Thoughts and Feelings

I've never really known what it means to lose someone. My great-grandmother died when I was 5 years old, but I can't remember anything from that time, even though I do feel sadness at not remembering her and not having seen her before her death.

I lost another family member just recently. I'd never seen him before either, and now I'm never going to have the opportunity to see him ever again. He was young, 6 or 7 years old, and he was the son of my mom's cousin.

Its interesting but its a similar situation with my cousin and my great-grandmother. I've seen pictures and photos of both, and I think I've met them, but I don't have any recollections. They will remain in my heart, and I know they will look down on me and help me whenever I'm in need. I look at the moon and I can see my great-grandmother, and I believe that she will have taken my cousin under her wing to protect him as well.

Here's another thing that I'm pretty set on not doing, ever: drinking. I have no idea if the less-than-human person driving that car around at 8 in the morning who later hit my cousin was drunk or not, but why take that risk? Obviously your mind isn't working right when you're drunk, so maybe you argue yourself into driving around, but you shouldn't. It only causes pain. Maybe you think you're the one person who can make it home without harming anything, but luck only goes so far. This is one of those things where its better to be safe and just not drive. Its not that hard. Especially if you have friends.

I don't know if I still have any readers, but if I do, I'd like to ask you all to pray for this little man that passed away quite recently. I know he's in a better place, even though I wish he hadn't gone up there quite so soon. Or that at least I would've been able to go up there before him to prepare the area for him. Rest in peace, little one. In peace.

A Few Things That Popped Into My Head :D

Hello again. I know it's been a while but I just had this random urge to write again on my blog so here I am.

I'm safely back in America now and school is well under way. I'm a sophomore now, and I've declared my major--international studies, concentrating on the Middle East and with a political/diplomatic focus.

I was cleaning up a part of my room today and I don't remember exactly what sparked this realization, but I just figured out that there a lot of even small and seemingly insignificant things that are different in Turkiye and USA. The biggest thing is obviously the bathroom--squatty vs. sitty--but there are some other differences as well. The size of paper for example--paper in Turkiye is longer than paper in America. Interestingly enough, paper you get in America will fit just fine in folders in Turkiye, but paper from Turkiye will not fit in American folders; there'll be a bit of it hanging out of the folder. I don't know about width, but length is definitely different among these two.

Something else: the date. I've always confused what comes first: the month or day. However you do it in America, it's the opposite in Turkiye.

Sounds of the night--those are also different. Right now, I'm sitting here typing and all I hear from my window are cicadas. Granted, we do live far enough away from the main road to not have too much sound, but it's still different. In Turkiye, you would hear cats and dogs screaming or fighting or whatever cat and dog noises they do. Weirdly enough, I don't remember hearing a dog (a street dog) bark, but the cats were always loud.

Measuring units are obviously different--metric vs the random system used here.

What else is different? I mean there are definitely a lot of other stuff that's totally obviously different, but I just wanted to put out some of the ones that aren't paid attention to all that much.

Oh yeah, here's the best one: the division sign used in long division is different. I've never been able to do long division with the American sign. I've always done it with the Turkish one. I just couldn't comprehend the American one. Still can't. So I go Turkish on that one. Not that I have to do long division too much. I so love my calculator :D

Last Post For Now

Our last week in Istanbul was pretty chill. We visited the US Consulate, did some last minute shopping, went to see the really awesome cistern left over from way back when much like everything in Istanbul :D The cistern was really cool though, because it was all dark except for a couple of lights that were red or green. There wasn't too much water, only about a foot, but there were some interesting fish swimming around underneath there. There were also these two huge Medusa heads--one was sideways and the other upside-down. Also, the columns in the place were really interesting--none of them looked similar to the others, but there was one column in particular that drew my attention because the design on it was truly different and it had a hole in it that looked like the wish hole that Gunhan pointed out to us in Aya Sofya. Basically you stick your thumb in there and turn your hand the full 360 degrees while wishing for something. If you can do the full 360, your wish gets accepted. Good deal, since all you have to do is take a step and your hand can do the full rotation, sans problems.

