The last week-ish has been full of excitement, adventure, and what-have-you. Not really, but it makes for a better opening than "It's been really busy," no? I started out my first week of school by trying to register for the only class Fulbright will fund, Turkish, only to be told that there was no set time, no set place, and there may not even be a class if the professor couldn't find enough people to fill 8 spaces in the class. Fabulous. I made it to one of my classes last Thursday, Turkish Foreign Policy, only to find that I'd already read the textbook last year for my thesis (probably a good sign for my thesis, but not so good for the class). Luckily, that was an undergrad class, and the grad class on the same subject looks to be very interesting, so it works out well. It also appears as though there are enough students for the Turkish class, although classes are on Thursday and Friday for that, so there goes my formerly free Friday.
The weekend was occupied first by internet issues (always exciting to troubleshoot in Turkish, let me tell you), then by a full day of expat activity. Sunday I met up with a friend to walk up to the Vatican Embassy for Mass, which I did not get lost for this time, or get in a bus crash. Considering my track record, this is excellent. Before Mass, I met a Princeton Ph.D student here for a year to learn both Turkish and Ottoman from scratch. We talked for a bit about Turkish, living as expat students in Ankara, and such, and he seems like an affable guy. After Mass, we stayed around for coffee (again, they serve real coffee after Mass; in Ankara, this is a wondrous thing) before I had to hightail it home to drop off church apparel, grab running apparel, and get to the hash house harriers meeting point. The run Sunday was in this rocky valley-ish place, and most of it was up, up, up, then straight down before climbing up again. I most certainly got my workout for the day :P Afterwards, they had a barbeque, which was really nice and a good chance to chat and to practice my conversational Turkish with some of the folks. We got back to Cankaya just in time for me to rush back, change again, hit up an internet cafe for 10 minutes, and get to Arjantin Cad to watch a friend performing at a cafe with a whole group of folks from the Refugee Support Group, plus my friends from Mass that morning. It was a really great relaxing time; Erin has a beautiful voice and the ARSG folks are really interesting people.
This week, I've attended a few more classes and run round all over the place trying to get documents in order for Fulbright and my apartment. Inshallah that's all done for the time being... Later this week I have Fulbright orientation finally, which should be a fun time; I'm looking forward to finally meeting the other Fulbrighters not in the city. Everyone's research sounds fascinating, so I can't wait to pick a few brains about their subjects.
Next week is Seker Bayram ("Sugar Holiday"), the end of Ramazan, where Turks visit family and celebrate for a few days with feasting and fellowship. ODTU's shut down for the week. Not to be left out, I'm also heading out on vacation, with a few friends, to the SouthEast. I think it'll be much calmer than my last trip to the region (see my early April 2006 blog entries for those stories), and the fact that all 3 of us speak semidecent Turkish will be an enormous help/ The region is absolutely gorgeous, and we're hoping to end up at Nemrut Dagi, which is a mountain with giant stone heads a la Easter Island on top. Expect copious amounts of pics when I get back (and inshallah I'll even catalogue the ones up on Flickr at the moment...).
On that note,
hope you're well!
-R