First Week in Turkey

Hello lovelies!

First of all let me apologize for not writing a letter earlier, but it has been a pretty crazy week and I did not have any internet access the first couple of days. It has only been a week since I have arrived in Turkey, but it feels like at least one year must have gone by. My experience thus far has been very rich and quiet fast paced. I was overwhelmed the first couple of days, to say the very least, but have since started building a pretty comfortable routine.

[For those of you who don’t want to/don’t have time to read a whole story here is a synopsis: spent about 24 hours getting from D.C. to Alanya which included three planes and one bus; received an introduction to the town including a walking tour but then spent the rest of the day totally lost – probably walking in circles, enjoyed the wonderful Mediterranean sea, went to an amazing outdoor opera, covered three units of a language book in four days (read almost 100 pages), taken three quizzes, and spent over 30 hours on homework, had fun at the bazaar, have my first test on Monday…]

Now for those of you who actually want to read the full stories…After leaving Seattle bright and early (read: crack of dawn 3:00am) last Wednesday, I arrived in D.C. for an orientation through the State Department. The first night consisted primarily of introductions. Thursday however, was the focus of the orientation. There was a long list of speakers that came including: diplomats, state department workers of various calibers, a woman from the Turkish embassy, as well as a couple of alumni from the program. The speakers were definitely very engaging and have made me further consider my interest in diplomacy as well as law. The students that I met were quite impressive as well. Quite a few of them are from Ivy League schools and highly intellectually oriented individuals.

One really fun aspect of the orientation was meeting all of the different individuals that are participating in the Turkish program (there are three levels which are being hosted in multiple cities in Turkey.) Within my short stay in D.C., I spoke more German and Bosnian then English. There was only one other person that spoke Bosnian, but I would say that at least one third of the Turkish group has some knowledge of the German language. Two out of the eleven other people in my group speak German really well, and we have definitely bonded over that.

After an exhausting Thursday, we had Friday free to ourselves until mid-afternoon, which, might I add, was the last time I really had time to decompress and fully gather my thoughts. Thus, in true Seattleite fashion I wandered D.C., ran some errands, and then found a little coffee shop and spent some time mentally preparing myself for the trip to come as well as processing the orientation.

At 4:30pm sharp is when the epic journey half-way across the globe started. We loaded a bus which took us to the airport and got on our first plane destined for Munich. According to our tickets we had a one hour layover in Munich, which was supposed to be just enough time to catch our next plane. Of course there were issues with the plane, and we did not start our departure until half an hour later than scheduled. Fortunately though we made all of our flights and had no problems with customs. Once, we landed in Antalya we took a bus (about another two hours) to our final destination. I was half-asleep throughout most of this ride, but definitely fully woke up when I realized that our bus driver was driving in reverse down an incredibly steep hill. Let’s just say that all of us were holding our breath during the 20 minutes or so that it took him to find our lodging place.

I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by our accommodations. As I mentioned there are 12 students (6 female, 6 male) all together and we were divided into groups of three and received our own apartments. The apartments are absolutely wonderful. The apartment that I am in has a very large living room, two bedrooms (one single and one double/master…I am in the double), a bathroom, a kitchen, and the best part: two balconies. There is one balcony in the bedroom that I am staying in and one in the living room. We are on the third floor and have a magnificent view of the ocean and the city below us. What I forgot to mention is that our living accommodations are about three quarters up what could only be called a mountain, and our school is practically at the peak of the mountain. I will try to take some pictures soon, so that you can see the harsh reality of what it feels like to walk up a 60/70˚ hill in 100˚F weather. Honestly, though I have really enjoyed the heat. Even though people keep saying that it is really hot, I have yet to feel uncomfortable from the heat. Who knows, maybe it is the fact that I try really hard to keep hydrated that keeps me cool.

Anyways, I love my apartment and I love the girls that I am living with. Speaking of, there is a really diverse mixture of age and interest within this group. Almost half of the group is PhD students that are in the middle of their research, then there are quite a few grad students. There are only very few undergrads, but that is okay, because it just adds to the overall diversity of conversations that we engage in. The interests of the group run the whole spectrum from archeologists to linguists. However, one of my roommates is a recent graduate that majored in international business and German, and we have had fun fawning over our love of econ, and commiserating over our dislike of finance.

