29 Ekim Cumhuriyet Bayramı

Here's a little game. How many Turkish flags do you see in this picture?


I counted nine, but there could be others lurking in corners. My neighborhood doesn't always look like this, but it so happens that today was a holiday.


October 29 is Republic Day, the anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. It's a national holiday, so schools and many businesses were closed. There was a parade this morning, but we didn't attend. But we did see that everyone was flying their national colors today. These ranged from very small:



to very large:
I already knew that Turks are very patriotic, but today I got a much better glimpse into how proud they are of their country. Just walking around you could get a sense of the pride they take in their republic. People had flags and little pictures of Atatürk on their car windows and hanging from their rearview mirrors driving around. Every bus had a flag flying on the front corner. Some guys on the bus saw us looking and pointing at the sheer quantity of flags displayed, and proudly asked us what we thought about it.

And remember how I said they really like Atatürk? I wasn't joking. He's everywhere too, more so than usual. He's even on the Google logo!



Quite a sight, isn't it? And it was like this all over the city. Rather inspiring, I think.

T.I.A.

Things are finally starting to come together, in a very Asian sort of way. I don't mean this in any derogatory sense; it's just that Eastern cultures operate on a completely different plane than Western cultures. Americans enjoy precision, planning ahead, and knowing exactly what to expect well before something happens so we can be prepared for it. Well, welcome to Turkey. On a superficial level, you'd be fooled into thinking that you're in a Western country with familiar values and operational systems, but the culture and way of thinking is simply never what you expect.

We were very thankful that all three of us were hired at the same language school. Last weekend we were asked to visit several classes for observation, so we went over on Saturday morning. Nobody seemed to know why we were there ("You're supposed to be observing? Erm..."), but some teachers welcomed us into their classrooms nonetheless. After the first tea break at 11:00, one of the administrative assistants approached us and said that they needed a substitute for a conversation class at 1:15. Huzzah! At the 12:00 tea break, she came back and said they needed another substitute for a conversation class at 1:30. Huzzah!

We've been waiting since then to hear about schedules and which courses we're teaching. Tonight we finally got phone calls saying that we start Saturday morning, and we can go to pick up our schedule and course materials tomorrow. That gives us a whole afternoon to prepare for teaching! Huzzah!

The next step was finding an apartment. In typical Turkish fashion, we were introduced to an apartment owned by a friend of a friend of a friend's sister. The place is located about a block away from the Russian embassy, a tall gloomy-looking apartment complex painted green and garnished with barbed wire. Cheery neighbors, those. But it is a nice central location, within walking distance of work and fairly near other Ankara hot spots.

The apartment has two bedrooms and one Harry Potter closet bedroom. It's furnished, not only with the sofa and chairs you'd expect, but also all the former occupant's belongings. Shoe boxes, eggs in the unplugged fridge, rows of empty beer bottles, a treadmill, Russian nesting dolls, even a poster of some Turkish pretty-boy celebrity smiling down at us from high on a wall. Poking through the cupboards in the kitchen, the woman showing us the flat smiled and remarked, "Look at all these curry mixes! You can have curry every day!" Hm. Well, I do love curry.

Junk aside, the flat is pretty nice and we're looking forward to occupying it. It's cozy and homey, nice but not extravagant. Just about perfect. We're negotiating and praying that it gets cleaned out a bit more before we take over.

Back in Taiwan we had a saying about this feeling of being overwhelmed and lacking any sort of mental schema to explain our surroundings. "TIA- This is Asia." (We stole it from Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Blood Diamond.) It's a metaphorical shrug, as if to say, "Well, let's just take it for what it is." At times, it's the only way to stay sane when everything around you appears to have descended into madness. Technically, I'm still in Asia, so I'm going to keep using this phrase when I'm completely perplexed.

"TIA" moments don't all stem from frustration, however. Turks have already provided me with lots of experiences that both baffle and delight me.

