Hamam!

The idea of social bathing always fascinated me as a kid. Having grown up with classical studies, I was well aware that the ancient Romans made a habit of combining hygiene and gossip by gathering at public baths. Frankly it appalled me, both that they used oil to clean themselves and that one would leave the house to bathe. The process and the concept of having such a long and elaborate bathing routine was intriguing, but all the same I was thankful to be born in an advanced time where indoor plumbing had rendered the need for public baths obsolete.

Along those lines, I had definitely heard the phrase "Turkish bath" a few times, and assumed it to be a similar concept to the Roman bath: exotic, slightly barbaric, and extinct. So it surprised me to discover when I came here that the tradition of the hamam had not died out with the Ottoman Empire, and that it was possible to experience it for myself.

So why did it take me so long to actually visit one of these? Fear of the unknown. There were too many variables involved in this: what's the protocol? What do I bring with me? What do I expect when I go? How much does it cost? Am I allowed to wear clothes?

But today was a public holiday in Turkey, and so a couple of the girls in my Turkish class decided to take a trip to the hamam, which turned into all six of the girls in my Turkish class, plus my flatmate, going together on a girls' day out. One of the French girls had been to a hamam before and knew what to expect, so it was a bit less intimidating. "It's like a spa," she said. "You can get a massage, you can get waxing, you can get a pedicure, anything you want!" Perfect.


There's a really cute area of Ankara called Hamamönü that is full of restored Ottoman-era buildings and is now a comfortable district full of cheap cafes and interesting shopping. It's also the location of the historic Karacabey Hamam, which was built in 1440 and is still functioning today, and it was to this hamam that our cheerful group went today.


This is the front, which is the men's entrance. There's a separate area for women in the back. It doesn't look like much from the outside, but once you get inside you feel immediately at home. The women at the reception area were delighted to have a group of seven foreign visitors, and did their best to welcome us. First they escorted us to a large room to change into our swimsuits, complimenting our beauty all the while. After we'd changed, they handed us some towels to cover up with and we headed into the steam-filled dreamworld of the Turkish bath.

This picture isn't the hamam we went to, but it gives you an idea what they look like

The bath area itself is a large room decorated all in white marble, with a high domed ceiling and marble sinks lining the walls. In the middle is a large octagon-shaped table, big enough for a person to lie comfortably on each side. The whole place is hot and full of steam and water.

The first step of the bath is opening up your pores in the hot room. We sat on the marble benches next to the sinks, pouring basinfuls of lukewarm water over ourselves as the steam softened our skin and got us ready for the scrubdown. Time seemed to stop as our muscles relaxed and we sat around casually chatting about anything that came to mind. I was starting to think that maybe the Romans weren't as crazy as I thought.

Last night I mentioned to my students that I was going to the hamam today. They were excited that I was finally going to experience this part of traditional Turkish culture, but offered one caveat: "Don't be ashamed. You think you are a clean person, but you will discover that you're wrong. When they scrub you, lots of dirty things will come off your skin. It's normal."

Turns out my students were right. A woman came in and called us individually into the main room, where we lay on the big marble tables as attendants came to give us the greatest exfoliation of our lives. They use a rough mitt called a kese to thoroughly scrub every inch of my body, and I was completely disgusted when I finally opened my eyes and noticed that she had rubbed off what looked like nearly a quarter inch of dead skin.

After scrubbing me clear, the attendant then proceeded to give me a full-body massage while soaping me down, finishing off by washing my hair via the most lovely scalp massage you can imagine. It would have been the most relaxing experience ever if my dozings hadn't been interrupted by this woman periodically grabbing my hand and directing me to flip over.

Once we were fully rinsed off, we were sent back into the steam room, where we continued to sit and marvel at how amazingly soft and clean our skin felt, pouring water over ourselves to cool off. It really was like a magical place from another world, with the soft light and white marble creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale palace, and the echoes of water and our voices bouncing off the walls like a cave, distorting sounds enough that it was difficult to keep my mind focused.