How to sum up my feelings for this place and these people that I came with? They were both wonderful, to be very simply put. The way the students were willing to accept everything as it came to them was pretty awesome, and trust me, Turkiye throws a lot of unexpected things at you, ranging from creepers during the partying after a big win in a soccer match to a small but lovely little mosque just around the corner of a big and awesome church. Neighborhood children pop out every now and then and there also.

I love Turkiye. Istanbul has become, if it already wasn't the center of THE universe, well, at least the center of MY universe.

I want to thank Professor Shields for organizing this program and taking us to Turkiye. I want to thank all the other students for making the experience even more wonderful. And definitely a big thanks to William for making the experience infinitely more delicious by cooking for us once a week.

Thanks go to my grandparents and my uncle and aunt for putting up with me in Istanbul. Thanks go to my aunts and grandmother and grandfather on my mom's side for helping me whenever we came to the city where they were located.

Thanks go definitely and infinitely to my mom and dad, because they can never be repaid, but I'm thinking they did a pretty good investment because now they have a tour guide who can take them around Istanbul, free of charge, and make them see what the tourists can't. Not just Istanbul, of course. Turkiye, in general. So woot :D

Thanks to my readers, for reading. I hope, for those who haven't ever been to Turkiye, that you'll want to go. And I hope you read the blogs of the others as well, because they each give a different perspective on the country.

And thanks to Turkiye, that wonderful country. I'll miss you, and I'll definitely come back to you.

Just a Note

Sorry about the no pictures of the last posts. I'll try to update again when I'm in a more internet savvy place and put up my photos.

Sunday, June 29, 2008 Ankara

We’re finally in Ankara. After a most adventurous trip from Kapadokya to Ankara where our driver almost refused to take us to Ankara and was on his way to Istanbul, we finally arrived in Ankara and went to Bilkent University where we stayed in dorms.

Ankara was nice. The first day we went over to Gordion and walked around those interesting ancient ruins and visited King Midas’ tomb. That’s right. The tomb of the guy whose touch turned everything to gold. Apparently it doesn’t work when you’re dead because his tomb was of wood not gold. But now they’re saying that the guy they found in the tomb might be Midas’ father instead of Midas, so maybe the golden touch skips a couple generations. We were taken around the Gordion ruins by Ken Sams, a professor from UNC who’s been working on this site for quite some time.

The next day, we went to Anitkabir, the place where the man of Turkey, Ataturk is buried. I’d asked for my grandfather to take us around the place because he has many interesting stories and he kindly accepted and showed us around. After Anitkabir we went over to the castle and to the Anatolian Civilizations museum and walked and explored around that. The museum we toured with another professor friend of Prof Shields’, I don’t remember his name at this time but if I do I’ll re-update and note it.

The night of the 30th we took the train instead of the disastrous Fez Travel bus to get back to Istanbul. The next morning, we were finally back home. I had missed Istanbul.

Thursday, June 26, 2008 Kapadokya

The pension we stayed at here was also a really nice place called Kilim Pension. Wonderful view from it’s terrace which we all frequented often during our three day stay. Kapadokya is a really nice place and an interesting place; because of all the interesting and naturally formed caves and towers and other random stuff like that, it really does seem like you’re in a different planet. Cool enough.

We hiked around a lot in Kapadokya and went to an outdoor museum where we walked around to a bunch of churches from centuries ago that still had some paintings and images of Christ and the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist and other stories from the Bible and whatnot on the walls. Also cool enough.

Our most interesting day was our second day there I think when we decided to do a nature walk through Ihlara Valley. It was pretty cool; we walked the 7 kilometer road and got to see some more churches and got up close and personal with Turkish nature. After the walk, we went to the crater lake and we decided to swim in it. That decision alone was crazy; some of us then also decided to swim across the lake and believe me, not a feat to be attempted by the faint of heart. Or the weak of body and mind. It was long. 1 entire freaking kilometer in diameter. And yeah. We swam across that. Call us brave or crazy. I don’t even know how to describe ourselves.

