Tekirova Pics, and This Week in Ankara

These giant fish greeted us at our last group dinner, Saturday night. Fittingly, it was a seafood banquet.


6 of us braved "The Banana". I'm third from the front.


We missed the oil wrestling championships by just a week. Maalesef! I've still never seen oil wrestling or camel wrestling, so clearly my time in Turkey is not finished quite yet.


George powers up at the Antalya otogar on the long journey home. We were all a little worn out on Sunday.


This week though has been full as always; I had lunch on Youth and Sport Day (Tuesday) with a few assorted Fulbrighters and a Harvard PhD student newly arrived at ARIT. We went back to Spice, for their lunch special, which was well worth it. Afterward we took a group trip to Migros, and then split up. I walked back to my flat, and then on through town, as it was 80 degrees and beautiful. Of course Wednesday dawned chilly and rainy, but that worked well for me as I cloistered myself in my flat to work out what exactly I'm doing this summer. I think I've figured it out, but we'll see how all the pieces move.

Today I met up with the sister of a good friend of mine from Minnesota, who's been living in Ankara as an exchange student. It was nice to finally meet her, and to exchange thoughts on Ankara, Minnesota, and even Boston. It's odd how 2 people can have such a different experience in Turkey (in Ankara, at that), but I suppose it makes sense, as she's been living with a host family and going to high school here, whereas I've been living in my flat and researching. Still, our social circles apparently overlap: I go to football matches with her English teacher. Ankara's a small world.
Well, more will have to wait for later. Side note, this is my 99th blog post. I'll try and think of something suitably exciting for the 100th.
kib,
-R


Also: For those with access to Turkish television (or incredibly good American satellite packages), my cooking show will be aired June 15, at 12:10 and 13:40 EET on TRT Int. I don't actually have TRT International, so I'll be trying to figure out something to see my cooking show glory. Inshallah.

