If a group of unicorns is a glory, a group of Fulbrighters is definitely a pride

So I spent the weekend before last in an assortment of Fulbrighter-accompanied activities. That Saturday, I met up with Janna for Indian food (and it was delicious...) before heading to Kizilay to watch the Gucu match with our expat contingent. Unfortunately, pretty much every good team in the league was playing at the exact same time, and Gucu is not exactly a good team, so we ended up wandering and doing a little text-message sleuthing before meeting up with everyone at the Platin. The game was good, what little we saw of it: the bar switched between games every 10 minutes, so we saw a decent amount of the Ankaraspor match as well. Unfortunately, we didn't win, so my personal win percentage is down to 50%. Should've gone to the Gencler match, as they won and my win percentage would've gone up to 67%. Ah well...

After hanging around chatting after the end of the game, grabbing a doner with a few Bilkent boys, and walking over to Kucukesat Janna and I headed over to Daniel's (a Fulbright teacher) place, where we met up with him and Zoe, a Fulbrighter in town from Trabzon on the Black Sea coast, before all heading out to a club. It was a bit Turkish in its music selection, which is actually odd as most clubs here play more American music than I've ever heard. Everyone else in the club was singing along to the electronica'd-up Turkish tunes as we danced along; it was good times.

That Sunday I woke up respectably late and headed out to meet up with Janna, Daniel, and Zoe on Tunali for some shopping, and ended up with another sundress as it's been warming up here in Ankara. Since it was about 75 out, the soft-serve windows on Tunali were open so I grabbed my first ice cream cone of the season with Janna before we split up to head home. That evening I headed over to Corey and Nick's place for dinner and some catching up. We had just finished dinner and were cleaning up when their carpet dealer called: he was in town. So we ended up at a hotel out by Panora (a pretty ritzy shopping mall), going through hundreds of absolutely gorgeous carpets. After tea, many carpet viewings, and about 3 hours of deliberations and decisions, I ended up with 2 carpets! They are the first carpets I've purchased in Turkey (...or, actually ever, although I bought a mat in Tefarkes), and they're quite nice: the first one is a sofra, which means 'family table', and is traditionally brought out for meals; the dishes are served on it. It's half-hali half-kilim, so half thick wool carpet (like the texture of American wall-to-wall, gibi) and half thinner dense wool weaving. It's mainly red and blue, and pretty dark. The second is pretty large (especially for my price range), and has finely-figured shapes on a v-shaped diagonal in several colors. It is beautiful. They're both Iranian, from Iranian Azerbaijan. Carpets purchased, I skedaddled home just in time to Skype my mom for Mothers Day.

The next day Jeremy, another Fulbrighter, showed up in town and moved into one of my guest rooms for a few days. I was a bit busy preparing for my last speech through the Embassy Speakers program, which was at Baskent. Baskent is technically in Ankara, but on the verrrrry edge of town, even further out than Bilkent. Tuesday morning I headed out to their bus stop and hopped on the Baskent downtown shuttle, after convincing the driver that I really did need to get to campus. Once on campus I headed to the American Studies department and chatted with several delightful grad students and professors before guest lecturing to a class of first- and second-year students on the differences between Turkish and American culture. It was a decent talk, although as these students were a bit younger than the ones I'd spoken to in other cities they didn't have many questions to ask. I brought up Turkish Superman, which brought down the house, and my/Americans' habit of walking down the street with a cup of coffee while listening to my iPod, which they agreed was crazy-talk and never seen in Ankara. After the talk, I chatted with the grad students again before I headed back to Tunali and ambled home, stopping en route for a haircut. It was pretty interesting: they had 4 guys working on my hair at once. One of the guys' sole role was to hold various sections of my hair out of the way. That's service.

Wednesday I took Jeremy and Janna up to the Red Lion for Trivia Night with my well-established team. We had delicious BLTs and ended up in second place; the high point of the night (from my perspective...) was when the question "What US state received its statehood in May 1858?" popped up--gotta love the Minnesota questions. We headed back to my place and crashed til way-too-early Thursday, when we headed off to ASTI to catch the bus to Antalya for the end-of-the-year Fulbright conference. The Ankarali contingent headed down en masse: on the way down we had about 15 people. We reached our pirate-themed resort in Tekirova somewhere around 7 in the evening, and settled in to our tropical paradise. Friday was spent predominantly in our conference room, discussing the program, but we had the afternoon free, and all of Saturday. It was fantastic: I spent hours on the beach, swimming in the Mediterranean, racing half the ETAs down the inner tube waterslide, and teaching the bartender how to make daiquiris. Saturday night, after our group dinner and Coast-versus-Anatolia Turkish trivia game (Anatolia won, because we're cool like that), about half of us headed down to the conference room to watch the Eurovision finals; it was a true bonding experience. Most of the viewers had never seen Eurovision before and were amazed at the glitz/glamour/tackiness that is the Eurovision Song Contest. There was widespread disbelief when Norway won, and when Azerbaijan took third place over Turkey (adopted patriotism can be pretty contagious).
Sunday morning, a smaller group of Ankaralilar took off to get back to town, leaving Tekirova at 10am. After ridiculous amounts of half-hour stops, we finally stumbled back into town at about 10pm, sunburned and exhausted. It was a great trip, and interesting to see Turkey as most tourists see it (...I don't spend much time at Mediterranean resorts at this stage of my life).

This week is full of miscellaneous activities, events, and errands. Yesterday was a holiday, and this weekend there are a few big football matches. But those'll have to wait til my next post.

kib,
-R