Rest of my Tatil and settling in

So I left off my last post with my adventuresome ride to Antakya. We were pretty glad to get in to Antakya's shiny new otogar, even though we were immediately set upon by would-be drivers offering to take us to Aleppo. Sadly, that will have to wait for a different trip, as my visa doesn't yet allow me to reenter the country. We hopped a dolmus into town, nodding politely to the dolmus attendant's rant on the evils of America and war en route. Once in the center, we found our hostel (we were staying at the Catholic Church in town, which has a hostel for pilgrims), and waited around/grabbed lunch/waited some more to check in. We were pretty grimy and exhausted, so the rest of the day we just rested, shopped a bit in the bazaar, and grabbed an amazing, amazing dinner.
Antakya is really a unique place in Turkey. It's in the Hatay province, which used to be a French protectorate, then part of Syria before Ataturk annexed it in 1938 for WWII strategic purposes. It's a very interesting meld of Turkish and Arabic culture, and is the only part of Turkey that eats hummus (clearly, I was ecstatic about that part). Our first lunch in Antakya was at this tiny, tiny restaurant that served only hummus and bakla (not baklava-- bakla is a hot dish also based on chickpeas, and also very, very good after an Istanbul kebap summer. Prices in Antakya were also Arab-inspired, and I bought a pair of pants that I'd seen in Istanbul for a standard price of 20 ytl for 5 ytl. I also bought a shirt for 2,5 ytl, which proudly proclaims that "life is beatifull." Oh yes, beatifull.
Antakya is most well known not for it's intriguing Turkish-Arab culture but for it's ancient history: you may know it by it's Roman-times name, Antioch (and to get there, you pass through the Cilician Gates). It's the site of the very first Catholic Church in the world (by many accounts), founded in a cave above the current city by St. Peter himself. I visited, but it was closed for August vacation, so I only got to see the outside, sadly. It was awesome from the outside though. Later in history, the city was captured by Crusader kings. Even today, there's (for Turkey) a sizeable Christian community in Hatay; Rough Guides says there are 4000.
Our second day, we met up with a friend of Alyssa's who was coming in from Syria; she'd spent the summer in Damascus and spoke Syrian Arabic, which would be not so helpful in Turkey, except that most people we ran into in Hatay also spoke Arabic. Before she got in (she tried to come up on Friday, but in Syria they take religion seriously and that's mosque day--no busses to the border), Alyssa and I checked out the Antakya Museum. It's gorgeous: the region has lots of archaeological sites with Roman mosaics, and so many of them were still in really good condition. I have dozens of photos, many with stories, so I'll post the link to that part of my Flickr account once I upload them. They had statues and a very nicely preserved excavated tomb as well, but the mosaics were really the centerpiece of the museum.
The Catholic Church hostel was really great, run by a woman (Zeynep Hanim) who lives on the property, and really cheap: just 20ytl per night each. We got a room, private bath, and a kitchen. The guidebooks had all said that guests were expected to attend Mass, which we didn't mind, especially once we found out Mass was at 7pm, not 7am. The weekday masses we went to were pretty small, just the token folks who hung around the church and us, and was in Turkish, which was pretty awesome. The church had booklets printed with the prayers and Mass protocol in Turkish, so we could follow along and know what we were saying/singing, instead of half mumbling til we got to the "Amen." They're clearly used to non-Turkish visitors. While we stayed there, 2 big groups of Italian pilgrims came through; they just walked through the church, prayed, and left, but they tended to arrive right before Mass, delaying Mass. Sunday Mass was really great; I was the only one of the three of us who went, as the other 2 were exhausted from our big day (more on that in a bit) and also weren't Catholic. The tiny church was filled, with people standing out the back door. Most of the Mass was in Turkish, but the Gospel was read in both Turkish and Italian. I suspect this is because there was a large expat contingent, and I believe they were mostly Italian, but I'm not positive. Anyway, it was really a great experience, and they closed with "When the Saints go Marching In" in Turkish.