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

A succession of cities

Last post left off in Ankara, after getting back from Rome. That Thursday morning, I headed back to Istanbul to board a plane to Prague, where I met up with friends, sampled Czech culinary delicacies, saw the sight of the Defenestration of Prague, walked through a fantastic hilltop park leading to Prague Castle, and attended what may be one of the most awful shows I've ever seen: Aspects of Alice. It did make up some points for being a theater experience I'll never forget, and providing me with the story of attending the show, but it's in close contention with a 1960s-set Shakespeare theatre-in-the-round production as the most awful show I've seen. It was billed as a "blacklight show", which in retrospect should have tipped us off, and had clowns, a suave dark man, and a grown-up Alice in Wonderland. Oh yes. I think it would have been less galling if the tickets had not been more than tickets for the opera, which was also playing that night. Lesson Learned. We also stopped by the Communism Museum, which was quite well done as smaller Eastern European museums go. They had a good deal of interpretation, although sometimes the word choice was a little biased-seeming. They did translate everything into 6 languages though, so I don't hold it against them. Their gift shop was very tongue-in-cheek, which I think worked well for them.
I flew back to Istanbul that Sunday, and got back to Ankara just before midnight Sunday night, in time to repack my bag and get on a plane to Erzurum. Particularly dedicated readers or those with better memories may remember that I'd been to Erzurum in January for some pretty fantastic skiing (10cm of snow will do that). This time, I was flying out to give a speech at Ataturk University about 'American Life'. Erzurum was quite nice, snowless at the moment. I stayed at the University's guesthouse, which was gorgeous. The American Corner Director there gave me a campus tour and a city tour, which I appreciated as I'd not had a chance to explore the city in January. There are a few beautiful mosques and medreses in the center of town, but most of the city is quite modern, industrial, and a little gritty. I liked Erzurum though, as it had a vibe that was entirely Eastern Turkey about it. My talk was ridiculously well-attended, with about 200 students in the audience, and I discussed the American Dream as well as perceptions of American Life in pop culture versus the reality of life in America. The question-and-answer section was pretty great; my first question was about cohabitation, whether people actually did that in America, and whether I thought it was moral. We then wandered through various topics from higher education in America, to what people in America think of Turkey, to Superman. I got back that Tuesday night, spent a few days catsitting, and took advantage of temporarily living with an oven to bake chocolate-chip cookies with a friend, Janna. As it was the weekend, Janna and I ended up at a football match after the cookies were done, watching Ankaragucu win with a group of expats and fresh cookies. We extended our luck by going to the Genclerbirligi match the next day, where Gencler also won. So I'm rocking a 60% win percentage for Ankara games I've watched. I should get a stipend for watching these.
That Monday, I again headed to the airport and flew to Izmir, to give a speech at Izmir Economics University. This one was to be on my research, so I was a bit more excited to give it. I stayed at a hotel on the sea, fronting onto Izmir's seaside promenade, and spent a lot of time just enjoying the utterly fantastic weather and laid-back environment. On Tuesday, I headed to the university, where I met up with the AC Director, chatted for a bit, got my photo taken for some sort of publicity purpose, and headed to my speech room...only to find it empty. The AC Director had scheduled my speech, on Turkish Foreign Policy, at the exact same time as a symposium on Turkey's entry to the EU, held in Turkish. If I were a Turkish student, I know which one I'd be going to, and it wouldn't be mine. The Director then mentioned that the student body was up in arms over Obama's statements on April 24th* and would probably boycott anything American for the next week or so. Wonderful. So there ended up being a grand total of 3 people at the lecture, which morphed into more of a one-on-one conversation and which took much less time than anticipated. It all worked though, I took the bus back downtown, met up with Deirdre, a Fulbrighter in Izmir, for dinner, and then we checked out Izmir's expat bar, where we passed the 'good yabanci' test by being able to speak Turkish. We ended up chatting with a British NATO guy for a bit, who didn't think too highly of my choice of football teams, before heading back. I had almost a full free day the next day, which I spent strolling the Kordon (promenade), doing some shopping (the gorgeous weather convinced me to stock up on summer clothes; of course it's been 60F in Ankara ever since), and exploring some side streets. Before heading to the airport, I made a small culinary discovery: patlican boregi, or eggplant borek. Borek usually comes in cheese, potato, spinach, and ground meat varieties; this patlican variety was delicious and smoky. I'm going to have to do some kitchen experimenting with borek, clearly.
After arriving back in Ankara from Izmir late Wednesday night, I had a few days to do laundry, have a simply delicious BLT at the Red Lion with friends, and repack before heading out again last Sunday, to Kayseri. Kayseri is a Central Anatolian town, just south of the Cappadochia region, mainly known for industry, pastirma (a really garlicky, sausagelike product), and manti. I was chiefly interested in the last item, as it's my favorite Turkish food. My speech here was at Erciyes University, again on Turkish Foreign Policy. Luckily this time I had an audience, with 60-70 people attending and giving me great questions afterward on American imperialism, America's position on Armenian genocide, whether America is in the pocket of Israel, and why America didn't give Turkey more money after World War II. I love question-and-answer sessions like that! The AC Director there was a bit of a dynamo: she works full time at Erciyes, and is a PhD student at ODTU, so every Thursday at 2am, she takes a 5-hour bus to Ankara, has a full day of classes, and takes a 5-hour bus back at 5 that night to turn around and teach the next day. She had serious pull with the bus companies in Kayseri. After my speech, I met up with Candace, a Fulbrighter from Istanbul who was giving a speech the next day. We went to dinner with the Director at a traditional Kayseri restaurant, where I had manti of course. It was pretty delicious, although as they are traditionalists they don't have the whole wheat, spinach, or fried varieties that I love so much in Istanbul.