In total, I think we were in the bath area over an hour, although I was in such a trance-like state that I honestly couldn't tell you how long it was. But we arrived at 3:30 and didn't leave until nearly 5:30. And the price for such an experience? A paltry US $15.

We finished off the day with a visit to a nearby cafe for more great conversation, delicious snacks, and lots of water to rehydrate. It was nice to spend more time with the girls from class, since our conversations are usually hindered by the fact that our Turkish teacher doesn't allow us to speak English in class. Our group included four Americans, a Korean, and two French girls, each here for different purposes and coming from different backgrounds, but united by the freakiness of being a foreigner in a vastly different country. I dearly love my Turkish friends and acquaintances, and value the time I can spend with them, but there is definitely something to be said for having time to decompress with other people who are experiencing the same thing as you.

So tomorrow it's back to work, back to teaching and getting to know as much as I can about this country, the people here, and their lives. But tomorrow I can face the day with freshly relaxed muscles and exfoliated skin, which might give me just the energy boost I need to get through a long weekend.

*PS- If you want to come visit me here in Turkey I will gladly take you to a hamam. I'm not even joking.*

Adventures at the hair salon, part deux

Turkish, as I've mentioned before, has borrowed a lot of foreign words, which are generally transliterated into Turkish spelling in hilariously literal ways. There are a couple of French girls in my Turkish class, and I think they have an easier time learning the language because so many words came from French and have simply been converted into Turkish spelling. For example, one day we encountered the word "puan" in Turkish and none of us knew what it meant until the French girl looked it up in her dictionary and said, "Oh-- point!" which in French sounds exactly like "puan." Of course, we have the exact same word in English, albeit with an Anglicized pronunciation. It makes me wonder which the French hate more: Turks retaining the pronunciation of borrowed words but mangling the spelling, or the English retaining the spelling but mangling the pronunciation.

The Turkish word for hair salon, "Kuaför," is one that threw me for a loop the first few weeks I was in Turkey until I had mastered the rules of Turkish pronunciation and started reading signs aloud to myself to practice, an obsessive-compulsive habit that makes me look crazy but also helps me learn languages faster. "Balikçı, kitabevi, ayakkabı hastanesi, kuaför--oh, coiffure! Got it." It seems so ridiculously simply once you pronounce the word out loud and can hear the similarity.

Anyway, this is where the story begins. Last week I decided it was yet again time to submit myself to the scissor-clutching grip of a Turkish stylist, so I went back to the kuaför that I had visited previously. I was a little less nervous this time because last month I started taking Turkish lessons and I feel a lot better about my listening comprehension these days, although my ability to form sentences is still on par with the average three year old. So I walked into the shop, told the stylist I needed a trim, and he escorted me over to the sink to rinse off my hair. All was well, they were chatting with me about the usual- how long have I been in Turkey, do I like it, etc. Then the stylist looked at me pointedly and stated: "Boya." This is a word I do not know, so I kindly asked him to explain himself and he said, "You need to change your hair color."

"No, no I don't, thanks," I replied.

"No, you definitely need to change your color. Here, look, I can make you beautiful!" He then enthusiastically whipped out his book full of tiny hair samples in a variety of tacky shades and pointed to a vivid color that in Crayola terms I'd call either "razzmatazz" or "violet red." "Beautiful," he kept repeating.

"I like this color," I said, desperately hoping that my kindergarten sentences would be enough to fend off what seemed like a very determined effort to turn my hair magenta.

He dropped my hair at this point and leaned back dramatically to make eye contact with me through the mirror. "Why?" he asked. "This color is not good. You are a beautiful girl, and you need beautiful hair."

"But this is my natural color!" I insisted. "And I like it!" He shook his head sadly, baffled by my preference to remain in the prison of my own fashion ineptitude. "Don't you at least want some highlights?" he tried. "I could make you blonde just on the top here. It would look so nice. You don't really like your natural hair color, do you?"