But my big experience Sunday was a different service, in a small village an hour-and-a-half outside of Antakya. Sunday morning, Alyssa, Jen (her friend from Syria), Lee(a friend of ours from our summer program, he came to Antakya a day after us) and I headed to Vakifli, the last remaining Armenian village in Turkey. The title is a bit of a misnomer: many Turks live there, and people in the village spoke Turkish to our hearing more than Armenian, but it still has Armenian roots and a strong Armenian connection. We were there for the Armenian Catholic Church's (they're in with the Holy See! the more you know)Feast of the Assumption of Mary, which is apparently their biggest feast day celebration. We were told it started at 10, so we got there right before then, but the Mass didn't begin until 10:10 or so, when the priest and the choir (and 2 priest-helper guys? kind of between choir members and deacons, they seemed) entered the front part of the church and started up. Even though there were probably at least 200 people milling about in the church courtyard, only maybe a dozen or so old ladies were actually sitting in the church, attending the service. We grabbed a pew and sat to take it all in. It was a beautiful service: it was entirely in Armenian, so we understood pretty much nothing, but it reminded me of Orthodox services. For starters, it was looong: about 2 and a half hours, I believe. There was a little fence/gate separating the parishioners from the choir and priest; it was split spacewise maybe 40-60, with 40% of the church area being occupied by the altar and various related things. The choir members kept wandering in and out throughout the whole thing; at one point, they all were gone, and it was just the priest and his helpers up in front. The choir was made up of people looking to be ages 7-maybe 65, but the leader was this girl (she can't've been over 20) with a beautiful, carrying voice; I heard that during choir practices and such, everything is very strictly age-hierarchical, while during Mass, the hierarchy is instead in order of singing talent.
The parishioner/Mass attendees also wandered in and out during the service, and while the numbers actually in church grew larger and larger, I don't think there were more than 50 people inside at any one time, and that was for Communion. Communion was fascinating, because the women all veiled for it: they grabbed scarves from in their handbags or around their necks to cover their hair, but only for Communion. Anyway, it was perhaps a little fortuitous that everyone in the church courtyard didn't crows in to the church, because it was stiflingly hot in the church, maybe hotter than I'd been all summer.
After the in-church portion of Mass, the priest and choir processed out the back of the church and to the courtyard, where they proceeded to bless a tablefull of grapes. Apparently, in the Armenian Catholic tradition, the Feast of the Assumption of Mary also is used to celebrate the grape harvest. After the grapes were blessed, everyone pressed forward and got a vineful. From there, the priest and choir went to 4 carpets laid out in the middle of the courtyard and did some sort of prayer/blessing there as well; I got video of this part and will upload it to Flickr inshallah soon. It was pretty interesting. After that, it looked like the Mass part of the day was done, so we chilled in the courtyard for awhile, looked at sour cherry products for sale in a small booth, and headed down to the main road to figure out how to get back (we'd taken a taxi from another town in the morning, but Vakifli is like, Byron-small or smaller, so there were no taxis there). We stopped at a tea garden for tea and water, and after chatting for a bit and finding a dolmus, we ran into an Armenian-Canadian woman, who told us more about the feast day, and also said that it was an annual pilgrimage for Diasporan Armenians, hence why so many people were there. She also told us that we'd missed the very end part of the ceremony at the church, where they hand out stewed mutton and wheat: apparently, in the times of the massacres, the Armenian communities of Musa Dag ('Mount Moses', where Vakifli is located) only had sheep and wheat, which they put into big pots, one for every village (there were 6 Armenian villages on the mountain then) and survived off of for 53 days under siege until the French rescued and evacuated them. It sounded like an odd recipe, but I tried some, and it was quite good on bread.
Our Armenian-Canadian friend also told us that we were ridiculously close to the sea, so after hearing that, and after having sat in the oven of the church for 2.5 hours, we decided to stop at the shore on the way back to Antakya. We took a dolmus to Samandag and walked to the waterfront. Samandag is a Turkish resort town, and it was pretty cool, as we were the only yabancis there. The water was so warm it was almost hot, and translucently blue. The Mediterranean hadn't been on our agenda when we left Antakya, so we swam in our clothes, which worked well til we had to get back on a dolmus to get back to Antakya. When we did finally make it back, we were pretty exhausted, and pretty much just napped and packed (and churched, for me) until grabbing a quick dinner and seeing Alyssa and Jen off to the otogar (they were headed to Cappadochia overnight).