The next day I hopped a bus back to Ankara, where I again changed out my luggage and turned around the next day to take a bus to Bursa. Bursa is 6 hours from Ankara, and I lucked out by getting Kamilkoc's Rahat bus, which is a bit like business class in an airplane (or maybe closer to economy-plus; but they have big leather chairs and satellite TV and internet, so I can't complain). It was pretty uneventful, and I got in to Bursa late enough to grab a light dinner, find my hotel, and write my speech (...). Thursday I got up, checked out, and took the Metro to the Bursa Chamber of Commerce, where their American Corner is. The building looks like a giant pyramid, so that was snazzy. I had lunch with the AC Director and her boss, before giving a speech on the American tradition of the State Fair as a microcosm of American Life. Good thing I did that History Day exhibit on the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and good thing I know my Minnesota State Fair. The talk was to a group of about 20 Turkish students, and the fun part was that they spoke almost no English. This meant that I got a translator, which was cool but also a bit different to get used to, as I had to pause after every sentence to let her translate. The questions this time were again all about Armenia, the US' position on Armenia, what Americans thought about Turkey, Americans' view on the Conquest of Constantinople, and US foreign policy failures through history. It was a bit like a mental ping pong match, and felt like I was back in my debate days. The students also told me I look like Tansu Ciller, who is Turkey's first and so far only female Prime Minister. She's pretty heavily linked to some corrupt dealings, so I'm thinking it's time for a haircut to put an end to that resemblance. After a few more questions about education in America, I headed off to the bus station, caught a bus back to Ankara, and got in late last night. Finally.

I do have one more speech, but it's in Ankara, so I don't have to travel for it. While I do love travel, I'm looking forward to being able to actually attend research lectures in Ankara, and football matches, and being able to buy produce and other perishables. It doesn't last too long though, as the Fulbright conference starts late next week on the coast.

Hope you all are doing well!
kib,
-R


*April 24th is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in many Western countries; Obama's remarks that day didn't specifically use the term 'genocide', but used a term close enough to earn Turkish ire and damage Turkish pride. The strength of the response to Obama's remarks in Turkey is a little difficult to explain, because honestly it's such a sensitive issue here that it's hard to understand the scope from outside Turkey.

Journeys to coffee-drinking lands

The past few weeks have, as per usual, been a bit of a whirlwind, as I pop in and out of Ankara like the most seasoned business traveller. Luckily, not all of my travel is for business. Easter weekend, I headed out to Istanbul on an overnight bus to catch a way-too-early flight to Rome for the holiday. I flew in Friday, arriving midmorning and catching the train (somewhat whimsically named the Leonardo Express, after Leonardo da Vinci) into central Rome. I had booked a hostel for my first night, and was meeting up with Kevin and his sister the next day and joining them at a bed and breakfast for the next two days (or so we thought, story below on how that didn't quite work). Luckily the hostel was 4 blocks from the train station, so I was able to find it quickly; not-so-luckily, my room wasn't quite ready yet. So I dropped off my bag and went out to wander the area.
I ended up walking down a high-end shopping street before finding the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiano, which was immense and overdecorated and beautiful. The most striking thing about though, to me, was the confessionals lining both sides of the church: they all had small signs indicating which languages the priest inside spoke, and I think they must have had almost every language spoken in Europe (not Turkish though, I checked). I spent the rest of the day wandering around in shock over Italian prices: I paid 4.5 Euro for a cappuccino and just tried not to convert anything to lira.