He finally gave up after a few minutes when he saw that my resistance was not abating, and resigned himself to simply cutting my hair. During this time, however, he did discover in himself a secret passion for teaching and realized that this was the perfect opportunity to help a hapless foreigner by instructing her in his native language.

"What's your name again?" he asked a couple times as his assistant ran off to fetch me a cup of tea. "Heidi! That's a nice name. And you say you understand pretty much everything I say?" He stopped and looked at me as if I were completely paralyzed, able only to respond yes or no by blinking my eyes. I managed to reply as best as I could, but my ability to keep a conversation going at this point is pretty limited, which means the burden of coming up with new topics is on the Turkish person. Most Turks get annoyed by this, but my new friend relished the opportunity.

"Heidi!" he'd say, dropping his scissors and coming round to the front of the chair to look at me. "Tell me about your family. How many siblings do you have? Where do they live? What do they do?" And he'd grin broadly at my stammered, childlike answers while he congratulated himself on his marvelous ability to teach the Turkish language. "I'm a great teacher, aren't I?" he said periodically to his assistant, who was perched on the windowsill laughing hysterically at everything I said.

To be fair, he is a pretty good teacher, and I'm fairly confident that he could switch careers successfully if he ever put his mind to it. At one point he was blow drying my hair when he suddenly turned off the blow dryer, looked at me, and said, "Heidi, do you know what I'm doing to you right now?" I replied that I couldn't say it in Turkish, and he beamed again. "I'm blow drying your hair. Repeat it after me. Okay, now again. Now let's practice. Next time you're going to come in here and what are you going to tell me? Here, stand up. Pretend you're ringing the door bell. I come to the door and say, 'Welcome!' Now what are you going to say?"

This went on for an hour and a half, during which time a couple of his friends wandered in just to hang out for a bit, and they began chatting with me too. The stylist fawned over me like a prize pupil. "Heidi is so cute," he said over and over. This seems to be a common theme in Turkey. In many countries, such as the United States, foreigners with limited language abilities are mocked and scorned, but in others it just ups your "cuteness" factor and can actually make you quite popular. "I like you a lot, Heidi. Do you like me? You're going to come back here and talk to me again, right? I'll teach you more Turkish!"

Later, when I insisted that it was time to leave because I had to teach a class, he seemed genuinely distressed. His friends got my cell phone number and texted me later to invite me to visit their office at the ministry of culture and tourism. The stylist escorted me to the door and reminded me to visit him again, even if I don't need a haircut.

Turkey: land of always getting more than you bargained for.

Turkish hospitality strikes again

Over and over I have heard people speak of Turkish hospitality and the cultural value of welcoming guests as "God's guests" and doing everything possible to make guests comfortable. After seven months of living here, I can state with absolute conviction that this is not a myth. Turkish people genuinely love guests, and from the moment you step into a Turkish home until the moment you leave, you can expect to be pampered, stuffed full of delicious food and all the tea you can handle, and treated to delightful conversation and laughter.

Language and cultural barriers cannot get in the way of this incessant desire to show hospitality. Smiles and "Tarzanca," as my Turkish teacher likes to call the language of gestures, are considered perfectly acceptable means of extending the arm of friendship to anyone who walks through the door. It is a very warm feeling for a foreigner alone in a strange country to have families so graciously bring you in and treat you with such kindness for no particular reason other than hospitality.

And while I greatly appreciate the warmth and hospitality of the Turkish people, there is a dark side to this cultural value. Being a perpetual guest can induce a state of exhaustion as you realize that people are never going to let you pay for dinner, and that an evening with friends is always going to be centered on you, the guest. My stubborn American notion of equality refuses to bend, and it's sometimes difficult for me to graciously accept such generosity, since I feel like I have done nothing to deserve the special treatment.

