Kocatepe on Friday

I think I've mentioned before that Ankara is home to Kocatepe Camii (pronounced Ko-jah-teh-peh Jah-mee), the largest mosque in Turkey. Whenever I rattle off the fact that it's big, my Turkish friends inevitably attach a second clause to that statement: "BUT it is not historical."

Yes, it's only about thirty years old, and therefore not quite worthy of the admiration given to more historical mosques. But it's huge, beautiful, and located on a large hill from which it's visible all over town. The mosque is actually only a few blocks from my school, and some of the classrooms face it directly, giving us a really spectacular view, especially during evening classes.

The most noticeable aspect of living in a city full of mosques is the call to prayer, the ezan, that emanates from the minarets five times a day. Islam requires its followers to pray five times a day, with the idea that continually reminding yourself of God's presence keeps him in the center of your mind throughout the day. To that end, a chorus of Arabic chants circulates the city every few hours, and with the high concentration of mosques it's difficult to miss, although you might eventually learn to sleep through the dawn ezan. Kocatepe has a particularly powerful PA system, and the ezan has become a regular feature of my weekend afternoon class, since it drowns out most other sounds in my classroom. However, the timing of the ezan depends on the sunrise and sunset, and changes slightly every day, so I can't quite use it to gauge the time of day.

I actually find this frustrating, as part of me would like the ezan to be more of a clock, notifying me that it's now 2:00 or whatever. But Islamic prayer requires more vigilance. The only way to know for sure ahead of time when to pray is to keep a calendar like this on your fridge:


Or you could use the internet.

While many Turks don't adhere strictly to the mandate of prayer on a daily basis, Friday is a different story. Noon prayers on Friday are the Islamic equivalent of Sunday morning church, when most devout Muslims go to the mosque. And if you can't get to a mosque, there are always groups of people with prayer rugs set up under bridges or in the metro station. I was less aware; the fact that it's Friday had totally escaped my mind when I went out rambling through Ankara this morning, armed with a video camera and the goal of recording some tidbits of daily life. But it so happened that while I was walking down the street, I heard the familiar voice of the Kocatepe muezzin, inviting believers to come pray. I looked up, and realized that I was only a couple blocks away from the mosque, so I ran up just in time to catch the last bit of the ezan on camera.

And yes, that's only the very last bit. The Friday noon ezan lasts a good four to five minutes. That's not a recording, either; there's a trained muezzin up there five times a day chanting.

I felt perfectly comfortable standing outside while others went in to pray, but I was surprised to see what looked like a military funeral out in the courtyard past what you can see in the video. A coffin sat out in front, with a Turkish flag draped over it, and soldiers standing round guarding it, while a large group of people in uniforms sat in rows facing the coffin. I had to walk past this funeral to get where I needed, but soon discovered that there were soldiers with large guns surrounding the place, and a tank parked in the street. Now I am curious as to whose funeral this was.

I'm hoping to post more videos soon of other glimpses into life here in Ankara, now that the weather's getting nicer and it's actually fun to go on a walkabout with a camera.

Party in the hallway!

One of the nicest features of our furnished apartment is that it came with a treadmill. My flatmates are both avid runners and plan to participate in the Istanbul Marathon next October, so this has been a great blessing. It's also strategically located next to the balcony, which allows us to prop open the door for a cool breeze whilst exercising.

However, a couple months ago I discovered that the open balcony door creates something of a wind tunnel throughout the apartment when I stepped out front to put out the garbage only to have the door immediately slam shut behind me. At the time, one flatmate was in the shower and the other was on the treadmill, totally zoned out with her iPod, so I had to lean on the doorbell for a good five minutes before the flatmate in the shower finally yelled out, "Heidi, would you answer the door?" and I yelled back, "I'm locked out!'

The lesson from that story is: when the balcony door is open, keep one foot firmly planted inside the front door. I failed to learn this lesson, because the exact same thing happened again this morning, except that one variable had changed: the flatmate in the shower had become the flatmate who wasn't home.

I'm an idiot, basically. I heard the door slam shut behind me and immediately thought, oh no, not again. I knew my flatmate had just hopped onto the treadmill and would likely be oblivious to the world for the next forty minutes. Meanwhile I was in the hallway with no cell phone, no keys, and no shoes. I banged on the door, rang the doorbell continuously, and after about fifteen minutes gave up and decided to sit patiently by the door until I heard the treadmill stop.

So I sat there for a few minutes, mentally running through all my Turkish vocabulary to see if I could conjure up an explanation good enough to convince a neighbor to let me sit in their flat for a few minutes while I waited. Just then a man came up the stairs, delivering a big jug of water to someone in the building. He cocked an eyebrow when he saw me sitting, shoeless, on the floor, and I grinned stupidly at him, aware of how ridiculous I looked. He kept walking, but also kept an eye on me, so as he disappeared up the stairs I blurted out the first thing I could think of: "I have no keys!" He kind of chuckled, and went to deliver his water.