For example, last week my two flatmates befriended the flower man who runs a streetside stand a block or so down. When we went back to get flowers for a friend's birthday, the man greeted us each with a kiss on the hand. He arranged our floral bouquet with flourishes of the hand and expressive gestures comparing the beauty of the flower with the beauty of the ladies before him. Then he threw in an extra flower and kissed the tips of his fingers in melodramatic satisfaction at his handiwork. TIA.

Another time, we were cooking a pot of beans on the stove when our Turkish teacher arrived. Somehow in the ensuing conversation, we mentioned that we liked black beans. He told us that they don't really have them in Turkey. The next day, he showed up with a big bag of black beans for us, because he knows the one place in Ankara that you can get them. TIA.

Creepy clown garbage can sure to scare children away rather than encourage them to throw their garbage in an appropriate place: TIA.

I looked out the window the other day and saw a middle-aged woman across the street crawling out her fifth-story apartment with a squeegee to clean the outside of her window. She accomplished this dangling by one arm, so caught up in her war against smudges that she didn't notice how high up she was. TIA.

Most parks have an exercise area with lots of equipment like this. Many of them have clear functions, but a few of these gadgets are pretty odd. TIA.

Yep, little joys, moderate frustrations- it's all part of the ride. This is Turkey.

Tidbits

Well, our first four weeks of "orientation" are coming to an end. We're getting close to having an apartment, work starts on Saturday, and soon enough this will stop feeling like vacation and start feeling more like real life. But here are some things that I've learned in four weeks of orientation:

• Ankara has a delightful website called "Yemek Sepetti" where you can order food online from many restaurants, and they deliver straight to your door. No awkward Turkish phone calls necessary! I've heard you can also have groceries delivered, but we've yet to try that.
• Turkish people eat a lot of bread. At the grocery store there's always a stockpile of fresh loaves of bread. We usually pick up one or two. Everyone else in line has like ten. Last night we ordered in, and my soup came with like half a loaf of bread.
• Every morning, if the muezzin calling people to prayer at the mosque doesn't wake you up, the simitci probably will. Simit is a traditional snack, a round pretzel-looking bread that tastes something like a bagel covered in sesame seeds. There are stands all over town selling these snacks, but simitci (the vendors) also wander the streets in the morning with a stockpile on their heads, hollering and calling for people to come buy breakfast.
• To say "no," Turkish people will often tilt their heads back and click their tongue. I have yet to get used to this.
• Movies at the cinema have a smoke break in the middle. Our English classes also have "tea" breaks, but I noticed that it's more often used to sneak out to the balcony for a cigarette. There's a lot of smoking.
• University students view cheating as "the rule." Every teacher I've talked to has talked about what a rampant problem it is. Cheating is culturally viewed as clever if you can get away with it. Some students I talked to the other day said that it's a problem, but there's no way to fix it because it's so prevalent. (That might have been their way of saying they cheat without admitting to it.)
  
• Worldwide, Turkey has the third highest percentage of Facebook users.
  
• Forget your stereotypes of women in burqas. Plenty of women on the streets cover their heads and wear modest long skirts, but just as many are out there wearing leggings as pants. Or better yet, tights as pants with tops that definitely aren't long enough to count as dresses.
• There's a fairly large Chinese community in Ankara. I have no idea why, but I hope this means I can somehow get my hands on ingredients to make Chinese food with some snooping around.
• Turks like tea a lot. Everywhere you go, you'll be offered tea. This is brewed exceptionally strong, but they are willing to add some water to dilute it for foreigners. However, if you want to impress your Turkish friends, you'll ask for "rabbit blood" tea, which means it's super strong. I haven't the guts for this.
• Soccer (or football, as I must now call it) is very popular here, but allegiance is not related to geography. People here are mostly fans of the three Istanbul teams. Ankara has a team as well, but apparently this is the team for "hooligans."
• I have to lie about what's in my wallet. Nobody likes breaking large bills and giving change, and if you hand one to a cashier hoping to get some smaller bills, she'll usually ask you if you have anything smaller. Smaller stores are often willing to give you a 50 cent discount rather than try to make change from a 5 lira bill. I have not yet figured out how I'm supposed to get the coins to pay in change when nobody is willing to break my large bills and give me coins in return.