Tonight was the same as usual: some Turkish friends had invited my flatmate and I out to celebrate the fact that we hadn't seen each other in a long time, and I sat helplessly as they refused to let us pay for our own dinner, but smiled broadly while snatching the bill away to cover the whole thing. We only managed to pay for coffee later by distracting the guys long enough to surreptitiously slip the cashier some bills.

But something weird happened after dinner when we were discussing where to go for the next stop of the evening. We were faced with a choice between hookah bar and coffee shop, and one guy said, "Well, I don't like hookah, but we'll go wherever the girls like. They're the guests." Our other friend looked at him and said, "No! These girls aren't guests anymore. They are just friends. If we want coffee, we can get coffee." And it may sound strange, but this moment made me feel more at home here than all the hospitality Turks have offered up so far. Finally, we've broken through to a point that at least one person doesn't feel the need to extend us the royal treatment anymore because we're no longer visiting "outsiders." Being "just a friend" puts me at a whole new level of comfort with these people who have been so willing to share their country and their culture with us. And that is a wonderful feeling.

Springtime and holidays

It's been a long, nasty transition from winter into spring, with March both entering and exiting with lion's fury, and April being a soggy, spastic mess. It's almost like being back in the Midwest, to tell the truth. One day it'll be sunny and 80 degrees, and the next it's back down to 40 degrees and the sky fills with ominous clouds. The past couple of weeks it's been generally warm, but even on the sunniest morning it's foolish to leave home without an umbrella because a downpour will probably start an hour later.

However, there was one glorious, glorious day last week that was warm and sunny for an entire afternoon. And not only was it sunny and gorgeous, it was also a public holiday so I had a Saturday without my normal six hours of classes!

And as with all national holidays, the flags came out and were proudly displayed everywhere.

April 23 is Children's Day in Turkey. This is a holiday established by Ataturk in 1921 to mark the date that Parliament first opened. Turks tell me that this is an international children's day, given to all the children in the world.

Last Saturday there were no classes, but schoolkids all over Turkey went to their schools for special ceremonies, with dance performances, poetry readings, singing, and other exhibitions. The other neat thing about Children's Day is that Ankara hosts an international children's sports festival in which kids from all over the world come to show off their national sports.

These posters are hanging all over the city to advertise the games, which are going on all week. The city is also celebrating by decorating the streets with some new friends.

Ankara (or Angora, as it was known in ancient times) is famous for its special breed of white angora cats. And it is these cats that have become the mascot for this year's Children's Games. These cats are all over the street corner. This is one of the smaller ones.

I did not make it to the games, but the day off was definitely a productive one in which I got my first taste of Turkish theater! It was certainly an interesting experience, considering that by a generous estimate I could understand a third of what was going on, but the magic of live theater is the same in any language and it felt good to be in an auditorium watching actors perform their craft.

And the best holiday is yet to come. May 1 is Labor Day in Turkey, and that means we get a Sunday off. I can go to church for the first time since Christmas! Hurray! I am praying that tomorrow will be another sunny day in which church can be followed by an afternoon in the park, but we'll see how it goes. I do not trust this Ankara weather.

Nasrettin Hoca

A few weeks ago a conversation class tried to introduce me to the wit of a medieval Turkish jokester named Nasrettin Hoca. A dominant figure in folklore, Nasrettin Hoca is known for his short comical anecdotes, and everyone in Turkey knows these jokes.

The story the class told me, which I saw later again in my Turkish textbook, is one of the more famous ones, and goes like this:

One day Nasrettin Hoca bought 3 kilos of liver at the market and had it sent home to his wife so she could cook dinner with it. However, his wife gave the meat to a neighbor. When Nasrettin Hoca came home, he asked his wife where the meat was and she replied that the cat had eaten it. Nasrettin Hoca promptly got out a scale and weighed the cat. "The cat is 3 kilos," he said, "and I bought 3 kilos of meat. So if this is the cat, where is the meat?"

One of the students later brought me a whole file of Nasrettin Hoca jokes. Here are some other cute ones.

