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.

—–

And a note: This semester was, in many ways, both much more challenging and much more rewarding than the first term– and yet none of it is up on the internet. Hopefully, I’ll be able to correct some of that– and post some of the thousand-photo backlog– over the next two weeks, as I relive it for friends in Portland.

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.

—

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.

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.

• (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.”

Bayram begins tomorrow, and I’m excited for it. I pride myself on being at least somewhat better-informed than the average yabancı about Turkish customs and Islamic traditions, but I really have no idea what the experience of participating in the holiday (even in a limited way) is going to be like. Knowledge of history and practices and religious significance and whatnot doesn’t get me very far in anticipating the emotions of and reactions to the newness of a foreign custom, one entirely outside of my own context. I’ll be visiting with a friend’s family in Adana for the first two days, then traveling to some coastal Roman and Byzantine sites on the third, then stopping by northern Hatay on the fourth day on my way back to Antep. It’s exciting. And makes me a little nervous.

In an odd sort of way, Thanksgiving and Kurban Bayramı fit well in my mind. Both seem like celebrations, on some level, of having enough: enough to get through the winter, enough to give to friends and family, enough to indulge for a day or two in an extravagant feast and celebration of togetherness, enough that you don’t have to endure pain and hardship for a little while. Charity is central. Food and family are central. There’s more to it than that, of course, in both cases– but enough, and being grateful for it, is important.

So instead of one day to remind me to be thankful this year, I’m lucky enough to get five devoted to the idea. I’m thankful for my friends and my family, for the ability to live in this wonderful place, for my health and my happiness and my luck. I’m thankful for the warmth and generosity of my new friends here, for the challenge of my work, for the time that I have to see places and explore experiences so unusual for my peers. I’m thankful for everything I have, for my life, and for the reminder to think on it and appreciate it.

Happy Thanksgiving, and bayramınız kutlu olsun.

1: Roast chicken (turkeys are– ironically, I guess– difficult to find here) over a bed of potatoes and quartered onions, plus tiny onions cooked whole until sweet with slivered spinach and crushed garlic steamed over them as a side. Bread and butter. Apple pie (a lovely success, when I expected a pretty awful failure– I bake a mean apple pie, but the circumstances were not in my favor).

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.

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.

There is most of a longer entry written down in my notebook, so I will wait until I can connect my own computer and use contractions and type comfortably before I go into detail about the mild craziness that was my trip here. The most important part: I am safely arrıved in Gaziantep, with both self and belongings intact, and my hosts are being almost ridiculously kind to me. I have this weekend to more or less stitch my brain back together, then I start teaching on Monday, with five hours of evening classes. Tuesday morning, another plane trip (aaaugh), to Ankara for Fulbright orientation; Saturday, back to Antep to start teaching in earnest the followıng Monday.

More when I have apostrophes and easy access to an ı wıth a dot. Goıng to try my hardest to stay up untıl a reasonable bedtıme tonight.