The next day I got up bright and early to check out of my hostel and check in to the B&B; good thing I gave myself extra time, as it took a decent amount of time to find the place--people in the neighborhood had never heard of the street name. I fortuitously ran into Kevin, and we headed up to check in...only to be told that they had no record of our reservation. After a brief internal panic (after all, it was Holy Saturday and we were right outside the Vatican), we were able to get a room for one night, use their internet to get another hotel for the next night, and negotiate extra bedding. The hotel guy's English was a little less than spectacular, but he was Peruvian, so I got to bust out my painfully rusty Spanish to get on the same page. Good times. We then headed over to the Vatican to pick up our tickets for Easter Mass and meet up with Kevin's sister, who'd been travelling through the region. Easter Sunday was great: we got up to see warm weather but overcast skies, which was perfect for sitting outside for a few hours. We walked over to St. Peters and waited in a mob-like line before getting in to the Square, finding the seating area, and looking for seats. We were lucky and got some of the last chairs. Mass was quite nice, the music was beautiful, and the service sounded beautiful as well although it was in Italian of course so I didn't understand all of it. The readings were in various languages, as were the intentions. Apparently our section of the crowd appeared on Swiss television twice. After Communion, Pope Benedict ended Mass and went up to his balcony to give his Easter blessing. This part was really cool, as he went through blessings in dozens of different languages. As the crowd heard their language, they'd cheer and hold up flags from their home countries. I was again listening for Turkish, but to no avail, maalesef. I did hear Arabic, Tagalog, and Esperanto though. We left after that, and decided to try and get far away from Vatican City for lunch, to try and avoid the masses of people also looking for lunch. After a nice stroll across the Tiber, we ended up at a very cute side-street cafe, where I had gnocchi and the waiter looked horrified at the prospect of serving spaghetti carbonara with a cappuccino. Ah tourists, we are so gauche.
The rest of the trip was predominantly spent meandering from one historic site to the next, with frequent stops for gelato and cappuccinos. On Monday we took a rather circuitous route through the center of the city and ended up on an island in the Tiber, reclining on cement pilings and watching the world go by. It was wonderful, a tranquil center in the hive of activity that is Tourist Rome. That evening I caught a flight back to Istanbul, but not before missing the train to the airport by literally 2 seconds (it was so painful watching it pull away in front of me), catching a cab, ascertaining that I had caught a gypsy cab, and finding another cab for the expensive privilege of a ride to the airport. Ah, travel... I got back to Istanbul at an inconvenient hour, took another cab to the otogar (after midnight, so the Metro was closed and the cabs were night rate, harika), and boarded a bus to Ankara, where I had less than 48 hours before heading out again for another flight out of Istanbul.

Great weekend, all in all, and after my first Easter in Turkey (ended up celebrating with fish and chips in the ODTU student center and listening to Chinese engineering students) I'm quite glad I spent this one in Rome. Maybe if I'm here next year I'll try for Jerusalem...
kib,
-R

Aleppo, etc.