I was worried for a minute that he would mistake me for a gypsy or drug addict or someone who didn't belong in the building, but this deliveryman was more perceptive than that. A minute later he came back and tried to coax more information out of me. "What were you doing out here with no shoes in the first place?"

"Uhhhh....." I pointed at the garbage bag. "Garbage. And the door......shut. My friend is at home, but.....she is running. And listening to music."

He pulled out his cell phone and handed it to me. So she can't hear the doorbell, but she'll hear a phone? Right. But it was a nice gesture, so I took the phone and dialed while he pressed his ear to the door. "I don't hear any music," he said, skeptically. "iPod," I replied.

Next he started banging on the door with the full strength of his muscular arm, smirking all the while. "What's her name? What's your name? You're American?" Yes, yes, yes, my Germanic features and broken Turkish give me away pretty well.

I looked ruefully at my watch. "Fifteen minutes ago," I told him. He gave me a brief pitying look before allowing himself to laugh at my predicament. "Do you have a balcony? We could go round to the back and throw things at the window! Oh wait, you don't have any shoes." With this, the man suddenly decided that his fist wasn't producing the volume required to rouse my flatmate from her exercise trance, so he pulled a coin out of his pocket, curled it into his palm for maximum acoustics, and continued pounding on the door. He kept this up until the next-door-neighbor came out to investigate.

She saw my stockinged feet and immediately clucked her tongue at me, "You got locked out with no shoes?" Cluck cluck cluck- the universal Turkish signal of disapproval at the ineptitude of foreigners. "Is your friend inside? Is she sleeping? Do you need a phone?" I held up the water deliveryman's phone while he explained to her that I'd now been outside for twenty minutes, which made her laugh too.

A couple minutes later my flatmate finally came to the door, panting and sweating from her workout. The water guy looked at her accusingly and greeted her with, "Twenty minutes your friend has been out here." She didn't know how to respond to this, so while she stood there in surprise, I thanked the friendly Turks and ducked inside.

I'm sure both my neighbor and the water guy will be telling the story of the silly American to all their friends today. Glad I can be so amusing to those around me.

Pop music

One of my favorite parts of traveling is discovering new styles of music. And Turkey is like a little piece of heaven as far as music is concerned, because people here really appreciate their musical heritage. Folk music is quite popular, and there are lots of opportunities to hear it. It's a completely different style of music than I've heard anywhere else, with lots of asymmetrical rhythms and wailing melismatic melodies. And each region of Turkey has its own distinct style of folk song and dance.

I have not had nearly enough exposure to this music, so I can't say too much about it except that I've already developed a fondness for Black Sea music. But I'm not yet savvy enough to explain why.



Pretty much all these songs are depressing lost-love songs.


The other weakness in my heart is for world pop music. I'm gradually starting to become familiar with some Turkish artists thanks to our quirky school. In lieu of a bell, the office informs us of break times by blasting MTV all up and down the halls when it's tea time. So yes, eventually I'm starting to recognize some songs and artists. Or at least one. Every country has its own Michael Jackson, and in Turkey that man is known as TARKAN. Despite his eerily feminine dance moves, I've taken quite a shine to his music because of his catchy juxtaposition of Turkish sounds and Western pop style.



Tarkan's definitely the first name any foreigner encounters in Turkish music, thanks to his ubiquity, but there's plenty of other fun music out there too. My goal is to learn more of it.



You'd think that knowing about Tarkan would give me some street cred with the teenagers I teach on the weekends, but quite a strange phenomenon has transpired in which we bonded over a different oeuvre of pop culture. Believe it or not, America, we're not the only country to export our entertainment to all corners of the globe. South Korea is gaining on us. Imagine my surprise when Turkish teenage girls walked into my room gushing about boy bands like SS501 and FT Island. Imagine their surprise when I'd actually heard of these bands because it's the same stuff Taiwanese kids listen to.



Oh yes. There's an irresistible draw about Korean entertainment. Their soap operas are deliciously cheesy and fun, their movies are hilarious, and their boy bands are a global diplomatic movement working to convince us all that South Korea's flourishing democracy is worth protecting.

I just never expected this craze to have spread to Turkey. Surprise!

Happy Bunny Year!

Happy New Year! February 3 marked the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese lunar calendar. While it's by far the most important holiday in Chinese culture, this is definitely a non-event in Turkey, which in Ottoman times utilized a different lunar calendar and now uses the Gregorian calendar exclusively.

