contact info and the like

I figured now that I'm settled in, I'd let you all know how to get in touch with me, if it strikes your fancy.
My snail mail address:
c/o Study Abroad Office
504 Rektörlük
Middle East Technical University (or Orta Doğu Teknik Universitesi)
06531
Ankara, Turkey

or you can email me at r_doffing_at_hotmail_dot_com (take out all the _s)
that's also my msn name, so feel free to say hi!
Of course, you can always comment here, too.

I've finalized my class schedule. I'm taking Turkish, Contemporary Turkey, Political Economy of Globalisation, Advanced Communications in IR, Human Rights in World Politics, and Museology. I only have one morning class, on Mondays, which I'm psyched about.

Oh, and it's finally warmer! Most of the snow has melted, so you can really see what the campus looks like, which is nice. I'll try to take pics in a bit and post them here.
'til later,
-R

Istanbul Rocks!

The view looking upwards, towards the domes, in the Blue Mosque.


More of the Blue Mosque. In this photo, you can see the Ottoman-style arches, and the thousands of tiles (the name "Blue Mosque" comes from the blue tiles), all gorgeously patterned.


The view from the Golden Horn. We walked along the waterfront at sunset, and the views were just stunning.


Sarah, me, and Desi, in the Blue Mosque. We're standing in front of one of 4 gigantic pillars that hold the dome up. The blue headscarves are lent to tourists, as women are supposed to cover their heads inside mosques, although they don't bother with headscarves for large tour groups.


The Blue Mosque. This is the right side, and it's a little blurry since they aren't too keen on flash photography inside.


Me, in front of the Aya Sofya.


Several of us at a narghile cafe. The thing in the middle is a narghile, or water pipe, and it's a major Turkish pastime.


The Blue Mosque, looking down from Sultanahmet Park.


A man praying at Yeni Cami.


A shot of some of the inscriptions under the dome at Yeni Cami.
Some of us exchange students, with Yeni Cami in the background.


A close-up shot of the fishermen and cafes on the Galata Bridge.


Yeni Cami. It's simply immense, and there's so much attention that was paid to every last detail, it's gorgeous.


Fishermen and shops on the Galata Bridge. The card game "bridge" is named after the Galata Bridge; apparently British soldiers stationed in Istanbul during the Crimean War would cross the bridge every night to play a new card game in a Beyoğlu coffeeshop.

Yeni Cami (The New Mosque, although it was finished in the 1600s), from Beyoğlu.

