• 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.

After class today, a student came up to me and, in an apparent nonsequitur, asked if he could show me something. He said, “You know our god is Allah. Look.” He interlaced his fingers, and turned so that I could see the inside of his palms. His friend traced letters on his hands:

Allah, written in the lines on the palms of our hands. I couldn’t think of anything to say (save “thank you”) in response to so lovely a sharing of knowledge.

Merry Christmas, everyone, however you observe it.

Meant to write earlier tonight, and take care of incredibly piled-up and overdue paperwork, and finish up the last tallying of attendance and exams– and all I managed was eating a bowl of pasta and reading, and now it’s 1:30 am (how does that happen?). Alas.

(I think I get a pass on the day.)

In lieu of content, have links to a few of the Turkey-related blogs I read regularly:
• Istanbul Calling by Yigal Schleifer– a good source for political news, and especially so for links to serious background and discussion of Turkish issues.
• Kamil Pasha by Jenny White– regular updates on Turkish news and culture (with a nice occasional focus on women’s issues).
• Istanbul Eats– pure gluttonous reading pleasure.
• The Turkish Life by Jen Hattam– updated somewhat irregularly; an interesting expat’s perspective.

And for news, the NYTimes is often useful (more so lately than usual, I suspect, since Turkey’s been in the US news heavily over the last few months), but Hurriyet is a major Turkish newspaper with a daily English-language edition, and if you’re desperate there’s always the journalistic oddity that is Today’s Zaman.

Bitter Lemons International has Turkey-related content sometimes (though I don’t check there regularly) and is an excellent source for Middle Eastern issues, and SETimes has been useful for me for following Turkey’s various European issues (especially the ongoing EU snafu).

There are plenty of other sources I head to, but these are the ones I find myself visiting most often. If you follow Turkish news or blogs, please throw suggestions at me– I’m sure buried in reading material, but that doesn’t mean I’ll avoid adding more to the stack.

Headed to bed.

And now the can’t-write-a-blog-entry cop-out photos.
(Addendum: including captions with tags broke the entire blog, so here are the intended captions instead:
1: Myself and excellent professor atop the Galata Tower.
2: Excellent professor and awesome study-abroad guru.
3: Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul's most famous strolling street, at dusk.
4: Looking across at the Galata Tower as a storm rolls in.
Clearly it is time to readjust the WordPress stuff in the background of this blog.)

More writing tomorrow, ideally.

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.

I am dealing with a tragedy among my friends at home in the states, unfortunately, and you should not expect to hear anything from me (either posts or long-overdue replies to comments) in the imminent future.

This too shall pass.

Does this count as a costume? Taken in Istanbul, May 2008.

“No, that was his circumcision suit. You wouldn’t call a wedding dress a costume, would you?”

Duh! I’d completely forgotten about the big dress-up party that goes along with the Turkish circumcision tradition. And my friend’s point was absolutely right– although the outfit looked and still looks like a costume to me, there’s an important difference between the archaisms of certain kinds of formal clothes (like wedding dresses and circumcision suits) and the mimicking of history involved in a costume. American wedding dresses, even modern ones, still cling to traditions that seem completely out of step with modern perspectives on clothing: white for the bride (but only the first-time bride), a long concealing skirt with a train, garters, maybe even still a veil. If we weren’t so accustomed to seeing wedding dresses in their own peculiar role, of course they’d look bizarre, archaic– like costumes.

Living here, I find my misinterpretations and mistakes getting mirrored back to me as insights fairly often, but it’s not always comfortable. There’s certainly satisfaction in figuring out (or having explained to me) some cultural note I was perplexed by, and amusement and fascination in the differences. But I do find myself struck by my minor and major misunderstandings alike, and wondering just what, exactly, is getting assumed about me.

Well. At least now I won’t call it a costume in class tomorrow. Small victories.