Since I'm stuck in a gloomy sunless mid-winter while everyone in Asia is on a two-week vacation from school, Chinese New Year has been a nice catalyst to pull me deeper into that stage of culture shock when your whole body and mind start to reject a new culture like a bad organ transplant. This week the predominant symptom of homesickness was gastronomic in nature: I could think of nothing but Chinese food.

Fortunately for my cravings, this is a big city, and like any big city anywhere in the world, there are a few Chinese restaurants. So lunch today was provided by a place called Guangzhou Wuyang, which was full of Chinese tourists getting their home fries before hitting up the one museum in Ankara. They even had a little altar set up in front with food offerings and incense for the ghosts. Hmm, okay, maybe that wasn't something I missed about Asia.

Happy Valentine's Day and Chinese Year of the Rabbit, it says, also advertising their special set meals. Two foreign holidays in one!

So is Chinese food in Turkey any good? Well, this place we went to today is probably just as good as any Chinese place in the United States, which is to say it's nothing like the gong bao chicken from my favorite place in Chiayi. The waiter's gift of a plate of Korean kimchi was probably the best part of the meal. Still, Chinese food is comfort food, and when you're homesick, mediocre Turkish-Chinese noodles are a little piece of heaven, and chopsticks feel like a hand-held security blanket. Some days are just like that.

Snow day!

Most days in Turkey I feel as though all my mental preconceptions about this place have been laid out like bubble wrap and someone is going through my brain popping each bubble in succession. Living here mostly shows me how woefully ignorant I am about this region of the world.

One of my biggest mistakes has been to mentally lump Turkey in with the rest of the Middle East. While technically Turkey is part of that region, it's culturally and geographically so different from the Arabian peninsula that the association causes a lot of false mental images. For example, does the name Istanbul conjure up images of shadowy deserts and fearsome nomadic traders going to spice markets? Yeah, that was my romanticized delusion. Until I got here and saw this:

Whoa! Not a desert at all. It's mountainous! It has trees! It has snow! Ankara looks a lot more like Wyoming* than Egypt. We're at the same latitude as Chicago, in the mountains, about as far away from a sea as you can get on a peninsula, so it makes sense that there would be snow. I had simply never taken the time to reason this out.

*The mountains, not the city part.

This is our second snowfall of the season. The first was in December, when we got about two inches that lasted for a day or so before melting. But when I woke up this past Saturday morning and peeked out the window, I was delighted to see a white blanket covering the rooftops and narrow alleyway between the buildings. (Our apartment faces the back, which means my view is all concrete. Hardly inspiring.)

Unfortunately I work all day Saturday and Sunday and had no time to enjoy this. So I simply prayed a lot that the snow would stick around until Monday. God must have decided there was no harm in letting me have a snow day for once after years on a tropical island, because while I watched students take exams on Sunday, the snow kept going.

So on Monday it was time to play. We had decided that it would be fun to make a snowman on our day off. City life is not so conducive to snowman building, seeing as we don't really have yards and street snow gets dirty pretty quickly. However, a quick scout around the neighborhood turned up a nice big snowy spot in the park near our bus stop. Hurray!

In college, I had a friend from Arkansas who showed up in Nebraska freshman year without a proper winter coat to help her survive the subzero Arctic chill of the prairie. At the time we Midwesterners laughed at her, unable to fathom a land where people didn't have closets full of snowpants and boots. The joke's on me now: in packing for Turkey I did not anticipate playing in the snow and did not plan for this occasion. Neither did my flatmates. So we improvised.

Oh how stylish we are. White knit hats, Concordia sports gear, a very fashionable puffy coat deemed "so Taiwanese" by Americans in Chiayi, and yes I'm wearing pajama pants under those yoga pants.


The snowman quickly turned into a snow octopus with a giant head and eight tentacles pointing every which way. At some point during the building process, one of my flatmates pointed out that it might have been wise to learn the Turkish word for octopus in case anyone came by and asked what we were making.

This turned out not to be a problem, since we soon discovered that the word is "ahtapot," which is highly intelligible in the context of, "Şu ahtapot mu?" (Is that an octopus?) A mom and her toddler came by to admire our work, or at least the mom admired and the little girl looked on in horror before finally running away.


He needed more definition, so we rounded up some red berries and leaves to make a face.


Voila! The octopus is complete. We celebrated by continuing to indulge our inner children on the playground equipment. You would be surprised how few strange looks we got from passers-by.




I am amazed that I can still fit into a safety swing. There is a bright side to having short legs!

The story ends on a bit of a tragic note. Our ahtapot lasted less than 24 hours. When I went to the grocery store this afternoon, I stopped by the park to see if it was still there. Nothing remained but a flat expanse of snow. You would never guess an ahtapot had been there. Someone clearly did not appreciate our ahtapot. Oh well. No killjoy can ever take away the bliss of snow construction.