Gainful employment and some sound advice

Good news: I am no longer unemployed!

God is good and always provides. We managed to find a dershani (cram school) willing to hire all three of us as full time English teachers, and will begin teaching classes at the end of the month. My two cohorts have already been recruited to substitute for some classes this week, while I escaped and still have a little time to crawl about the city before getting into the daily grind.

Today we were able to go in and observe some classes, to get a feel for the course material and the lessons. Classes are taught in three hour blocks, broken into chunks of fifty minutes with tea breaks in between. It's pretty intense. Most of the students are university students hoping to improve their English, and there are also quite a few professionals. One girl I talked to today graduated from university last year and wants to be a primary school teacher. These days, there's a growing demand in primary schools for English instruction, so she's learning English to increase her chance of getting a good job.

I visited three different classes this morning, with three different teachers and levels of students. Their abilities varied, but overall the teachers were helpful and the students were enthusiastic. One of the teachers decided to utilize his visitor to spur some practical conversation practice with his students.

They asked me a few questions about myself and my hometown. I used my standard answer of, "You've never heard of Missouri, but you know Brad Pitt? He's from Missouri." Works every time. They think it's an awesome place. Then I asked them about Ankara and what's fun to do here. They all answered, "Go to Istanbul. Go to İzmir. Go to Eskişehir." Basically: Ankara is boring. If you want fun, go somewhere else.

Things took a more interesting turn when the teacher asked them to advise me on things not to do in Ankara. The students started with the standard big city advice of don't go out downtown alone at night, keep an eye on your purse, don't go to pubs alone unless you want to be majorly hit on, don't make eye contact with beggars or they'll follow you, etc.

Then a guy in the class perked up his head and said, "Don't speak to apaçi!" When I asked for clarification on who or what is apaçi, all the students scratched their heads for a moment. The guy continued: "Apaçi are strange people. They have strange hair."

The teacher stopped him. "That could mean anything. Draw it on the board." One of the girls took a marker and drew a rough version of this:



Hair sticking straight up on top, hanging down on the sides. I recognized this from the streets. We'd noticed that some guys here walk around with partial mohawks, gelling up only the top portion of their heads and letting the rest hang loose. To be honest, it looks like they just gave up on their hair halfway through styling it.

The student, whose hair was tame and completely lacking in gel or tackiness, finally thought of the word he needed. "Heidi, do you know emo?" I nodded and he smiled, glad that he'd found a way to communicate. "It's like emo, but dangerous. Don't speak with them."

Well then. I'd never thought of emo kids as a particularly dangerous breed, but apparently there's an offshoot of the movement in Turkey that is creepy enough to warrant some cautionary advice. I shall keep my eyes peeled.

The next class I visited was taught by an Englishman who has a rule that if a student speaks Turkish during class, he receives a strike. Three strikes and you have to bring cake for the class. It so happened that I arrived on a day when two students were being punished for speaking Turkish in class; one man had brought a cake and another drinks. The lesson finished early and we all got to chat and enjoy a lovely cherry-chocolate cake. I think I like this disciplinary measure.

If our goal is building relationships, this seems like a great place to start. Once I get my own students, we'll be together a lot through these intensive English courses. The school emphasizes conversation and getting students to speak, so there are lots of chances to build rapport and positive relationships in the classroom. I'm looking forward to it.

Where's Dr. House when you need him?

So Friday night was pretty great. The team got together for a time of fellowship and American-style hamburgers. A friend tempted me to gluttony and I actually ate a hamburger for once, as well as cheesecake and a nice Turkish beer. All was well, until I got home and curled up in bed.

Suddenly I was beset by an intense itchy feeling. It started on my legs, but soon spread to my entire body. I spent a sleepless night wracked by intense pain. At first I thought my little room was the next victim in the epidemic of bedbugs I keep hearing about in the news. But when I got up and looked in a mirror, I saw that I was covered head to toe in hives.