Now that you can somewhat picture the setup of my current living situation, it’s time to let you know what I’ve been up to. As I alluded to earlier, Sunday was a day of walking in circles. We met up with the director of the program in the morning and had a wonderful breakfast just a short way down the hill from where we are living. Let me just say that Turkish food is more or less like my parent’s home cooked food, and thus makes for fantastic comfort food. After the director gave us a walking tour of the city, she dropped us off at the beach. As my roommates and I were hoping to spend the rest of the day being beach bums, we thought it would be a good idea to go drop off our bags at our apartment beforehand. Thus, we embarked on a journey back to our apartment. In order to get the full effect of the story you have to realize that we only had two hand drawn maps, which do not have many street names on them, but instead use landmarks as orientation points. Furthermore, the street names were not helpful anyway, because most of the streets do not have street signs on them. Let’s just say that we spent about three hours circling the town before we finally figured out how to get back to our apartment. Alas, that was not the end of our being lost that day.

As we had every intention of being beach bums, we did not let the fact that we got lost for a while damper our enthusiasm for the beautiful Mediterranean beach. Instead we trekked back down the hill and dove right in, and might I add that all of the effort to get there was completely worth it. One of my roommates, Amy, and I decided to swim all the way to the rocks, aka a point that was jutting out into the ocean. The water there was even bluer and clear then in the middle of the ocean, if that is even possible. After we swam back we got, we got out where we thought we had left our other roommate Katy, but did not see her anywhere. Thinking that we might not have swam far enough we started walking further away from the rocks.

Well, after about a good half hour of walking we decided that there is no way that we could have swam that far and we started heading back in the direction that we had come from. We were tired, our feet were sore, and panic was starting to rise with every step we took. Here we were in just our swim suit, in the late afternoon with no sense of direction but a sense of impending doom if we did not quickly find Katy. We walked part of the way back and swam part of the way back in order to relax our sore bodies. Finally, we recognized some of the building on the street and eventually found Katy. At this point she had also started worrying about us and was not quite sure what to do. The funny thing though is, that she saw us walking past her the first time around, and thought that we were getting ready to do another lap, thus did not say anything to us.

After our adventurous Sunday, we have pretty much mastered the city and the beach, and have not gotten lost since then. Monday, was the first day of class and what a day it was. The morning started off with one of our teachers, who is also living in the same building as us, showing us a shortcut to school. When you look from right outside our building up towards the school it looks like it would take you at least an hour to walk over there, but with the shortcut it only took us 15 minutes. Though, I have to say that we looked like little first graders all with our backpacks on in a single-file line walking across this rocky shortcut.

Our school days are divided into a couple of parts. The first part of the day is from 8:00am- 10:00am then we get a half hour break. Following that we have some more class from 10:30am-12:00pm. Then it is lunch time until 1:30pm. Our lunch is prepared by an amazing cook every day. He buys local fresh ingredients every day, and makes typical Turkish meals for us, which is just delicious. We also have four peer tutors that join us for lunch, and ‘hang out’ with us on most school days. On some days we also have lectures after lunch, which revolve around history and culture, or we have excursions in the evening.

Class on Monday was more than just overwhelming; the pace at which we covered things was crazy. Thankfully our teacher allows us to ask questions in English, but that will soon not be allowed either, and often there is not even enough time to ask questions. By the time I understand what we are doing and formulate the question we have already moved past three other things. It was definitely an academically intense day. Following class, we had lunch and meet with our peer tutors, which took us downtown to purchase cell phones. I have a cell phone now at which you can reach me anytime; it does not cost anything for me to receive phone calls, so if you need to reach me please feel free to call me (I recommend you use skype though, because it will cost you obviously.) My cell phone number is:
531 469 86 81. Just also know that you will need to dial the country code for Turkey, if you want to call me.

After our little walk downtown we came back and worked on homework and studied our first set of vocabulary. We have a vocabulary test pretty much every day, and a list of about 70 vocabs that we need to learn every night, in addition to which ever random vocabs (i.e. numbers, colors, fruits, vegetables…) we learned that particular day. Let’s just say that doing the homework took me about eight hours that night.

Tuesday involved a similar morning, except for the fact that we had a different teacher for the first part of class. Every Tuesday and Thursday we have a conversation teacher that comes in for the first part of class, and she does not speak any English. I really like her and really enjoyed her teaching style, but have to admit that it was incredibly hard to try to understand what she wanted from us considering our very limited knowledge of Turkish.

A lot of the people in my class have a strong background in Arabic, and say that it is very helpful for their studies of the Turkish language, and some of them have even had some Turkish before coming here. I had never encountered the Turkish language before coming here and have to admit that there have been many moments when I have felt quite inept during class. I have learned different languages before, but I have never learned a language from scratch in an academic manner. I have always been thrown into the language and somehow found my way through it, but trying to learn Turkish from a book is not coming easily to me at all. It is a lot more difficult than I expected, and I have probably been getting a lot more frustrated with myself then I should be. After all, I have barely been here a week and I really should not expect too much, even though the teachers expect quite a bit.