Hey!
It was a little cold last week, so about a dozen of us exchange students took off for Istanbul for the weekend. It was incredible. We stayed in Taksim, which is full of shops, boutiques, restaurants, cafes, and bars, and we saw soooo much! We took the bus there Friday afternoon, which took about 6 hours. It was only 20 lira, and the bus had a beverage service, and gave out chocolate brownies, which is definitely something that the New York-Boston busses should look at. We got to our hotel at maybe 9 at night, and had dinner and chilled for a while after walking down Istikal Caddesi, which is where the locals come to see and be seen, and to do their shopping. It's a very Western street: I've only seen one Starbucks in Ankara, in a shopping mall, but there were 2 Starbucks, a Dunkin' Donuts, and 2 Gloria Jeans on Istikal. I didn't actually stop at any of them, but they certainly illustrated that Istanbul is not Ankara. On Saturday, we went for breakfast, then walked down sidestreets full of music shops and other specialty shops to the Galata Bridge, which connects the 2 European parts of Istanbul. The bridge is really cool: under the part where the cars drive, there are tons of cafes and restaurants, where you can sit and watch the sea (One cafe has beanbag chairs, which are heavenly after a day of walking around Istanbul). There are also loads of street vendors on the bridge, as well as fishermen casting their rods off the side. It's a very lively place. On the other side of Galatay, we toured the Yeni Cami, or New Mosque. The "new" part is relative, as it was finished in 1663; it was stunning. It was right next to the Spice Bazaar, so we toured that next, and had some Turkish Delight, which is really good when it's fresh. I saw some spice sets that I liked, and was going to get them, but then the shopkeeper found out I was American and refused to do business with any "American terrorits." Other than that guy, the shopkeepers were more than happy to do business with us, often too happy. We practically didn't need our limited Turkish, as so many of the vendors spoke English; we still tried to speak Turkish as much as we could, though. After the Spice Bazaar, we wound our way to the Grand Bazaar, which is immense and overwhelming. Imagine any large shopping mall, but increase the size, fill every spare inch with vendors, and have merchandise literally packed in, with scores of Turkish shopkeepers calling out "Hey ladies," "Excuse me, beautiful," or "Oooh, it's a harem!" (we were walking around in a group of four girls and a guy). It actually wasn't very crowded, because this is the tourist off season, so it was kind of nice. I didn't buy anything, though, because the prices were all at least 4 times what I'd seen things for in Ankara, and the shopkeepers had us pegged as tourists and didn't really want to barter. Note to the wise: don't actually buy things in the Grand Bazaar unless you speak Turkish. We stopped at a narghile cafe afterwards, and had some narghile and tea. Narghile is a Turkish water pipe, and it's part of the core of Turkish identity. The stereotypical Turk on a Sunday afternoon is sitting at a cafe with a narghile and some tea, playing backgammon. It's pretty relaxing. We found a guy selling earrings on the street for 1 lira, so naturally we all bought several pair; they're really nice. We then wandered down to Sultanahmet Park, which is known for the two buildings at the ends of the park: the Aya Sofya and the Blue Mosque. I didn't go in to the Aya Sofya (I will next time, for sure), but I did get to see the Blue Mosque, which was absolutely stunning. It's just immense, and the builders made sure that every small detail was just gorgeous. While we were walking on the grounds, we bought head scarves from a vendor; mine is black and red, and I don't have photos of it yet, but I'm sure I will soon. We then wandered down to the Golden Horn, and walked around it on the waterfront back to the Galata Bridge (incidentally, the card game Bridge is named after the Galata Bridge), where we stopped at a cafe before heading back to Taksim for dinner and dancing. On Sunday, we slept in, brunched at a cafe, and did some shopping before heading to the bus station, where we bargained (or, Katy bargained, as she's been here since Fall semester and therefore has better Turkish and better bargaining skills) and got 15 lira bus tickets back. We went shopping and ate at the Otogar (bus station) Metro station, which is full of shops selling everything (I could have got a television, or baklava, or a handgun. yes, they had 3 different stores selling handguns. this is so not America!); I picked up some Turkish Delight, which is really good, but only when it's fresh. We got on the bus at 7, it left at 7:30-ish, and we were back in Ankara by 2AM. I was absolutely exhausted in class today, but it was so worth it. I was really surprised at how different Istanbul was. It was very Western, and very tourist-oriented; so many people spoke English that I think if I studied there, I'd never learn Turkish. I also saw more "stereotypically Turkish" things in Istanbul than in Ankara: doner kebap were everywhere, they're huge amounts of meat packed onto a vertical metal spit and cooked, the cook shaves off meat as it's ordered. There were also a lot of shops selling Turkish Delight, which you really can't find in Ankara. It seems to be primarily popular in Istanbul. A lot of the things for sale in the tourist shops struck me as odd, because I hadn't seen them as part of Turkish culture.
I am really glad I got to Istanbul this weekend. It is an amazing city, really romantic in the old-ageless-but-really-modern city kind of way. It was also like 60 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny, whereas there's definitely still snow on the ground here in Ankara.
I'll leave you with some photos of my trip. I don't think I'll get a chance to caption them tonight, but I can edit my post tomorrow and add captions. I tried to capture how gorgeous everything was, and how absolutely immense Istanbul is.

Take care,
-R

Turkish!

Hey everyone!
Marcus' comment reminded me that I'd been meaning to write a post about the Turkish language, so I figured I'd do that now. It's been pretty fun, learning Turkish, although I'm tripped up a lot by pronounciation of the vowels, especially ö, ü, and the "i" without the dot (I haven't figured out how to type that one yet). My other languages have come in handy: Turkish has a "ma" particle, like Chinese, used to ask a yes-no question. Of course, where it's just "ma" in Chinese, it's "mi," "mi(no dot)," "mu," and "mü," because Turkish has vowel harmony, which means that you match up the vowel of the particle with the last particle of the word before it. It's pretty easy to just gloss over in conversation, because I seem to subconsiously harmonize the vowels, but when I'm writing, I always have to stop and think about which vowels are linked.

Turkish is also a case language, which means that the subject and object of the verb in a sentence are indicated, so that word order doesn't matter as much (English isn't a case language, but Latin is). There is a "preferred" word order (basically subject-object-verb, at least from what I've learnt so far), but it's ok if you don't say it correctly, which is great for me.

Turkish is also an agglutinative language, as Marcus pointed out (English isn't an agglutinative language, but Finnish is). This makes stringing sentences together...interesting, for me. It also makes for some really, really long words. I've only learned present-tense conjugations so far, but they seem designed to make every verb at least 8 or so letters long. For example, "bilmek," or "to know," is conjugated in the first-person-singular present tense as "biliyorum" (I know). Negating is pretty simple; you just add an "m" in the middle, for example to make "bilmiyorum," or "I don't know." I've been using the phrase "bilmiyorum Türkçe" a whole heck of a lot recently. So far, the agglutination hasn't been too much of a big deal for me, because I don't know enough structure to string together megawords, but my Turkish teacher did give us a longer Turkish word during a discussion we had about word lengths; it sort of makes me a bit nervous about what I'll learn next, grammar-wise: it's çekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz. You'll have to imagine most of the "i"s without dots, and the middle "s" with a line through it, because I can't type those letters on this keyboard. The word is a full question, and doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it literally means "Are you one of the people who we couldn't make Czechoslovakian?"