What on earth could have caused this? I'm in a new country, in a completely new environment. I could be reacting to anything. The possibilities were myriad. Was it

A) something I ate?
B) a new soap, shampoo, or detergent?
C) my supervisor's new cat?
D) stress?
E) air pollution?
F) the curse of the Phrygians come to haunt me?
G) my blanket?
H) my toothpaste?
I) paranoia?

Seriously. Everything here is new. Sights, smells, foods, microbes, you name it, this is my first exposure.

The hives got worse through Saturday and Sunday. Eventually they spread to my face, and like Quasimodo, I became disgusted by my ghastly deformity and cloistered myself in the house while my two flatmates went out for coffee with friends, job interviews, and jogs. (It was at this point that I recognized the sole virtue of the burqa, a garment seldom seen here but which I would gladly have donned for the privilege of going out without revealing my disfigured appearance.)

They did come back bearing gifts: roses sprayed in some odd sort of wax to make them brighter, tiny evil eye trinkets, and--best of all--some antihistamines procured from a Turkish pharmacy. Way to go, flatmates!

These "nazar" trinkets are a common sight here. In the superstitious traditions of folk Islam, jealous eyes are portals for evil spirits to cause harm. Nazar are thought to protect the bearer from the evil thoughts emanating from other people's jealous eyes. Clearly Lady Gaga has become jealous of my great beauty and charm and thought to inflict me with an allergic reaction of epic proportions.

Or maybe it was the laundry detergent I found in the bathroom and used to wash my clothes last week. This was my eventual conclusion as I ticked through my mental list of possible culprits. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday doped up on the Turkish equivalent of Benadryl, which left me pretty loopy. When I finally recovered from my stupor Monday morning, my hives were gone and my face was all puffy like a cartoon chipmunk. However, the hives returned when I put on a top I'd washed earlier this week. When I changed, the hives receded again. Bingo.

So now I'm only slightly deformed, and washing all my clothes twice: once with a new detergent I bought, and again without detergent to make sure everything is super rinsed out before I let it touch my skin. Lesson learned: a few extra dollars is sometimes worth it.

Traffic

I will admit that three years of Asian traffic has desensitized me to those who choose to view traffic laws as suggestions. Driving in Taiwan almost mandates the violation of traffic laws; following the rules is at times more dangerous than ignoring them. The roads are chaotic, with scooters and bicycles weaving around the cars and ubiquitous blue trucks. Red lights mean "Look both ways before going." This is now so ingrained in me that I'm a little scared of driving in the United States, where you can count on people to stop at red lights and stay stopped.

So Turkish traffic is probably less of a shock to me than to my fellow compatriots who are used to orderly rural European traffic. My shock was more at the homogeneity of motorized vehicles on the street. As in America, streets here are dominated by cars, buses, trucks, and taxis. In nearly three weeks I have yet to see a bicycle. There are a few scooters, but they're mostly pizza deliverymen, and they weave in and around traffic like Taiwanese teenagers.

Still, the roads here are scary. Ankara drivers are in a hurry to get wherever they're going. I've kept my eyes peeled for speed limit marking along the road. Perhaps it's my inability to internalize space and distance, but it certainly seems to me that the signs are interpreted as "minimum speed." At any rate, the cars zip down the street, flying up and down Ankara's numerous steep hills with flagrant disregard for the people around them.

Lane markings are optional. A two-lane street is clearly wide enough to fit at least three-- four if they're small-- motorized vehicles. This makes the idea of "changing lanes" completely irrelevant. If you're already in two lanes simultaneously, that makes you free to choose one or the other any time you please. At a red light, cars will line up four abreast at the white line, engines revving and drivers eyeing each other suspiciously, each ready to zoom out the second the light turns green and claim the coveted goal of being five feet ahead of the next guy.

But the worst is the pedestrians. Automobiles are a relatively new phenomenon in Turkey; it's been perhaps ten years since cars became accessible to the middle class and started filling the streets. There are a good number of people, especially those of an older generation, wandering around Ankara who don't seem to have caught on to this. I've seen people pop out in front of traffic, seemingly oblivious to the speed of the cars. The cars are reluctant to slow down or stop for pedestrians not in a crosswalk, preferring to honk menacingly and speed up.