Time's been slipping away from me, but I'm going to try to get this as up-to-date as possible, because there's so much to update on/anticipate. My last entry left off on the outskirts of Antakya, which Danaijo and I left via bus. We took the bus to the Syrian border, where we had to get off and apply for visas. Ostensibly, Americans are supposed to apply for Syrian visas well in advance from the Syrian Embassy in DC, but that takes a long time and costs somewhere in the vicinity of $130. Plus, I've not been Stateside since last June, so it'd be difficult for me to get my passport to DC. So we decided to chance it at the border. We grabbed our luggage and waited in the border authorities' building for about 2 hours or so while the Syrian officials called Damascus to check whether or not we were allowed in the country. After getting approval, we paid $16 apiece for 2-week visas and were good to go. Unfortunately, our bus hadn't waited around, so we took a taxi the rest of the way to Aleppo.
Our taxi driver was really nice, stopping along the way for food for us, trying to find the hotel we wanted to stay at, and giving us a decent discount on the taxi price when I asked. Unfortunately, he didn't speak and Turkish (or English, or French). This was a little surprising to me, as I'd figured that people around the border would tend to speak a little bit of Turkish. Many people in Antakya speak some Arabic, but apparently the inverse is not true in Aleppo. Maalesef. We couldn't get to the hotel we'd intended to stay at, as it was full, so our taxi driver dropped us off at one that was apparently 'cheap'. We walked inside and quickly did an about-face: it was over $100/night. Luckily, the concierge was able to direct us to the central hotel area, where we found a pretty awesome room for substantially cheaper. That settled, we set out to explore a little bit and find dinner.
Aleppo was like a different world compared to Turkey. It was noticeably more desertlike, the shops were all smaller and independent (compared to Turkey's mix of independent shops and Turkish chains), and perhaps most glaringly, women were veiled. In some cases, fully veiled--we saw women walking around in not just the chador, but also a sort of small black scarf draped over their entire head, made of thin material through which they peered at the streets. I've never seen a woman in Turkey wear that, and I've seen quite a few women in Turkey.
Anyway, that night we had a delicious dinner of street-side falafel, walked through a pedestrianized shopping street, bought scarves, and retired for coffee and bed. In the morning, we headed out for fresh juice and the Grand Mosque, which is one of the older mosques in Islam. As another sign that we weren't in Turkey anymore, we of course had headscarves with us, but weren't allowed inside even the mosque courtyard til we'd donned large, shapeless, button-front robes over our clothing. The mosque was beautiful, and immense. It also was on the edge of the bazaar district, which we happily plunged in to after turning in our shapeless robes. We spent quite a bit of time ambling down aisles, bargaining, and avoiding the English-speaking touts, and managed to make it out with a respectable number of purchases at pretty decent prices. We were really amused when we found out that the name of the shop we'd bought pashminas at was "Oscar Wilde"; we had a great conversation with the owner, who was really interested in America, as his boyfriend was at Princeton. I think Danaijo came closest to buying a carpet in Aleppo; the prices there were the best I've seen, and they had some gorgeous ones. The ones we saw were predominantly Iranian, so the designs were very different than the Turkish/Kurdish/Armenian designs I'm familiar with. They use an entirely different color palette as well.
After wandering some more through the bazaars, and getting wonderfully lost trying to find a fabled amazing restaurant, we ended up having falafel again before heading to the bus station to hop a bus for Turkey again. We got there to find that the busses had all left for the day, so we had to take a cab. Luckily, the cab drivers at the station spoke a fair amount of Turkish, so I was able to bargain the cost down and get a cab to Gaziantep instead of Antakya. The border crossing this time was a breeze; I don't think many tourists come through the Gaziantep road's border, so the Turkish border official made us take as many Turkish tourism brochures as we could carry, even though half of them were in German. We got to Gaziantep in the late evening, and met up with my friend Alex, who's teaching English at the local university, after a brief adventure on the Gaziantep city busses.
We pretty much just made dinner and crashed at Alex's place, before getting up to explore the city the next day. We ended up at the very edge of an industrial part of town after taking a city bus, and finally made it downtown in time for lunch and shopping and baklava. Gaziantep's bazaar district is pretty adorable, and there are really good deals to be had; it's much more relaxed than the Istanbul bazaars, and the local handicrafts are better quality. We spent a lot of time chatting with shopkeepers and learning about handicrafts, with me translating between the shopkeepers' Turkish and D's English. It was a great linguistic exercise. After shopping, we stopped at a cave cafe for a narghile and baklava, which were both delicious. I'd wanted to stop by Gaziantep's museum, which is probably my favorite museum in Turkey, but when we got there, at about 4:35, the exhibit halls were closed, even though the museum closed at 5. Ah well, that's Turkey.
