—

On the way to the bus station this morning, the city was unspeakably smoggy– worse than I’ve ever seen it. Gaziantep is a polluted place, unquestionably; when the weather was warmer, I’d find myself getting pollution headaches after anything more than a few hours downtown, and a low pall of dirty smoke hangs over the city at all times. But this was considerably more intense: from the top of the ridge of the Cumhuriyet neighborhood, I could look down sidestreets towards the center and see the whole city obscured, its outlines made uncertain by a grey haze. Downtown, it was difficult to even make out the edges of the castle clearly. Apparently yesterday a factory on the outskirts of the city caught fire, and now the aftermath is drifting through.

—

At the otogar, I got snapped up immediately by one of the where-are-you-going guys– the three or four people from the bus companies who hang out at the entrance to the station and try to gather up anyone incoming for one of the nearer destinations. It’s actually usually the best way for me to get a ticket; still buying directly from the bus companies, and usually for the soonest departure. My where-are-you-going guy today asked if I was German– usually the first question– but, to my surprise, followed it up by telling me (in German) that he’d lived in Köln for two years. Despite my assurances that no, I am not German, and yes, I understand (some) Turkish, the rest of our business was conducted in German. It was kind of sweet, actually; I got the impression he wanted to practice.¹ As he was walking me to the bus, ticket in hand, someone called out a joke to him in Turkish; I asked if he was a friend. “Yes,” he said, in Turkish this time, “all friends. But no German friends. And no German wife.” He grinned, and gestured expansively, jokingly. “Neden? Neden?” For what reason, what reason? Then, a little more quietly, without the gestures, neden again.

—

My initial impression of Urfa was dominated by pigeons.

From the otogar, a dolmuş took me into the center of old town through a city center which reminded me of Antep (but with the substitution of palm trees) and a short string of winding back streets, the kind that make you wonder whether the bus driver actually meant to turn this way, or is just enjoying trying to smooth down some of the nearby masonry. I hopped out when we reached the old bazaar (not really being eager to continue participating in the backstreet driving experiment), and, after a minute’s walk, found myself in the courtyard of the mosque built on the site of Abraham’s birth.

Which, as I said before, was full of pigeons. I realize this is a trite observation to be making about a terribly holy place– but it was the first thing that struck me, in any case. Huge clouds of pigeons, settling on the domes, the balconies of the minarets, the ornate architecture of the courtyard’s corners. In the center, a constantly-moving, constantly-disturbed crowd of pigeons cooing on the yellow stones with alternate contentment and indignation, as children threw handfuls of feed and raced through the knots of birds. At the very middle, where the children and pigeons were attending to their respective business, was a short stream set into a channel in the stone: water from the Balikligöl, the lake of sacred fish that supposedly sprang up to protect Abraham from fiery death– which eventually brought my attention back to the ostensible holiness, and away from the pigeons fluttering all around.

—

More writing incoming when it’s not so late after a long day of travel; pictures incoming when I have the correct camera cable again. Tomorrow: grading grading grading, seeing a movie (Yahşi Batı) with a friend and her class, possible dinner plans, personal academic projects. Busy life.

1: For me, hearing German is both lovely and a little strange. I can no longer consciously produce much German without great difficulty, but I understand a respectable amount when it’s spoken at me. What’s much more odd, though, is that there’s no translating going on in my head; what German I can remember just intrinsically means what it does, the same as English. The advantages of learning a language early, I guess.

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.