Last week I was on a bus, and three school girls ran out in front of us. The bus stopped literally less than a foot away from one girl. I don't know which was scarier: that the bus nearly ran over her or that she seemed completely unaware of the bus speeding toward her.

So far I've only seen one accident, or rather, the aftermath of an accident. It was stimulating enough that I'd prefer not to repeat the experience. Let's hope so.

Ataturk and some other historical notes

If you live outside of Turkey, chances are you've never heard of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. If you live in Turkey, there's no chance you haven't heard of him. His face is on all the paper currency, his statue graces every school, street corner, and building in Ankara, and his name is revered here in a way that might rival American admiration for Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. combined. He is the national hero.

Okay, before I get into Ataturk, let's quickly review some Turkish history, just for fun. Here's a brief timeline of Turkey's impressive roster of occupants:

Bronze Age (2500 BC- 700 BC)--> Anatolia was inhabited at various points by Hattians, Hittities, Akkadians, Assyrians, Phrygians, Lydians, Trojans, and probably a bunch of other groups. Greeks were around and influential.
The Romans (133 BC-330 AD, aka the era of places you'd recognize from the Bible)--> Veni, vidi, vici, Augustus took over in 14 AD, Turkey became the province of Asia Minor, home to many of St. Paul's travels, the council of Nicea, and Santa Claus (St. Nicholas-- true story!)
Byzantines (330-1453) --> History teachers taught you that the Roman Empire fell and caused the Middle Ages, but that's only half true. The Byzantines kept Roman tradition and power going for another millennium. Meanwhile, the Seljuk Turks were there too, and Ottoman power rose, waiting for the weakening Byzantine empire to crumble.
Ottoman Empire (1453-1922) --> Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's now Istanbul, not Constantinople. The Ottomans took over the whole Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and even got close enough to Germany that Martin Luther wrote nasty things about them. They sided with Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I, but lost. After that the empire was divided up. (That is far too little about the Ottomans. I leave it to you to find out more.)
Republic of Turkey (1922-now) --> Western powers occupied former Ottoman lands after World War I. The Turks fought them off and started an independent, democratic, secular republic. We can credit this to one man: Ataturk.

Yes, Ataturk pretty much created modern Turkey. A military officer, statesman, linguist, writer, and modernist, Ataturk gained prominence during World War I for his leadership in the Ottoman Army. Later he led the Turkish War of Independence, founded the current government, and became the first President of the Turkish Republic.

He was also hugely influential in his ideas, which he developed by studying Western cultures, particularly governments and Enlightenment-era philosophy. Ataturk implemented huge reforms in politics, law, language, culture, education, and pretty much any other aspect of society you can think of. His goal was to modernize Turkey, bringing Western influences in to help Turkey become a competitive world power. The man did everything.

Some of his reforms:

• Moved the political capital from Istanbul to Ankara
• Established a secular government
• Set up the military as the defender of the Republic, guarding against threats both domestic and international (there have been several military coups since then, when Islamist parties have threatened Ataturk's vision of a secular government)
  
• Created a representative democracy
• Instituted women's suffrage
  
• Reformed the Turkish language to use the Roman alphabet instead of Arabic, and also purging the language of Persian and Arabic words
  
• Banned traditional religious garments and promoted Western clothing
  
• Replaced Islamic courts with a legal code based on Switzerland's
• Encouraged the study of science and technology in schools and standardized education
• Encouraged reevaluation of history, claiming that the Ottomans taught only religious history and ignored the glorious past of other Anatolian civilizations
  
• Developed a national rail network

Pretty impressive list. To get an idea of how Turks feel about him, simply consider the name they gave him: Ataturk means "Father of the Turks."

Ataturk's mausoleum in Ankara

Last week we visited Ataturk's mausoleum, which includes a huge museum of modern Turkish history. It's really fascinating stuff, if you're into history at all. I highly recommend learning more about Ataturk.

