the rest of the term.

Surprisingly not uncommon: horsecarts.

The Tuesday bazaar in the university neighborhood is a repeated source of entertainment for me. Markets are human life in distilled and concentrated form: talking, shouting, haggling, eating, buying, joking with friends, jostling, scooping up children, persuading, gossiping, teasing, finding necessities, selling necessities, what-have-you. The building blocks of communities– families, food, daily chores, connections with your neighbors– all happen at the market. And they’re full of bright colors and interesting smells to boot. What’s not to like? So last week I finally stocked my kitchen with a little more equipment (enough that it’s not a daily frustration anymore– that is, I bought a saucepan and some miscellany) and loaded myself up with as much incredibly fresh produce, cheese, and honey as I could carry with aching arms on two different trips. Maybe most satisfyingly of all, I managed to get through my transactions in comprehensible Turkish with pretty minimal sign language. Incredibly rudimentary Turkish, yes, but being able to buy something without making a complete idiot of myself is an important language milestone all the same. This week, since I won’t be trying to stock up so much, I’m hoping to get pictures. I’ll probably wind up making two trips all over again.

Between settling into my apartment (as per Twitter, I’m now settled in enough that I tend to get up from my chair to grab a book from the shelf– and then realize there is no shelf and the book’s in a box in Portland), getting to know Antep a little more, and teaching-teaching-teaching, I haven’t gotten out of the city in the last two weeks. This weekend, though, I’m planning to go to Hatay with a friend who’s from the area. I guarantee writing of some sort will follow.

Speaking of which, I have about three partially-written-out notes I’m going to try to get onto the internet this week. To try to hold myself to it, here they are:

• a navel-gazey post on why I’m not applying to grad school this fall
• a post on the Turkish engagement ceremony I went to now-a-few-weeks-ago, plus some other cultural notes
• and a very-delayed post on Fulbright orientation in Ankara, what it meant to me, and some of the ideas I see as central to my role here.

And that’s the general gist of what I’ve been doing lately. More soon, as promised.

1: As I’m writing this, I can hear raucous shouting and car-horn-honking in the street outside. I’m guessing Fenerbahçe beat Galatasaray.

Over the next couple of days, I should get a definite teaching schedule for the semester, find out more about university administrivia, submit (or get closer to submitting) my application for a residence permit, and sign a lease on an apartment. Inşallah, inşallah.¹ With luck, I’ll also get a few moments to update here with some more of how things are going, my daily life, and Turkish color. For now, though, iyi geceler,² and more soon.

It’s hard to believe I’ve only been here for a little over a week.

1: God willing.
2: Good night.

1) Yesterday Narin took me into the city proper for the first time, which was excellent. (She was joking about having no practice being a tour guide in Antep, but she was really helpful.) I now have the beginnings of an understanding of how the bus system works in this city, and a rudimentary knowledge of how to get around downtown. I’m looking forward to exploring next weekend. We also saw the city archaeological museum, which has the spectacular mosaics from Zeugma (as well as some other truly excellent finds, although the English signage is extremely limited)– I’m looking forward to going back when not feeling nauseous from poor sleep and adjusting to the sun.

2) Today, Narin had a… lunch party, I guess? Several friends of hers– colleagues from the university– came over for food and spent the afternoon half-watching tv and half-talking and making fun of each other. Like everyone I’ve met here, they were extremely friendly, although the vast majority of the conversation was in Turkish that flew by too fast for me to understand anything but a word or two (not that I do much better with slow Turkish). Two of the women live in the same apartment building very close to the university, and said there’s a vacancy on their floor. It looks like I might have a place within a few days of getting back from the meeting in Ankara.

3) Still not totally clear on what I’m supposed to be teaching tomorrow, although at least I’ve finally gotten a look at the textbook. I guess it’s a good thing the classes aren’t until 5:30pm.

4) I’m optimistic that someone at Fulbright orientation will be able to help me figure out what on earth is going on with my computer. If not, I will be frustrated, and begin hunting for computer nerds in Antep.