Monday morning, I finished my packing, headed out for a brief bit, and then headed to the otogar, where I headed to Adana. Adana is about 3 hours northeast of Antakya, and is the 4th largest city in Turkey. You may have heard of it because Incirlik air base (US military) is located there. I planned to do a bit of sightseeing there before catching an overnight bus to Istanbul. On my bus from Antakya to Adana, I sat next to this adorable red-headed two-year-old and his mother, who were on their way to a beach holiday in Mersin. They were great travelling companions, until the poor kid got a little bus-sick and threw up. He kind of looked like Dan when he was 2, if Dan had been close-cropped instead of having that adorably curly mop. In Adana, I did some bargaining with various companies (after my Ankara-Adana bus ride, I was not about to risk a repeat experience), and ended up getting a ticket with Metro, who is towards the high end of the middle level of bus companies. I then headed into the city to see what I could find. I visited the Sabanci Mosque, which is the third largest mosque in the world; it's really new (like, last-decade-new), so there wasn't much historical intrigue, but it was huge, and nice. I then stopped by one of Adana's 2 museums where I found out that both museums were closed on Mondays. Bummer. I wandered a bit more, and ended up at this swanky restaurant for dinner, where I had an amaretto iced mocha. It pretty much made my whole body smile, it was so good. As Adana was also closer to 40 C than 30 C, it was very much appreciated. After my dinner, I skedaddled to the otogar and headed out for Istanbul. My seatmate was this very nice old lady, and it was I think her first bus trip. We chatted for a bit about Adana and Istanbul and what I was doing in Turkey before tuning in to the bus movies and then sleeping. In the morning, she got off at the first Istanbul stop (Istanbul is so big, there are multiple otogars and usually tertiary drop-off locations as well; it takes over an hour and a half from the first Istanbul stop to the Otogar), and I got a new seatmate, Ayse, who was travelling to Istanbul with her husband and 2 kids for a visit before school started. We had a great talk, and when she heard that I wanted to return to Adana, she gave me her cell number so that I could get to see "the real Adana" when I go back there.
Once I got into Istanbul, I had a lot of time to kill; I had pretty ungainly luggage, so I didn't really want to trek all over the city or go all out and be touristy. I ended up on Istiklal by about 9am, where I snagged a table at a cafe and chilled all morning, updating my blog and such. In the afternoon, I took the ferry to Asia to buy my train ticket for that night (heading to Ankara; the train is conveniently about 8 hours, or enough to actually sleep, versus the 5-6 hour bus), found that the only seats left were in 4-person couchettes, got a 20% student discount (I will really miss being a student someday), and took the ferry back. Once back in Taksim, I called Fulbright to make sure I could still pick up my luggage that afternoon, and handled the entire phone conversation in Turkish. I was pretty proud. As I had to pick up my luggage by 5, and would then be encumbered by 5 bags of various sizes, I decided to grab an early dinner, at Istanbul's best Chinese restaurant (it happened to be on the way the the Fulbright offices). My meal was great, and my waiter was very curious as to what I was doing all by myself and how I knew Turkish; we chatted for a bit, and then at the end of my meal he gave me 10% off. It was just a really great Turkish-speaking day for me.
I picked up my baggage and headed right to Haydarpasa (the train station), getting there about 5 hours before my train departed. Luckily, I had a 400-page journal of an early West African explorer to read, so I chilled in the waiting room. On the train, I had 3 Turkish women seatmates, all of whom were very nice and 2 of whom had also never ridden on a train before. Before we left, I had an awesome Turkish experience, when one of my compartment-mates, walking down the corridor, found a group of Italian tourists trying to communicate with the ticket man in English and went "wait, my friend speaks English and Turkish!" So I got to translate for this group of 10 Italian tourists who wanted to trade seats with other passengers so that their party could sit together; it was pretty exhilarating being able to explain back and forth. They finally got things settled, and I went back to my compartment, and woke up bright and early in Ankara, where I headed to my hostel.

Many apologies for this novel of a post; I was going to post some about my activities in Ankara, but I think this is quite enough for one update and will try to update some more fun things, like pics or videos, in a much more timely fashion.
Hope you all are doing well!
-R