One of the easier things about Turkish is the structure of related words. If you want to say that someone does something, you append "-cu" or one of its vowel-harmony variants to the noun. For example, "futbol" is soccer, so "futbolcu" is soccer player. Possession is similarly easy, you just append "-im" (for "my") or a variant to the word, for example "defter" is notebook, so "defterim" is my notebook.

I'm really enjoying learning Turkish so far. It's not anything like English, so I can't use English as a crutch as you can with Romance languages; even the cognates don't always sound like they're from the same word ("bilardo" is billiards, but I'd never have guessed it). Turkish is a very logical language, with almost no irregular verbs so far, which is nice.

In other news here in Turkey, it's been snowing here all weekend, but not half as much as I hear it's snowed in Boston. The difference is that they still don't plow here, so I had to wade through a foot of wet slush to return a book to the library today. I spent the rest of the day comfortably ensconced in my dorm, reading, surfing the web, talking with other exchange students, and making dinner with some other American students (it was pasta with a fesh-tomato-based sauce; I've made this 4 times with exchange students, and am fully convinced that this must be the one dish that every college kid worth their salt can make and likes to make). Next weekend, I believe I'll be in Cappadocia, although I haven't signed up for the trip yet; it should be fun, and it'll be nice to get out of Ankara. On Thursday and Friday, I don't have classes, so I think I'm going to try and find the pazaar in Maltepe (a region of Ankara), which is supposed to be the biggest pazaar in Ankara; it'll be an adventure, as I'll get to take the Metro system (subway) to get there.

Well, that's about it for now, so I'll just leave you all with one of the longest words in Turkish: Muvaffakiyetsizlestiricilestiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmissinizcesine. It means "acting like you're one of those people who support bad manners," and I have no clue when you'd actually want to use it. But it's fun, nonetheless. Hope I wasn't too confusing with the Turkish grammar rambling,
'Til later,
-R

Class!

Hey everyone!
This week was the first week of class here at METU. I was reeeally looking forward to it; it's been like 7 or 8 weeks since my last classes at BU. My classes seem pretty interesting, I've been adding and dropping a few, to get a better schedule with better classes, and I think I'll end up with:
Intensive Turkish
Contemporary Turkey
Political Economy of Globalisation
Human Rights in World Politics
Museology
Intro to Foreign Policy Analysis (I might drop this)
Advanced Communications in IR (I'm probably going to add this)

I've been able to find all of my IR classes pretty easily; it's slightly a pain to walk to the IR building, since it's 2 miles from my dorm and much of the trek entails wading through a good 3 or 4 inches of slush-water, but the building itself is gorgeous, all marble and modern, with really comfortable lecture rooms and seminar rooms. It kind of reminds me of SMG back at BU. My other classes, though, have been interesting. I originally signed up for Rural Sociology, and I spent over an hour trying to find the darn classroom. Never did find it. I asked the Sociology department secretary for help, but she didn't know English, so I asked some random people about the room number, and got 3 different answers as to where it was. I found out later that it was a required course for Socoilogy majors at METU, and that it met twice a week at 9, instead of once, so I dropped it in favor of Museology, which I also got lost trying to find. This time, though, I'd learnt enough Turkish to ask the History Department secretary "Sinif 412 oda nerede?" which is, "what room is class 412 in?"; it didn't help much, though, because the room had a name, not a number. When I finally found room "masada izdemir" (or something like that), it was in the basement of the Library. I still can't believe I found it.
Classes here are a bit different than classes back home. They still have 3 hours of class a week, but instead of having an hour on Monday, one on Wednesday, and one on Friday, for example, they have a big three hour bloc, one day a week. It's kind of nice, as I have no classes on Thursdays or Fridays, so I can travel, shop, or do pretty much anything. 3 hours at a stretch does get a little long, though, so the professors usually give smoke breaks either 2 hours in or 1 and 2 hours in, thank goodness.
I've been fairly relieved at my professors' English ability so far. Although METU is an English-speaking university, most people there, including the professors, are more comfortable in Turkish. I have exchange friends here who had classes where the professor simply couldn't hold class in English when asked to; they had to drop the class. Apparently, that happens more in introductory, required courses. I'm pretty lucky: I walked in to my first class Monday morning, and the professor was new, just in from London, so he speaks perfect British English. My other professors are less fluent, but still really understandable.
Well, that's about all I can update for now,
Take care,
-R

Photos

This is my room at METU: it's cozy and really nice. My side's the right side.

This is the biggest mosque in Ankara. It's quite cool; I passed it while I was wandering the city.

These are gece kondurs, which I wrote about in my last post. There are literally hhundreds of thousands of them in pockets all around the city. As a side note, most of the buildings are candy-colored, brights pinks and yellows and greens, etc. It's nice, because the city would otherwise be insurmountably gray.


My camera works again (apparently you can't scrimp on batteries and get the cheap ones, because then your camera will pretty much die), so I've finally taken a few pictures. Not many, but at least there are Turkish photos on my memory card. So, to start things off, here's a few from the last few days (above).

Take care,
-R