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.

• (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.

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.

In discussing the apartment with Narin, I found out something very surprising to me: many Turkish people apparently don’t know– and don’t care about– their address.² Narin doesn’t even know the name of the street her apartment is on; everyone she’s asked has said it doesn’t have a name, even though it’s a very major street. Mail, even for taxes or bills or government documents, is a little uncommon, and usually comes to your place of business. (Mail to me, for example, should be directed to my university address in the Yabancı Diller Yüksekokulu.¹) Yet kindergarteners still have learning their address and phone number as an early piece of homework (it was my very first assignment in school at Fairview, too). Narin claims everyone just forgets it right afterward.

This ranks near the top of surprising cultural differences that have appeared so far, even though it’s relatively minor. I can list the addresses of everywhere I’ve ever lived– but Narin says she’s not even sure how she would get mail at her house!

Ok, back to work. Lots to do!

1: School of Foreign Languages.
2: Ok, Narin backed down on this one. Many people do know their addresses, but many Turkish buildings don’t have clear or useful addresses, and personal mail is pretty rare. However, official mail does still happen– though it’s common for it to go to your workplace, too. So address-obsession: not common, but address-usage: occasional.