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From Abroad

Well, I’m back in the States, back in good ol’ West Virginia. I feel compelled to wrap up my blog with a final entry, but frankly I haven’t the foggiest idea what I should write about. My education and experiences were so far reaching that to say anything I’d need pages and pages. Nevertheless, I’ll write something and hope it is somewhat coherent.
As expected my time in Turkey was again incredible. While it may not have matched my exchange days in the amount of fun, (having as much fun as I did while I was an exchange student is probably illegal in some states) I learned infinitely more, not only about Turkish, but Turkish culture (including some silly nuances) and interactions. Perhaps the most exciting part of my experience is that with my newly aquired Turkish skills I was able to form real friendships with people that spoke no English. Indeed, there exist people in the world whom I feel as though I know reasonably well that I have never communicated with in my mother tongue. Wow, what a thought.
Anyone that is even remotely interested in travelling or langauges should apply for the Critical Language Scholarship (clscholarship.com). Period. If you have questions about it please feel to email me.
I’ve only been gone a week and my heart already burns for Istanbul. I ache for sipping tea on streetside tea houses with old Turkish men, for the unbelievably pleasant ferry boat rides, for waking up on hot Istanbul Saturday mornings to the call the prayer, for my Turkish lady, for Istiklal Caddesi, one of the busiest street in Europe, for delicious Turkish kebab, for Gypsy musicians on the streets, for intoxicating manzara.
Well, thats about all I have to say without rambling on and on. I hope you enjoyed reading my blog. Kendine iyi bak, take care, and have as many adventures as possible.

The other day I went out to Boğaziçi Üniversitesi’s campus (my school from my exchange where my Turkish lady, Aydan, goes to school) for a good old Turkish time; eating cheese and olives, looking at a spectacular views of the Bosphorus. We went to meet Aydan’s friends at the manzara (remember that word?) and shoot the breeze for a while. Shortly before arriving Aydan informed me that she really didn’t like one of the people we were going to meet, Ceyda, because she “talks too much”? mind you, it is pretty atypical for any Turk to say something like this, Aydan included, so I knew it must be bad. Sure enough we meet up and the girl talks entirely too much. Ceyda was definitely quite rude to me from the get go and I was happy I knew the score before I arrived.
About an hour after meeting her Ceyda said something extremely rude and ignorant to me. I won’t repeat it here because what was said is not important. She spoke in Turkish so I was not entirely sure I caught all of it but Aydan later translated for my and I pretty much had it, which made me happy. Anyway I knew I had been insulted and had pretty much the same reaction I have when people insult me in English (“Really, maaan? Why?”).
Anyway the reason I thought this was interesting is that it demonstrated to me something that I thought to be true but was never really sure about because I don’t speak any other language well enough; that in every culture and language there are jerks. And not jerks in some kind of different way, no, jerks in the everyday, classic, in-your-face ignorant aggression way. I guess this is pretty obvious in hindsight but I think it highlights a broader thing that learning Turkish has taught me; that everyone in the world is essentially the same. There are undoubtably cultural differences and everyone might speak a different language but there is a incontrovertible truth that there are jerks all over the world.

One of the most difficult things for Westerners to get used to in countries like Turkey is that nothing is ever definite. Everywhere you go you can bargain and if a request is reasonable you can most likely do whatever you please after a little convincing of the authority figures.

DISCLAIMER: I am not talking about doing things that are flat out illegal. I am talking about bending small rules that frankly I wonder why are taken so seriously in the States. I certainly do not do, nor do I advocate doing illegal things in general, especially in foreign countries, and ESPECIALLY in Turkey. You DO NOT want to go to Turkish prison. Read on.