We met up with Alex for dinner, after she finished her teaching for the day, at the best restaurant in town. As I've mentioned in earlier entries, Gaziantep food is unique in Turkey, and unlike traditional Turkish cuisine. We had a great bulgur and lamb dish (D's was lambless of course), and for dessert the waiter brought us something I'd never even heard of before: Gaziantep coffee. It was fabulous, even if it wasn't strictly coffee. Gaziantep coffee is made of pistachios, roasted like coffee beans and brewed in milk. It smelled of chocolate and tasted of deliciousness. We then all headed back to Alex's place to grab our bags before D and I headed to the otogar to grab our overnight bus to Ankara. With my previous Gaziantep-Ankara bus experience (see October 2008 entries) still fresh in my mind, we'd purchased tickets in advance, and had verified that we had seats and a reputable company. We boarded the bus, and settled in to sleep. Sadly, that was easier said than done as the bus proceeded to stop hourly between midnight and 4am. Oh boy. We did make it back to Ankara just fine though, and nobody had to sleep on the floor, so that was a success in my book.
In Ankara, we headed to my place first to drop a few things and collapse before heading to my friend's apartment, where we were staying as I was catsitting starting that day (Saturday). We dropped more stuff, took stock of our exhaustion, and headed out for Ulus and Ankara's citadel, which we climbed and explored for a bit before heading to Kizilay. In Kizilay, we walked throught the subway and a few streets before meeting up with a group of expats at a bar to watch a football match. I'd never met those particular expats, but the football match meetups are part and parcel of the Round Ball in Ankara blog (ankarafootball.blogspot.com), whose co-author I've known for quite some time.
I'd never been to a football match besides my younger siblings' games before, so I was quite excited. We met up at a bar in Kizilay before the match with a Scottish teacher who's been in Turkey off and on for a few decades and a few Bilkent folks, generally here for a year as Communications Skills Instructors at Bilkent's English language preparatory program. After a quick lunch for D and I, and a beer all around, we headed en masse to 19 Mayis Stadyum, where both Ankaragucu and Genclerbirligi play their home matches. The match we saw was Ankaragucu, who were playing Sivasspor; I'm sure this doesn't mean much to most of my readers. For perspective, Ankaragucu is fighting relegation and is I think 4th from the bottom in the league, while Sivasspor is the top-ranked team in the league. Clearly it was not going to be a knock-out win. The stadium had 2 different security checks, where we were patted down and had to surrender any coins or bottle caps we had so we wouldn't throw them on the field later. At each checkpoint, there were maybe a dozen male police officers, and one female police officer to check the few women attending the match. It was a bit interesting to see how few women were actually at the match; there were 4 in our group, but maybe 10 others total.
We found decent seats and settled in to watch the match. I don't think D or I really followed which player was doing what, but the first half was pretty closely-fought, and ended scoreless. Much more interesting than the match (to us) was the crowd: Ankaragucu supporters tend to be young, male, and energetic, and the area behind the goal was full of guys on their feet and chanting the entire game, their section undulating as they waved their scarves and gestured in unison. It was really cool to see. I tried to figure out what the crowd was shouting, but aside from one ridiculously easy cheer ("La-la, la-laaaa, Ankaragucu!"), couldn't distinguish many words. In the second half, Sivasspor showed why they were top-ranked, and outplayed Gucu quite a bit. The game ended with Sivasspor winning by 2 or 3, and the Ankaragucu supporters showed their displeasure by turning their backs for the last few minutes.
After the game, we all headed back to Kizilay to discuss the game, and after a bit D and I headed back up the hill to have dinner at one of my more-favorite restaurants in Ankara, Spice. It's an Indian place, and we both had delicious dishes, and D tried raki for the first time. It wasn't her favorite beverage, but then there's a time and a place for raki, and it's not all-the-time and everywhere. It's traditionally eaten with fish, but as D doesn't eat fish, it went decently with her Indian food.
After dinner, we were so exhausted. We headed back to the apartment and D packed before we grabbed a few hours of sleep. The next morning I got up at 5-something to get Danaijo to the airport bus. I looked outside to see...a snowstorm, with a few inches of snow already on the ground and driving winds of heavy snows. We headed out early, but still just barely made it to the Havas bus before it left for the airport. I took the same taxi back up the hill, and the roads were so bad the taxi couldn't make it up the last bit and the driver and I had to abandon the cab. The entire time I was a bit terrified that I'd get a call from D saying that her Ankara-Istanbul flight had been cancelled, but luckily the flight got out fine and I spent the rest of the day watching the storm from my fantastic hilltop vantage point.
And that was Danaijo's and my epic Turkish-Syrian adventure, briefly.