5) You all thought my caffeine consumption was bad. Well, the standard for this afternoon’s party was a cup of Turkish coffee (Türk kahve) with attendant fortune-telling, followed by multiple (2-4 each) glasses of strong Turkish tea, followed by a glass of cola. Aaaah. Also, per-guest dessert was an enormous slice of heavily-iced/chocolated/pistachio’d fluffy cake, plus 8-10 cookies. (At least nobody else finished all of theirs either, although I was by far the weakest contender.) I cannot keep up with the middle east, guys.

Explanatory Turkish Phrasebook, Episode Bir

ayip olmasa: “If it’s not rude–” As Narin put it, Turks are too curious not to ask, but at least they’re going to be polite about it. Apparently I should expect to hear this frequently from my students.

Schwern and I took a long, meandering way to his apartment, where I’m storing my stuff for the year– there were midnight drop-offs of GRE books and end tables, and a stop at the late-night food carts on Hawthorne and 12th, which I had somehow neglected to go to over the last year, as they suddenly boomed into this excellent post-midnight hangout. We shared a coconut-basil milkshake and had my dinosaur tarot read,¹ and drove over the Broadway bridge and back over the Fremont (which, in my opinion, has the best views of Portland), and stowed the last of my belongings in Schwern’s basement, and snagged a twenty minute nap before driving to the airport at 4:30 and saying goodbye.

And pretty much immediately after I got into the airport terminal, it turned into one of those horrible nightmare travel adventures, where problems just cascade into each other.

I couldn’t check into my flight using the automatic terminals, because Delta’s system was distressed by the open seating in my later Turkish Airlines flight. The line for manual check-in was half an hour long. My checked suitcase was three pounds overweight, so we had lightning repack transfer at the counter. The security line was more massive and hectic than I’ve ever seen it– even during my annual New Year’s Eve flights– and was too intimidating to afford me the time to go to the US Bank terminal to deposit all the checks from my sell-all-my-stuff endeavors. Finally, I got to the plane, only to remember I hadn’t called my bank to warn them I would be out of country, so a harried Skype call at the noisy gate ensued. (Kudos to the poor USBank representative on the other end, who delivered excellent service despite the crazy.)

Less than five minutes after we’d all settled into the plane, we received notice that our flight had been grounded. Because of the UN meeting in New York, presidential traffic through JFK, and, I imagine, the heightened worry due to the recently discovered bomb plot in New York, all air traffic in and out of JFK was going to be temporarily suspended. We’d be delayed at least an hour, probably an hour and a half. The plane demonstrated impressive synchronized groaning skills.

On the plus side, this afforded me the time to leave the terminal, deposit my checks, and return through the miraculously shortened security line. On the minus side, the layover for my flight from New York to Istanbul was only going to be an hour and a bit long originally; with the delay, this would be entertaining.

They managed to swing us leaving only an hour late rather than an hour and a half, which was encouraging. I took some pictures of the Portland airport and the takeoff in the dawn light, and promptly slept through the rest of the flight.

We arrived in New York about ten minutes after the Istanbul flight’s scheduled departure (partly courtesy half an hour in a holding pattern). Miraculously, the Istanbul gate was next door. Even more miraculously, they’d held the plane for us, since a surprising number of people (maybe as much as an eighth of the plane) was headed to Istanbul. I fell into my seat, and promptly slept through the vast majority of the flight to Istanbul. When I finally woke up for breakfast, a concerned flight attendant actually asked me if I’d taken a sleeping pill.

I’d been anxious and sad for much of the time I was awake on both flights, and for several days prior to leaving. Abandoning a solid community of friends and a happy existence in a city I love for nine months in a country where I don’t speak the language and remain remarkably ill-informed about the details of my ostensible job– well, it’s understandably painful. But as the suburbs of Istanbul came into view under our plane in the morning light, dotted with minarets and
enormous Turkish flags, as we passed over the coastline of the Sea of Marmara and back over the land again, as Turkey got closer and closer below me– I felt an irrepressible joy rising up in me. I chose to come back to Turkey because when I last visited– even for such a short and chaotic trip– it felt eerily like home. When our plane touched down on Turkish soil, I wanted to shout with glee.