One day Nasrettin Hoca was standing at the edge of a river. His friend waved to him from the opposite bank. "Nasrettin Hoca, how do I get back to the other side of the river?" he called. Nasrettin Hoca called back, "You're already on the other side of the river!"
*********

Once Nasrettin was invited to deliver a sermon. When he got on the pulpit, he asked, Do you know what I am going to say? The audience replied "no", so he announced, "I have no desire to speak to people who don't even know what I will be talking about!" and left.

The people felt embarrassed and called him back again the next day. This time, when he asked the same question, the people replied yes. So Nasrettin said, "Well, since you already know what I am going to say, I won't waste any more of your time!" and left.

Now the people were really perplexed. They decided to try one more time and once again invited the Hoca to speak the following week. Once again he asked the same question - "Do you know what I am going to say?" Now the people were prepared and so half of them answered "yes" while the other half replied "no". So Nasrettin said "Let the half who know what I am going to say, tell it to the half who don't," and left.

*******
In the village a woman was giving birth to her child and as it was a difficult birth the relatives waited for many hours. So they sent for the Hoca.
He came, listened to their story and went away. He returned in a few moments with a toy that made a squeaking sound. They asked him why and he said:
“Because the child will hear the “voice” of the toy and will very quickly come out to play.”
*******
One day the Hoca bought a piece of liver, and on his way home he met a friend who gave him a recipe for a delicious new liver dish. While he was walking, a crow swooped by, grabbed the piece of liver from the Hoca's hands, and flew away with it. Nasrettin Hoca watched the bird fly off, and then called after him, "Your dinner won't be as delicious as mine was going to be, because I have the recipe!"
*********
Nasrettin Hoca borrowed a cauldron from his neighbor, and returned it a few days later with a smaller bowl inside. "What's this?" the friend asked. "Your cauldron gave birth!" Nasrettin Hoca replied. The friend was very pleased. He thanked Nasrettin Hoca and took the cauldron and bowl. A few weeks later the Hoca borrowed the cauldron but this time he didn't return it. Finally the neighbor went to him and said, "Where is my cauldron?" "It died," said the hoca. "Oh come on," said the neighbor. "A cauldron can't die." Nasrettin Hoca snapped back, "What? You believed that it gave birth, why can't you believe that it died?"

U.S. History 101

I have been blessed in my evening class with a group full of history buffs who love conversation and love the fact that they can pick my brain about U.S. history as well as English grammar. Having discovered our mutual interest in history, the class brings this topic up frequently, and they get really excited about teaching me the history of the Ottoman Empire, the battle at Çanakkale (Gallipoli), the Turkic peoples, and of course Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in return.

As a teacher of the English language, with students who are trying to become proficient in English, I can only be delighted that they've hit on a topic that brings up lengthy discussions allowing them to practice using the language while I get to learn much more about their view of history and what's important to them. However, I've had to brush up on my own history a bit, because so far I've been called upon to explain

• Why Abraham Lincoln is so respected in the USA
• the history of slavery and the Civil War
• the setup of the U.S. government, including separation of powers and what the President can and cannot do
• U.S. involvement in World War I
• The Protestant Reformation (they remembered that I'm Lutheran so they figured I must be an expert in this area....)
• The Louisiana Purchase and westward expansion (including a history of which European powers have occupied the entire American continent)
• The Founding Fathers and what they did

This last one came after my four students worked together to tell me about Ataturk, and asked me if there is an American equivalent. I divided the glory between Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Adams, Madison, and Hamilton, and explained briefly the role each played in the formation of the USA. (Imagine all those fellows rolled into one and you'll get an idea of how very much Ataturk accomplished)

But this has all made me realize how very unique and incredible the American narrative is. I feel proud when talking about Lincoln or Jefferson or those who have shaped the course of our country, and I get goosebumps when talking about the Bill of Rights. I have also realized how ridiculous some of it sounds when you explain it to foreigners, such as slavery in a country that fought so hard for freedom. And unfortunately, tonight Hamilton was the last name on my list of Founding Fathers, so after this inspirational discussion about the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the end of the story was, "And then Hamilton was shot and killed by the Vice President in a duel." Good story, America. Or rather, good storytelling skills, Heidi.