For example, the other day I went into a store to buy a bathing suit. Now, in the United States, if you go to a store and purchase a bathing suit, you are going to pay whatever is written on the tag. In fact, if you were to even mention that you might like to pay something less than the tag price you would certainly be met with, at the very least, some confused looks, if not some real hostility. Turkey, however, is quite different. I came into the bathing suit store in a hurry as I was going to buy a bathing suit for a school trip that was due to leave in half an hour. I bought two bathing suits for my friend and I, and the total came to around 30 lira. Fortunately, this is Turkey:

Me: “Abi (brother), you don’t have the sizes I need”
Turk: “Well I’m sorry but it’s all we have”
Me: “Hmm, well, you see, it’s a little expensive and you don’t have my size. Also, I’m a student at Yildiz Teknik (my school, just up the road) and I don’t have a lot of money”
Turk: “Oh? Where are you from?”
Me: “Well, I’m American but I’m studying Turkish at Yildiz for the summer”
Turk: “Hmm? Well, I guess we can make a student discount. My son is studying in New York City and he loves it.”
[he rings up 20 lira on the register]
Me: “Ah thank you so much abi, I really appreciate it. Good luck to your son.”
Turk: [literally] “Enjoy wearing it, laughingly laughingly!”

In Turkey there are lots of laws and social rules, just like anywhere else. However the difference is that in Turkey everything is like “well, eh? that’s not really allowed, but? you’re a student, so? how about you just don’t do that”. Not to say that the Turkish police are slouches; quite the opposite. They are some of the toughest cops around. However unlike cops in the US, you can reason with them. If you were to, say, want to walk on a large semi-completed but no-longer-under-construction bridge on the Golden Horn, you’d probably tell the policemen stationed there that, while it is supposed to be illegal, you are foreign students and want to get some good pictures of the Horn and you will most certainly be careful. For example.

Turks have a phrase that I seem to be hearing more and more these days, probably because I understand significantly more than the last time I was here. Burası Türkiye, “this is Turkey”. You see a car driving the wrong way on the highway, burası Türkiye. You see a cab driver cut a bus driver off and the bus driver gets off the bus to yell in the cabbie’s face; burası Türkiye. You see cops with AK-47’s posing with soccer fanatics, police taking tea breaks, news headlines of “Snake Fights Cat in Kadıköy”, people selling piles of old aluminum, alarm clocks shaped like mosques that play the call the prayer, tens of stores in a row that sell the exact same product, grown men that sell only umbrellas and lottery tickets, headscarved women with Armani sunglasses? burası Türkiye, burası Türkiye, burası Türkiye.

Just ‘cause my mama says she likes these:

I should apologize for the fact that I haven’t written in a little while, especially since there was another, and perhaps more serious terror attack in Istanbul. It is true that the attack occurred in a fairly crowded shopping district, which is a bit disconcerting, although in one that I have never been to, nor had ever heard of. This is not surprising as by some counts Istanbul is a city of 20 million people. Anyway, I want to tell everyone that I am alright. The only way that the attack has affected me is that I see updates about finding the suspects frequently on TV. Again this is in no way a reason to not come to Istanbul or be worried about me.
Learning Turkish is going well. I had a strange realization the other day. I was thinking about a conversation I had with my Turkish lady-friend had told me (she speaks English pretty well) and I realized I had no idea if we spoke in Turkish or English. It was a fairly in depth conversation, although one that I could carry on in both languages, and for the life of me I can’t remember. Even more cool to think about is that in all likelihood it was in Turkish. We probably speak in Turkish 90 percent of the time, and usually only in English when I want to say a very complicated sentence. I think this is a pretty significant step because it means that in my brain I’ve attached Turkish words to abstract ideas, as opposed to having Turkish words simply be translations of English words that describe abstract ideas. At this point a thing with pages and words is both a book and kitap. Not speaking any language other than English, to me this is a pretty cool thing to have happen.
I’ve gotten a couple emails from people about studying in Turkey lately which makes me happy, partially because I like talking about Turkey to people who are interested and partially because it means that people other than my mother are reading this. If you have any questions about Turkey or studying in Turkey please don’t hesitate to ask. Not to toot my own horn but at this point I do have a decent amount of knowledge about being a student in Turkey, traveling in and around Turkey, ect. If you are considering studying here, here’s three tips: One, learn just a little Turkish while you are here. Two, go to Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, it’s the best, it’s close to the fun stuff in Istanbul, it’s incredibly beautiful, and the people are great. Thirdly and most importantly, stay for a year. Everyone I know that only did the semester regretted not staying longer.
Having said that I think it’s important to say that Turkey is (in my mind) by far the best place to study abroad. The people are wonderful, the girls are beautiful, the food is delicious, the language is interesting and learnable, the culture is intense, vibrant, and completely different than the US, most things are pretty cheap? the list could go on for pages. Furthermore studying in Turkey is a good sieve for quality people. The type of people (non-Turks, yabancılar) that you meet while studying in Turkey are, well, the type of people that would come study in Turkey and are generally pretty interesting. Some of my best friends are ones that I met in Turkey two years ago, and honestly I can’t remember what I was even like before I studied in Turkey. In conclusion, drop everything and come study for a year in Turkey. It’s awesome, you won’t regret it.