That upwelling of happiness got me through the long line at passport control, through collecting my luggage and struggling to drag it along the long, twisty ramps to the domestic departure terminal, going through the line and checking in again in a mixture of my wretched Turkish and the clerk’s struggling English, and finally through the confusion of figuring out multiple streams of misinformation to find the actual gate for my plane. When I finally boarded, I did so in a
haze of exhaustion, with shaky hands and legs and a desperate desire to not be in any kind of motion at all for a while, aerial or terrestrial.

The flight was slightly awkward. I was clumsy– still with shaky hands– and spilled parts of lunch; I was gauche and stared out the window past my seatmate unabashedly, too tired (and still far too fascinated with the Turkish landscape below) to worry about it much. The flight was comparatively short– maybe an hour and a half– and the landscape changed rapidly from coast, to plains, to mountains and Cappadocian foothills. We passed over a few cities whose names I recognized. Finally, a last short mountain range, and we began to descend, circling Gaziantep. I could see the kale– the ancient castle– dominating the center of town, and the enormous pastel-painted apartment buildings seeming even bigger and denser at the edges of the city.

For a city of over a million people, Gaziantep struck me as extraordinarily compact from the air. This certainly isn’t out of
line with my existing experiences in Europe, but it’s still visually surprising to me. For Cincinnati or Portland to be counted as metropolitan areas of about a million, you have to include enormous swaths of the surrounding suburbs, some of them quite absurdly far away (though still part of the city ecosystem). We did actually pass over some outlying houses and communities– some poor pistachio (fıstık) farms, some enormous rich houses, some suburban-looking clusters– but I’m confident that the part of the city counted as holding a million inhabitants is that dense central area, and that’s still somewhat strange to me.

We landed, and I managed to muddle through the travel haze again. The flight attendant said güle güle to everyone (and goodbye to me– something I fear I’m doomed to everywhere in Turkey, thanks to my unmistakeably northern European coloring) and we trundled off the plane. Several people snagged their bags directly off the luggage carts being loaded, in a typically chaotic fashion, rather than waiting for the slightly rickety carousel inside. A little boy kept sitting on the carousel and being carried a little way along, only to be hauled off by his distressed-looking father. Outside the doors, a crowd of taxi (taksi) drivers and bus drivers awaited, as well as many greeters with hand-written signs in Arabic. Gaziantep is close enough to the Syrian border that it’s not uncommon to simply fly there and travel over, as far as I understand.

Noticeably absent from this group, however, was anyone looking for an awkward, jet-lagged American with red hair. Uh-oh. In PDX, I had dashed off a quick email to Birsen hanım (the head of department), Fadime (one of my hosts), and Verna (the other Fulbright grantee here, an ELF or English Language Fellow), warning them that my flight had been delayed and I might not make my connections. I’d had no opportunity to reach them since, and my initial warnings had
apparently been taken seriously. With no access to a Turkish phone, no accessible phone number for any of my hosts (my own computer was thoroughly out of batteries, with my travel adapter buried somewhere in my carry-on and no outlet in sight anyway), and no idea how to contact them, I felt pretty panicky for a moment.