So the moral of the story is this: teaching English is not for the faint of heart. Not only must you have the ability to explain the difference in usage between past simple and present perfect verb tenses, you must also be able to carry on an intelligent conversation on whatever topics the book or the students bring up. Yikes.

loan words in Turkish

Fact: Turkish vocabulary is not as hard to pick up as I thought. Part of this is because although the Turkish language originated in Central Asia, it's been so influenced by the West that it's absorbed a lot of foreign words that I recognize easily when they pop up in Turkish.

This is something of a point of contention among my students, which I discovered when we brought up the issue of language in class to discuss how it relates to cultural and national identity and whether the government should protect language.

In context, the Turkish language already went through a major reform in the early 20th century, so much so that Ottoman Turkish is considered a separate language. Ataturk purged the language of foreign words, especially the Arabic words that had permeated Turkish as cultural, religious and political trickle effects of imperial cosmopolitanism. He threw out the use of Arabic script and replaced it with the Latin alphabet that Turkish uses today.

Turkey also has a national ministry of language designed to keep Turkish pure and protect language identity. However, according to my students, this isn't really working. I noticed this in particular when I was teaching sports vocabulary to my beginner students. Out of curiosity I asked how to say the same words in Turkish. The responses? "Basketbol, futbol, voleybol, sörf (surfing)..." Technological words are mostly derived from English too: radyo, televizyon. Even the verb "to program" is "programlamak." Other foreign words have a longer history of infiltration. For example, the only term I know in this country for "I hope" is "Insh'Allah," the Arabic phrase meaning "God willing." If there is a Turkish equivalent, no one uses it.

The discussion got more interesting as students also said that young people love to look cosmopolitan by replacing Turkish words with foreign words: saying "hello" instead of "selam," "waiter" for "garson," "sorry" for "pardon." I pointed out that all these "Turkish" words were themselves loan words from Arabic and French, which prompted the observation that a lot of the Turkish words are just too long. Which makes sense: why say "Affedersiniz" when "pardon" is equally understandable? Why use the ministry's literally translated nomenclature of "sepet topu" when "basketbol" is both hipper and more universal?

In many cases, the loan words are from imported concepts that had no Turkish word to begin with. My students emphasized that if the government established a Turkish word for a new thing before it actually came to the country, people have tended to use the Turkish word, for instance "bilgisayar," which means computer. But if the public got their hands on something before the government could translate it, like TVs, then the foreign word prevails. And while the young people moan about losing their identity and wanting to preserve Turkish culture, they're the ones perpetuating the integration of foreign words.

Every language is undergoing this same phenomenon to some extent, thanks to globalization. English is a perfect example of a language that has grown and evolved into something today that Thomas Jefferson and his friends probably wouldn't understand if they heard it. Chinese is the same, simply substituting Mandarin characters so that "巧克力" (chyow kuh lee) is chocolate and "粉絲" (fun sz) are fans, as in those who love Justin Timberlake. Taiwan's taken that a step further, so that if you watch TV there you'll see words like "High" written in English amongst the Chinese subtitles, a word has been adopted as slang for "happy." (Try explaining to teenagers that you really shouldn't tell native English speakers that you have been high all day.) France has taken legal measures to stop the invasion of foreign words into their language, although I don't know enough about the situation to say how effective that's been.

Globalization- a good thing increasing mutual intelligibility among languages? Or a McWorld force catalyzing homogeneity and destruction of local cultures? We haven't finished this unit in our textbook yet, and since the last lesson ended in a shouting match among the students, I have a feeling they have more to say on this topic. I'm looking forward to it.