Here’s some more pictures:

In Turkey there are cats everywhere; on college campuses, under tables at restaurants, in classrooms, anywhere a cat might be able to survive… which is pretty much everywhere. At first to me this seemed very strange and silly. It is difficult to not laugh everytime a cat comes bounding through the window during class or when a tail brushes your leg while you’re eating. However the more time I spend in Istanbul the more sense it makes to have hordes of cats running wild. For example, in Istanbul there are very few trash cans. Instead, trash piles magically appear in the middle of pedestrian throughfares and the municipality comes and picks it up. In fact, this works pretty well, and I think Istanbul is fairly clean for a city of 17 million that has been continually growing for a thousand years ago. However were it not for the cats, I shudder to think what the rat situation might look like. I mentioned to a Turkish friend that in America we don’t have cats roaming free and he replied incredulous, “Why not? But cats are so funny!”
Another interesting thing to note is that Turks don’t treat the street cats like you’d imagine… quite the opposite; it is not uncommon to see a shop owner putting food out, or a proper headscarved woman crouching to give an especially cute cat a good scratch. Oftentimes you can hear groups of Turkish girls squealing “Offff çok tatlı yaaa… şeker yaaa”, literally “Oh it’s soo tasty… like sugar yaaa” My Turkish friends love when I imitate this.
If and when people mistreat the cats people almost always react, ranging from a tsk tsk to a shout. And this kind of behavior isn’t reserved only for cats; put your feet up on a seat on a bus or talk too loudly on the tramvay and you are sure to get reprimanded by the first person that sees you. I was once reprimanded by a homeless guy for resting my foot too close to a seat on a bus.
Turks care deeply for all the residents of Istanbul, their hometowns, Turkey, and the world in general. You could literally go to any town in Turkey, knock on a door, and chances are you would have a place to stay at least for a night or two free of charge. In Istanbul there are plenty of homeless selling everything from tissues to wally walkers. I’m sure that tissues are not selling like hotcakes, but in Turkey these people survive because people buy things they don’t want or need. I’ve even seen restaurant owners give street children large bags of food for their family. Turks are some of the most caring and socially concious people I have ever encountered, which is definitely one of the countless reasons I love this country so much.

In other news, this is how I get home from school everyday:
p=.

As of late, I have been hanging out with Turks far out of my social class. For example, the other day I had dinner in one of the richest districts of Istanbul with one of the coaches of Besiktas JK. For those of you that don’t know Besiktas (I wouldn’t expect you to), it is one of three major soccer clubs in Turkey. So, well, you get the idea.
Anyway, I don’t have time to write a decent entry as I still haven’t finished tomorrow’s homework, which as always is substantial. I did want to put up some pictures however, and I hope you enjoy.

A quick view from the Galata Bridge

A good example of manzara... The old city at sunset.

Türks out for a stroll in front of Yeni Camii

Yeeep. That’s me and the Black Sea at the mouth of the Boğaz, Bosphorus.

And my Turkish family.

Some good old Turkish exercise. In every park there are “exercise machines”... although they are very oddly built without any kind of resistance, and I fail to see how there could be any real benefits.

Me “tuting some baliklar”(there’s some serious Turklish for you) in front of the Yeni Camii on the Galata Bridge.