All praise to the boundless hospitality and goodwill of the Turk. When I dragged myself over to the airport entrance, looking (I imagine) pretty distressed and confused, I was gently handed up a chain of ever-more-proficient English speakers. First the janitor outside (”Ingilizce?” “No..” [pause] “Gelme, gelme…” (”Come, come…”)), then one security guard (”Ingilizce?” “No… wait…“), then a second (”Yes? English?” “I have a problem. I was supposed to meet someone here, and I can’t find them, and I don’t have a phone number—” “Uh… wait… wait one
moment…”), then allowed through security to the information booth (”Yes? He says you have a problem finding your friend?” “Yes, they were supposed to meet me, but they aren’t here, and I don’t have their phone number, I have it in an email–” “You do or you don’t have the number?” “It’s in an email. I need a computer to look it up.” “Ok. Wait here.”). A few minutes of waiting, and: “Ok. Our computer here, it has a problem with the internet. Come upstairs with me. Ah! Your çanta (bag)– leave here, please.”

With many a worried glance backwards at my bag, up the stairs I went, to the office of the airport yönetici (manager), who got up and waved me behind his desk to his computer. A moment of typing later, and miracle of miracles, there was a reply from Fadime to my PDX email, with a number to call. I wrote it down and dialed.

“Merhaba?”
“Hello?”
“Hello?” (burst of static)
“Hello?”
“Hello? Hello! Is this Kate?”
“Yes!”
“Kate! Where are you, Kate?”
“I’m at the airport.”
“Oh! Oh. We did not know when you were coming. We will come now. A half hour.”
“Okay! Thank you. Thank you.”
“Okay! See you soon, Kate.”

A big sigh of relief, and I got up to go. The yönetici stopped me.

“Taksi? Problem?”
“All fixed.”
“You call taksi?”
“No, I called my friend–”

He waved his hand at me, picked up the phone and redialed. I caught fragments of the conversation in Turkish– “woman here”, “your friend?”, “car”– then he hung up and smiled.

“Okay! You wait here?” He gestures to a big leather chair (which, I must admit, looked pretty comfortable at this point). I shook my head, though– “I said I would wait outside”– and headed out, repeating over and over again, “Teşekkür ederim, teşekkür ederim“– thank you, thank you. He waved me on, smiling benevolently.

Back down the stairs back to the information booth, teşekkür ederim, çok teşekkür ederim– thank you, thank you so much. “Your problem fixed? You find the number, call your friend?” “Yes! Çok teşekkür ederim.” Collected my baggage, and headed out of the door under the collective waving and benevolent smiles of the information booth man, both security guards, and the janitor.

All of which brings me back to the place I was in when I first began writing this entry (since continued over a long evening and morning), sitting much more calmly outside the Gaziantep airport on my suitcase, enjoying the opportunity to rest in the warm shade with the breeze and stare at the rolling yellow foothills and green pistachio trees around me, scribbling a little in my notebook. After a little while, I was collected by Mehmet, a friend of Fadime’s and fellow instructor in the English department, who greeted me with big smiles and profuse apologies that I returned with full force. Bags were loaded, selves were buckled into Mehmet’s car, and my introduction to the Gaziantep foreign language department began.

Mehmet and I chatted most of the way into town, though I was too disoriented to really contribute a polite amount to the conversation. We passed pistachio farms and endless road construction, little roadside apple stands (and by stands I mean crates) manned by an old man or boy and a horse tiredly munching from a bag, big houses owned by civil servants, lumbering tractors, a slightly sad-looking monorail construction, estimated to be finished in five years. Mehmet told me
about his history and studies (he used to teach at the university in Izmir, a city he called “the one love of his life”), answered my questions about the city and what we were seeing, and took me on a quick tour of the department. I was plied with tea and cookies within minutes of arrival by Belma hoca (hoca is a polite title for teachers), who calls herself the department mother and invited me to stay with her or come over for dinner anytime! anytime! within a minute of sitting down in her office. Mehmet extricated us after a little while, introduced me to İhsan (a department administrator with whom I corresponded over the summer), showed me a classroom, and pointed out his office (”not really an office,” he said, “more like a closet”). I learned I’d be teaching five hours of night classes on Monday, from 5:30 pm on, though still no one is clear on what, precisely, I’m teaching.

We took off again, this time for the apartment of Fadime and Narin, my hosts until I can be situated in my own apartment. More ever-present construction on the way– Mehmet told me he woke up one morning and literally found a new apartment building outside his window.