kib,
-R

Ridiculous amounts of photos

To save everyone the pain of wading through the several-hundred photos from my last trip (and so my grandmother can see them, Hi Grandma!), I'm featuring a few highlights here:



Flags outside Bogazici's gate in Etiler; The 3 big parties (AKP, CHP, MHP) are all represented.



Danaijo and I in the Yerebatan Sarnici, or Basilica Cisterns



Sultan's Loge at the Aya Sofya; the royal family would use this so as not to be disturbed by the great unwashed masses during prayertime.



Danaijo and I in the balcony of the Aya Sofya.



Topkapi Palace and the view behind it. Gorgeous even on a gray rainy day.



Me and a fountain outside the Sultan's bedroom. The bedroom itself was in its own building, in the middle of the family section.



D wasn't trying to get my eyes in this one, but it turned out kind of cool. That's the Yeni Cami (New Mosque) behind me.



Troy. Those different wall sections are all from different Trojan cities. This is why I'm not an archaeologist.

As I get more uploaded to Flickr, I'll get more up here as well.
kib,
-R

Taking the long way

So, my last post left off on the way to Canakkale. Canakkale is the jumping-off point for both Troy and Gallipoli, but because we only had a week, we were skipping Gallipoli. We got in past midnight; the bus ride down was kind of nice, as the bus drove down the Gelibolu Peninsula before taking a ferry to Canakkale, and the bus itself was new and had satellite television instead of a DVD player. So we got to catch up on our Turkish news and soap operas.
Monday morning bright and early we struck out from our hotel to the minibus garage, where we hopped a bus for Truva (Troy, in Turkish). After a decent 30-minute ride through villages and along the coast, we arrived at the front gates, where we bought a ticket, flashed my MuzeKart, and walked down the access road to the excavation house and large wooden Trojan Horse model. It was a little tacky-wonderful, and had a cabin/playhouse thing built on top of its back. It would have made for a pretty awesome treehouse. D and I headed in, and started down the one path that didn't have Japanese tour groups. We ambled for a bit between bluffs and ancient stone walls helpfully labelled with "IV", "II", and "VII" to indicate which Trojan city that particular section was from. After rounding a bend, we got to the good parts: the Trench, where the German-American explorer who discovered the site bulldozed through most of the top cities to get to the Troy II layer, and temple remains, and city walls and entrance ramps. The interpretation was pretty decent, with explanatory signs up every so often. We were trying to take in everything, which wasn't quite the pace the tour groups were setting, so we ended up alternately caught up in a group and passed by them a few times over. About halfway through the winding path, we noticed a branching-off path with a small sign that said "CAVE" with an arrow. Naturally we had to check that out, so we wandered down to this little wooded area with a manmade cave that was probably used for water storage and later other storage. It was really pretty, and set off a bit from the main site. On our way back to the entrance of the site, we made a quick backtrack to see the main gate, which we'd somehow completely missed the first time 'round. Then it was back to the main entrance, where we killed time waiting for the minibus by checking out the 2 open gift stalls (it was clearly not the high season: there were perhaps 2 dozen stalls, but only the 2 were open). We could have bought many, many Trojan Horses, in a variety of sizes. What an opportunity...

Back in Canakkale, we wandered through town to the bus station, where we picked up tickets to Izmir before heading back to the waterfront, stopping en route to pick up some borek for a light on-the-bus lunch. We had time to check out Canakkale's Trojan Horse before we left, which was much more gritty and impressive than Troy's version: it was a prop from the Hollywood movie Troy, released a few years ago.

We trundled off to Izmir on an afternoon bus that got in a little later than we'd expected, and hopped a servis shuttle to Buca, the area of town where my Fulbright friend Deirdre lives. She's an English teacher at one of the universities in Izmir, and had offered to let us stay the night. We met up with Deirdre and stopped by her gorgeous flat to drop off our things before heading out for lahmacun and pide. We had a great evening catching up and chatting over wine and baklava, before heading off to bed so we could catch our flight the next morning.