Anyways, Monday as you can see was very academically focused, but Tuesday is a different story. After class a couple of us went to a restaurant that two of our tutors (they are husband and wife) own and did our homework there. It was really nice to get to hang out with them. I had real Turkish coffee, which was really strong but yummy, and we even got to ‘play’ with turtles, because they have pet turtles in the garden around their restaurant. What was really nice about doing homework with them, is that they could help us and they would correct our pronunciation.

The best part of Tuesday, came later that night though. This was our first real excursion. We drove for a couple of hours back into the main town of Antalya to see Puccini’s opera “Tosca” in one of the best preserved Roman amphitheaters. It was an absolutely amazing experience. First of all, the opera in general is a breathtaking work of art, but being able to see it in the dead of night with the stars high above you was just magnificent. This is going to sound really nerdy of me, but I also got really excited about the architecture of the theater and some of the props that they were using on stage. I took an art class this past year that focused in large part on various types of theaters throughout history, and I could very easily connect my knowledge from the class with the theater that I was sitting in, and just got super excited.

The opera as you can imagine was amazing, but getting up the next morning was not so much, since we had not gotten home until 2:00 or 3:00am. Wednesday was what I think will become a pretty typical day of school, homework, and a little bit of time at the beach. Thursday, however, we had our first guest lecturer and we learned about the Turkish family unit. The lecture was really interesting for me, because I could draw quite a few parallels between the Turkish family life and the Bosnian family life. There are quite a few similarities, but also some differences. Yet, as the days go by I am noticing more and more things where I can pull out the exact influence that the Ottoman Empire had on Bosnia and its culture.

One cultural even that we have been able to observe quite a bit are ‘circumcision parties.’ Traditionally, in any Muslim a male child needs to be circumcised; however, specifically in the Turkish culture this is done when the boy is of an age when he is coherent (around 5 or 6 years old). The reason for that is that every boy receives a very elaborate party for this event, it is of equivalent importance and lavish as a wedding for a girl. Thus almost every other day we stumble upon a caravan of cars decked out in streamers, honking everywhere they go, and a little boy dressed in a king or sultan’s outfit sticking out of one of the cars. It is definitely a fun spectacle and one of the very authentic cultural experiences that I have had so far.

As Friday, lies at the end of the week so comes a lot of exhaustion with it. It was a pretty relaxed day, and my roommates and I went to the bazaar. The bazaar takes place every Friday and is primarily for fruits and vegetables, but there are also some other knickknacks there and definitely also sweets. Somehow we ended up with one kilo of Turkish delight and also approximately a kilo (which is about two pounds for those of you trying to convert) of halva (which is this delicious sweet thing, but I am still not exactly sure what it is made out of. I know I have had it before, because it is also a Bosnian dessert, but still no clue what is in it.)

So, today Saturday, was a really rejuvenating day. We had planned on going out last night, because the town seems to just completely come alive at night. We can hear the music and see the people from our balcony. It’s around 2:00am (so technically Sunday) right now and I have all the windows closed and yet I can hear and feel the music that is blasting from the different clubs in town. However, when I looked over the city earlier tonight (around 10:00pm) there was not a single beep to be heard and I could only see a few people out on the street. Yet, now the city is alive and blaring! Thank goodness that I don’t have trouble falling asleep with noise.

Anyway, most of today was spend hanging out with my roommates and doing homework; tomorrow will be spend studying massively, because we have our first test on Monday. This program is technically a year’s worth of language study, thus it is divided into two semesters, four weeks each. Each ‘semester’ we have two tests and one final; so by the end of the summer I will have taken a ridiculous number of quizzes, four tests and two finals…that is almost an entire quarter’s worth of testing! Aside from studying, we also had a really awesome tour of the historic sites of Alanya this evening.

Since, Alanya was a fortified city and had a castle it was amazing to walk along the ruins of the wall, as well as the rebuild parts. Though, I have to admit that my favorite part, still, is the water. It is just this incredibly gorgeous blue color. Maybe we will take our flashcards with us down to the beach tomorrow, and go swimming, that would be nice. Every time I go out on the balcony I feel like the water is taunting me. I want to go hang out at the beach so bad, but yet I know that I have to do my homework or study.

Well, that is about all that has been going on with me this past week or so. If you are still reading you are trooper and I promise that I will try to update more often now that I have steady internet access (i.e. I will try not to write any more novels…for any of you who remember Nazir’s emails: after seeing how much I had written, I kind of feel like I wrote one of his epic letters…).

I hope you are all doing well and am sending you lots of beautiful sunshine.

With love,

Ajla