And if you're not into history....well, you're probably not reading this anymore, so we'll leave it at that.

Is this a dog? No, it's a table.

"I'd hoped the language might come on its own, the way it comes to babies, but people don't talk to foreigners the way they talk to babies. They don't hypnotize you with bright objects and repeat the same words over and over, handing out little treats when you finally say "potty" or "wawa." It got to the point where I'd see a baby in the bakery or grocery store and instinctively ball up my fists, jealous over how easy he had it. I wanted to lie in a French crib and start from scratch, learning the language from the ground floor up. I wanted to be a baby, but instead, I was an adult who talked like one, a spooky man-child demanding more than his fair share of attention."
-David Sedaris

Few things are more humbling than starting from scratch in a language completely unfamiliar to you. All your education and intelligence is suddenly irrelevant, because you lack the tools to express anything you know. Well-meaning people try to help you by explaining things, but all you can do is nod and smile, acknowledging their politeness and trying to hide your embarrassment at not understanding a word.

This is an incredibly frustrating experience for me, since I'm a person who likes to understand my surroundings. But it's probably healthy. Professionally, it helps me become more sympathetic with students who feel overwhelmed by English. Spiritually, it reminds me how weak I am and how much I do need to rely on God to get me through each day.

That being said, I'm very thankful for our Turkish teacher, who for the past week has been showing up to dutifully drill Turkish into our heads two hours a day. The language is still like a flood, and for now I am most certainly drowning.

In five lessons, we've encountered about 200 words and several grammatical constructions like, "Is this a man or a woman?" "Are these knives? Yes, they are." "What's on the house? The small dogs are on the house." and "What is this place? This is not a hospital, it's a bank!" Yes, it really does seem that ridiculous at times.

So far we're only capable of painfully obvious statements and caveman-esque requests like, "What? I small understand. Bread, please! Okay, okay." But eventually it will start to make sense. I hope.

Meanwhile, the explorations of historical and cultural sites continue and next week we'll start the process of job interviews and getting into schools and real housing where we don't have to sleep on piles of foam mattresses like in "The Princess and the Pea." We're praying this goes smoothly and that things work out.

Little birds

We only started Turkish lessons on Monday, but it's already a lot of pressure. To practice, we decided to make a little diagram of birds in various locations. I'm quite sure we made some grammatical errors. Yipes.

First impressions

When I decided to come to Turkey, a lot of people were concerned about the "single Christian American Female living in a Muslim country" aspect of this thing. To be honest, that was one of my first thoughts too.

It seems to be helpful that we have three SCAFs all in the same boat. Ankara is a big city, and as such does have certain risks. Walking alone at night is not smart, nor is dressing immodestly and calling lots of attention to the fact that you're alone. I wouldn't do those things living in a city in the United States. As in most places, if you look like you know where you're going, nobody's going to mess with you. Part of these first few weeks is to help us get to the point where we can look like we know where we're going. It probably helps that all three of us have lived alone overseas before and have developed a heightened sense of vigilance and instincts in dealing with people.

We felt a lot better about this after our exploring the other day, particularly in our interactions with Turkish men. We were collectively a little nervous at first, with vestiges of American stereotypes of the Middle East roaming through our thoughts, despite the fact that American stereotypes are largely skewed and that Turkey doesn't consider itself part of the Middle East.

While riding the bus, all three of us took turns sitting by ourselves, which didn't last very long because we were each soon joined by men, usually older guys in suits. This was a little surprising at first, especially since there were other seats available and we'd been told that on inter-city buses there is no mixed-gender seating. However, we learned later that sometimes men on city buses will sit next to young women traveling alone as a form of protection. So if a man views himself as safe, he'll just plop himself next to a woman to prevent creepers from sitting next to her. And it was a rather safe feeling, as they all just minded their own business and didn't say a word to us. I'm praying that this sense of protection extends to a scenario where friendly people would intercede should a real creep try to bother one of us.