Tuesday morning, we bade farewell to Deirdre and set off once again to Izmir's airport. We flew from Izmir to Adana, which was wonderful as a bus ride between the two would have been probably 12-14 hours. Not all that fun. We landed in balmy Adana and went straight to the bus station, where we hopped a bus for Antakya. A short 2 hours later, we disembarked in downtown Antakya and wound our way through the side streets to the Catholic Church, where we'd planned to stay the night. Antakya gets quite a few pilgrims passing through, so the Catholic Church in town has rooms for travellers that are really nice, and not very spendy (I can't recommend it highly enough, everyone should spend a few days in Antakya at the Catholic Church). I'd stayed there before, when I was in town in August for the Armenian festival in Vakiflikoy. When we walked in the courtyard, the place was teeming with Italian tourists, but we sat down and chatted with some of the Turkish kids that always seem to be in the courtyard til things quieted down somewhat. We spoke with the priest to arrange our room, dropped off our bags, and headed out to this hole-in-the-wall restaurant that I'd remembered as being excellent. The place is called "Hummuscu ve Baklaci", and it has 2 items on the menu, hummus and bakla. D's a vegetarian, so a place that didn't even have meat on the menu was a good choice. We walked in and ordered one of each, to split. The owner made both the hummus and the bakla from scratch in front of us. I'll spare the hummus details, as it's pretty well-known, but bakla is a thinner spread made chiefly from mashed bakla beans stewed in I believe oil, then mixed with spices, hot peppers, lemon, tahini, and garnished with pickled vegetables and tomatoes. They were both delicious. Fully sated, D and I wandered through the central part of town, along the river, to the bazaar district. I had been hoping to pick up another pair of the mad awesome pajama pants I'd found in Antakya in August, but they were nowhere to be found, so I settled for buying a shoulder bag, as mine gave up somewhere around Izmir. D found some decent scarves, and we had a nice chat with the headscarf shop employees before heading back to the Catholic Church. We'd intended to chill for a bit before heading back out to grab a late dinner, but ended up just falling asleep; after all, we'd travelled something like 1000 miles just that day. In the morning, we went out in search of breakfast and ended up in this tiny basement tostcu in a dilapidated business center, where we had the best egg sandwiches outside of West Africa. The lady running the shop wasn't quite sure what to do with 2 yabancis in her shop, and was quite anxious to hear what we thought of our sandwiches--we reassured her that they had been delicious and huge. After breakfast, we headed to the Antakya Museum, where we wandered through the impressive collection of mosaics, before grabbing our bags and heading to the Church of St. Peter. This is the first physical Christian church in the world, and is where the term 'Christian' was first used. I had tried to visit it in August, but it was closed. This time, we were able to take a dolmus most of the way there, but still ended up dragging our luggage up the winding road to the church's hillside perch. When we got there, the ticketseller said "Oh, I watched you guys struggle up the whole way; why didn't you drive?" We got our tickets (this was also a MuzeKart site, as was the Antakya Muze; that card was a Very Good Procurement) and entered the church. It was really nice and quiet, as we were the only visitors, and quite small: the original church had been added to by the Crusaders, who gave it a front wall with some pretty blatantly Crusader-era decoration. The interior had a spring in one corner, fragments of mosaics and frescoes, and an escape hole out the back, so that celebrants could get out if the nonCatholics in town decided to round them up during services. It was all pretty simple, of course, but just impressive with the weight of history. We stuck around for a bit to take photos and watch the city of Antakya, which spread out from the foot of the hill.

Once down from the Church of St. Peter, we walked back to a main road and grabbed a dolmus to the bus station. From there, we grabbed a bus headed to Aleppo, but that will have to wait for the next post. I have photos of the Istanbul part of our trip, as well as some of the Troy portion, up on Flickr; inshallah I'll get the rest up soon!
kib,
-R