As you might have seen in the news there was an attack on US Consulate in Istanbul the other day, resulting in the deaths of three Turkish security guards and the three gunmen. You can read much more here:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=istanbul&btnG=Search+News
First of all I need to say that I am fine. The attack occurred at the highly fortified American consulate on the outskirts of Istanbul, far from anywhere I frequent. I did visit the consulate two weeks ago for a meeting with some State Dept officials so it is a little weird to see it on CNN and the like.
Truthfully, the attack really has little effect of me; these things happen. It can be a pretty nasty world sometimes but it is critically important that we move beyond events like this. In fact, I think that if anything it is even more important that I be here now. There is only one way to defeat terrorism and that it is stare it straight in the face. Terrorism aims to incite fear in people through violent and sometimes random acts, and out of that fear cause people to make decisions that harm themselves. There can be no militaristic victory over this type of warfare because by fighting in the shadows the terrorists have turned their greatest weakness, their lack of resources and small numbers, into their greatest strength. If we duck and run at the slightest sign of violence terrorism has succeeded. At any rate, I won?t be letting this bother me and I won?t be coming home until my course is over.
There have been some pretty graphic pictures on the front pages of the major news papers, but they have all had a very pro-American slant. I have had several Turks come up to me and apologize for what happened. They explain that these guys were stupid, crazy, and a whole lot of other adjectives that I wouldn?t want my mother to know I heard (or that I know how to say in both English and Turkish). Turks love American people and culture. They love our movies, music, clothes, and expressions, and almost every Turk is continually trying to at least visit the States. I have had a few meetings with Turks that will come out and say that they don?t like America, but after the slightest prodding they will admit (partially to themselves) that they in fact love Americans but oppose the war in Iraq.
Turkey has its own war on terror ongoing in the southeast on the Iraqi border and Turks are vehemently anti-terror. Other than soccer team slogans and silly English phrases, the most popular graffiti says “savaş hayır”, ?no war?.
Anyway, to my family and people worrying about me, please don?t. I am fine, and I will continue to be. This attack has had no effect of my life and I am in no way anxious about further attacks.

I apologize that I haven’t written in a while; I’ve been extremely busy with my Turkish classes and I really haven’t had a whole lot of free time—compounded by the fact that my computer went on the fritz a few days before I left and as such I have no steady access to Firefox, which the blog requires I use.

I spent the last weekend on a group tour run by the program in Canakkale and Edirne. Canakkale is incredibly beautiful and pleasant and is also the site of one of the bloodiest battles in modern history with 150,000 people killed. We visited a few monuments that were interesting but I spent most of my time staring off at the beautiful manzara. I’m not much of a history buff, and I preferred not to spend too much time dwelling on the people that died on the ground I was standing on.

One coolest things about cities like Istanbul is this idea of being able to “feel the history”. It is true that anywhere you go you can’t help but think about all of the people that have walked on the ground you walk on. There are countless door marble thresholds in Istanbul that are significantly worn and contoured by millions or even billions of feet sliding over them for many hundreds of years. Truthfully; that is no exaggeration.

At the same time however, I’m always struck by how timeless cities are. Cities like Istanbul have no memory, and each pair of feet that passes over the marble thresholds is just another set of feet. Istanbul doesn’t care who you are or where you’re from, she has seen it all.

While I was in Canakkale I was struck with the same feeling of timelessness. Save for the gigantic monuments and the endless names of lost brigades and ships you’d never know how much blood was spilled on the land. It simply goes on; the breeze is still the same and the endless fields of sunflowers still grow. At the end of the day, Canakkale is just a beautiful place.

Television in Turkey would send the FCC through the roof. If you think American television is bad, I challenge you to stomach Turkish TV. There are essentially only a few types of shows: the first kind is a kind of music variety show. Usually arabesque singers, in particular one Ibrahim Tatlises (literally “Abraham Sweetvoice”) will sit around a large table, tell jokes, and drink tea. Suddenly someone will stand up and start singing in that Arab sounding, wavering voice, only to be joined in shortly by the rest of the guests. The song becomes a massive ordeal and finally ends in thunderous applause from the crowd.