Narin and Fadime live on the fourth floor of one of the enormous apartment buildings that dominate this area of Antep, in a tidy little two-bedroom flat with carpets and slightly rickety furniture covered in various flowered cloths. Fadime, with whom I’d corresponded over the summer, wasn’t home when I arrived, but Narin welcomed me in and immediately plied me with food again. Narin is sweet and talkative and looks eerily like my friend Vera at home when she’s laughing, and we got along instantly, talking about travel and her hometown and food and linguistics. Mehmet vanished while I was in the shower, and when I emerged, Narin and I sat down and talked in earnest, more or less nonstop until Fadime got home.

I was given more tea and coffee than I could comfortably drink– which, given my caffeine consumption rate, is really quite impressive. At least five glasses of strong Turkish tea, and two of Turkish coffee, the second followed by Narin somewhat jokingly telling our fortunes from the grounds.²

Between the jet lag and the nonstop talk, the evening more or less flew by. Narin showed me her knitting and asked me to explain an SSK (slip-slip-knit) to her– apparently she’d been hoping all summer that the new ETA would know how to knit and be able to help her interpret American pattern abbreviations. Lots of talk of English literature– I think Narin is more well-read in the American classics than I am– and Turkish and American politics and regionalism. A long, joking riff on American accents and British accents. I managed to get on the internet briefly at some point during all of this to let you all know that I am, y’know, here and okay, but since then it’s been more or less inaccessible.

In that regard, a quick word on my connectivity, and how you can get in touch with me. The internet is more or less non-existent, although it should be more usable at school (and, this coming week, at Fulbright orientation). Gmail successfully connects about once a day and grabs new email and sends what I have in my outbox, but gchat doesn’t work and no other websites can be accessed. (The quick blog post the first day was made from Narin’s computer, but it’s been having the same problem since then. ETA: This is being posted on Sunday evening, from Narin’s computer.) The only thing that reliably works is Skype. So if you want to talk to me, you’ll need to log into Skype and hope that I get online, I guess; obviously, I’m not really hanging around the computer (so much to do! so much to see!), but I do generally check and see if the internet’s improved when going to bed and getting up. (I’m typing up this entry, mostly written during the evening of day 0 and morning of day 1, on the morning of my second full day here.) I’ve managed to call a few of you; the internet seems to support calls easily even though nothing else works. It’s
baffling and frustrating– I feel a little like Portland’s dropped off the face of the earth. Getting cut off so abruptly from everywhere else is difficult.

I can hear Narin getting up elsewhere in the apartment, so I’m going to cut transcribing all of this short. God only knows when I’ll actually be able to post it (answer: Sunday evening), let alone get descriptions of yesterday up, or actually talk to all of you. Soon, I hope; I miss you.

My hosts have been incredibly friendly and kind the whole way through– Turkey is lovely and pleasant, though still a big shock to my system. The jet lag is fading.

Okay. More soon.

1: Yes, dinosaur tarot. This woman, while at Burning Man, had
improvised dinosaur tarot for a group of people, and now that she’s
back in Portland and unemployed, she does dinosaur tarot at night in
the food carts. You pick five dinosaurs from her herd of plastic
toys– whichever ones “speak” to you– and indicate which is you, your
past, present and future, and your challenge. I am a protoceratops,
and am going through a period of transition (pterodactyl present) in
which I’ll be supported by a group of friends (hadrosaur future) and a
community, but feel very vulnerable to backstabbing. My heart is
vulnerable despite my well-protected head. The whole thing was the
most absurd and delightful only-in-Portland nonsense.

2: Narin claims that I have two roads ahead of me, that I will have an
important conversation with a man with an i in his name, that there
was a good-luck duck and a fish in my cup, that I would find my kısmet
(the happiness destined for me), that although I’m happy there are
many thoughts in my head and my heart is confused, and that of the two
secret wishes I made at the beginning, one will come true.