We were also pleasantly surprised at our interactions with the waiters at a cafe we tried in the city. It was embarrassing enough to try ordering from a restaurant for the first time. We had no idea of procedures, what was on the menu, how to go about any of this. Our servers picked up pretty quickly that our Turkish was limited almost to the point of nonexistence, but that only increased their friendliness and care. They did give us a bit of a hard time about our lack of Turkish ability, but they were smiling the whole time and, honestly, they were nicer than most American servers would be to a non-English speaking foreigner. They joked with us, tried to teach us a few words, and laughed at our pronunciation while still giving us all the help they could. In short, it seemed completely normal.

Sometimes we get stares, but usually from children. We're blessed in two ways.
1) This is a big city, and it's the capital, so foreigners aren't unusual anyway.
2) We all have darker hair and don't dress like tourists, so we don't really stick out that much.

Here's hoping that this isn't only my naivete speaking and that our sense of security continues throughout our term here.

A few things I've learned in five days

This first week in Turkey has been something of a whirlwind. The past few days I've felt so overwhelmed by new information and jet lag that at times my head was spinning. So here are just a couple of the experiences we've had in the last few days.

Friday morning we were taken by a Turkish friend to visit Kocatepe Mosque, the largest in Turkey. Our guide says that over 30,000 people can worship here at a time. It's an absolutely gorgeous building, shining with white and blue on top of a hill. The inside is a big open space, with marbled domes decorated in geometric patterns and writings from the Qur'an. The carpet is patterned to allow individuals a space to kneel and pray. Since we arrived shortly before noon prayers on Friday (the Islamic equivalent of Sunday church) we could see people sitting along the walls, discussing the Qur'an or simply sitting in quiet contemplation.

The chandelier in the center is made of eight tons of gold!

The circle is a surah (chapter) of the Qur'an in Arabic

The mosque seemed to be a perfect example of the juxtaposition of ancient and modern that characterizes this society. Women in Turkey work outside their homes and walk confidently in the streets, but are confined to the balconies and rear of the mosque during prayer times. The muezzin sings from the top of the minaret the same call to prayer that Muslims have used for centuries, but these days he's aided by an elevator and an amplifier. Women walk into their mosque with their heads covered (we did too, as a sign of respect) but still wearing trendy skirts and tight-fitting blouses. It reminded me that while Ankara seems very cosmopolitan and modern on the outside, many people here are still rooted in tradition and look to their faith to guide their busy lives rather than the secularism that informs their government.

That being said, secularism does pervade the streets. While many women do wear headscarves and dress conservatively, there are plenty who prefer trendy European styles. Islam forbids consumption of alcohol, but a sign on the street informed me today that it's still Miller Time here.

Which brings us to part 2: the day of exploration.

The three new girls have been sticking together for the most part as we try to get our bearings. Yesterday we made a leap and bought bus passes. Ankara is a city of 4 million, and while I do truly enjoy walking up and down hills all day, sometimes it's best to let someone else take you where you need to go. This is a new adventure for me, since I rarely utilized the bus system in Taiwan.

One thing we did discover is that the only way to find out which bus goes where is to literally get on a bus and find out. There are no route maps to be found in stores or online, so we decided this morning to just explore.

The 413 bus took us all around Ankara, making a big loop around the north end of town before coming to the end of its route. At this point we were kicked off our bus and told to find another that was heading into town. From there we went back to the downtown area of Kızılay, where we hopped off to wander around town.


You can never get too engrossed in gazing about the buildings and fascinating people here, because the sidewalks are deadly. Sometimes tiles pile up in odd places, or there will be a hole in front of you waiting to trap your ankle and sprain it. And really, this area of town was crowded enough that I nearly walked into people several times.

Our office/temporary housing is conveniently near this very large tower, which is visible all over town.

We found parks, cafes, a triceratops, the opera house, mountains, Roman baths, and some pretty wacky hairstyles. Then we came back and cooked some dinner, ready now to tackle a new week which will bring such exciting ventures as our first formal Turkish lessons. Bring it on.