The next type is the intensely violent Mafioso drama. It is difficult to follow these shows because they have countless subplots, necessitated by the fact that multiple seemingly important characters are killed of each episode. Each episode is guaranteed to have at least one or two brutal beatings, far more graphic than anything that might be allowed by the FCC.

A third type is the yellow news channels. These channels are incredibly overdramatic and like the paper news usually being with some type of sensational and mostly deceptive headline. For example, I read a headline in the news the other day that said something like “Even Ten-Year -Olds Are Getting Gastric Bypass Surgery These Days?”, but when I read the article all it said was that there was a single reported case of a kid getting gastric bypass surgery. These channels usually have a soundtrack of some extremely intense techno music just so you know how important the stories are.

The last kind is the most common and is the extremely silly soap opera. These usually include squealing Turkish girls, demons, magic, crazy ladies, incredulous old men, ect.

Turkish people are notorious gossipers. Turkish language even has a “gossip tense” restricted for knowledge that was obtained through the grapevine. Getting good at using this tense is definitely a goal of mine.

So I’ve been trying to take some pictures around town so that I might post them and give you some idea of what I’m working with on this end. However, whenever I see beautiful manzara (Manzara ne demek hatirliyor musun – Do you remember what manzara means?) I grab my camera and take a photo, and every time I’m disappointed at how short it falls of what I’m actually looking at. I did take some good ones while my friend and I fished off of the Galata Bridge today though so maybe next post will include some pictures.

One thing my I’ve noticed about Turkey is that business operates completely differently. For example, if you want a bike in Istanbul, there is only one place in the whole city you can get one and it is under a bridge in the Russian district. Not that there is only one store that sells bikes, there are in fact several of them. They all just happen to be in the same place. And that is the case with just about every type of good; if you want a cooking pot, plumbing materials, speargun, guitar, chainsaw, ect., you have to go to a very specific part of town, and you can choose between a whole bunch of stores that sell the same thing. To me it seems like they don’t understand the concept of competition but I’m sure this is not the case. There must be a reason for this and I’ve decided to make it a mission of mine to figure out why. I will report back when I figure out why.

Living in Istanbul is great because everyday you wake up in the greatest city in the world. Even a menial task like riding the bus is exciting because it is so visually stimulating. Around every corner is something that is not only completely different that anything you might see in Morgantown, WV or Amherst, NY (my hometown) but it’s probably seven hundred years old and incredibly well built. I’m not really a fan of the phrase “feel the history” but there’s really no other way to describe it. Istanbul is thought to have been continuously inhabited for as long as 5000 years so if feeling the history is possible, the feeling is going to be about as intense as it can be in Istanbul.

I’m currently sitting on the roof terrace of my hotel on Istanbul’s Golden Horn enjoying the heck out of the manzara, the really nice view. That’s right, Turkish has a word for a nice view. While I’m sitting here enjoying myself and thinking about Turkey I guess I should say a word about the Turkish language I’m studying.

Turkish is not, as many people assume because of Turkey’s location, in anyway grammatically related to Arabic or Persian. There are many Persian and Arabic loanwords, but grammatically Turkish is classified as Turkic language, and is related to many Central Asian languages including Uzbek, Azeri, Tatar, Turkmen, Uygur, et cetera. While you probably haven’t heard of any of these, about 200 million people speak Turkic languages worldwide. Interestingly enough, Turkish is also fairly closely related to Finnish and Japanese. I have heard this strange distribution attributed to the Turkic people fleeing Turan (the Turkic homeland) as a result of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Horde.

Turkish is a little difficult because the grammar is completely different than in English. Instead of prepositions, Turkish has postpositions that are added on to the ends of words. As a result, you can get words like “Cekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdan” meaning “a person whom we could not turn into one from Czechoslovakia.” Another difficulty is that the verb comes at the end of the sentence, so you have to try to speak like Yoda; “Bardak masada var mi?”, “a glass- on the table- is there?”. Once you get used to this however, Turkish is much easier than it looks.