We had a lot of adventures in Kapadokya, not the least of which was when we were almost losing our minds because of too much nature while walking through Ihlara valley so we decided to start singing, starting with the Sound of Music and continuing with Disney. I’m pretty sure we scared off some birds and other wild animals.

Monday, June 23, 2008 Eşenler Village

After breakfast this morning we packed up enough stuff for two days and went on our way to the village. Our stay in this village was arranged by the carpet-seller friend of Sarah’s. Before getting to the village, we went up a mountain and looked around and had a picnic arranged by our social chairs, Amanda and Edward. After this delicious meal, we went up the mountain to check out the view and what a view that was. When we got back to the village, Muammer (brother of carpet-seller friend who speaks English) took us to his family’s cherry…farm? Orchard? I don’t really know the word for it, but he took us to his cherry tree area and showed us the multitude of fruits and nuts that were growing around. We learned that there were woman-cherries and man-cherries and that woman-cherries have two kinds—sweet and sour. Both, well, all, were delicious.

Once we’d walked around and tasted pretty much every tree available and fruit-ed in the area, we walked back to the village to divide up among the houses and families. Amanda, Kristina, Emily, and I were with one family, Kevin by himself in one, David again by himself in another, Zoe, Kelly, and the Profs in one house, and Clayton and Edward together with another family. All our families were really nice, plus we had Muammer with us. Lack of English/Turkish wasn’t a problem at our house, and not really in any of the other ones, but Muammer’s presence in the village helped out a lot.

Our family consisted of Hasan and Emine, and Yasemin, their daughter. She’s 23 years old. Hasan and Emine have another daughter older than Yasemin, but she’s married so she wasn’t with them. Yasemin was also supposed to be getting married right around then, but apparently her husband-to-be changed after the engagement so they’re now trying to break it off. To be Turkish for just a second about this topic, hayırlısı inşaallah.

After the initial introductions and conversations, we had some more fruit, this time from their garden/farm/orchard, and then they allowed us to walk around and check out their house and the surroundings. They have a nice house; 3 rooms, one living room, roomy kitchen that has an additional space used for eating, small bathroom, nice bath, and sink. There’s also a little area out the back door that has a ladder that leads to the top of the house which was apparently used as a rendezvous point for a girl and a guy from an earlier trip much like ours. They fell in love in the village and got married when they got back to the US. Cute story. :D

Dinner was a delicious meal. Let me just say now that all of the meals we had at the village were delicious, fulfilling, and completely healthy. Hasan is a bee-keeper so the honey we ate came from his batch. Their garden has peaches, cherries, erik (green fruit that can be sour or sweet but are delicious and what I miss most when I’m in the US because they don’t happen over there), walnuts, almonds, apricots, pomegranates, bees and thus honey, and many other fruits that I just don’t remember. They have another, smaller garden right next to their house where they grow vegetables and whatnot, but the place they took us to where we helped them out with the peach-picking was their actual land and it was a large amount of land.

After we helped them with packing up the peaches in crates (they wouldn’t let us help with the actual picking which was a good idea because we wouldn’t have known which peach to pick), we had the most awesome lunch ever. They grilled chicken, and they fried squash, and delicious tomatoes and cucumbers, and wonderful watermelon, and my god I can’t remember what else but it was all DELICIOUS. That done, Muammer came with the rest of our people from the village and we went to the waterfall close by and swam around in that. What an adventure that was. The river wasn’t like what we swam around in at Egirdir; Egirdir’s water was pretty stationery whereas this one was a powerful flowing river so the only way was to cross really fast from one side to another and then hang on to some rocks. We hiked towards the waterfall, which was an adventure, and then we hiked back. I swear, just within these five-ish weeks in Turkey, I’ve gotten more bruises and scratches than the last seven years of my life. It’s still all fun and games though. The water was cold, but wonderful, and when all of us were sitting on a rock in the middle of the river, Muammer threw us the peaches that Hasan had given which we ate.

Dinner was once again a delicious affair. Hasan and Emine weren’t with us for dinner; they’d gone off to sell the peaches we’d helped pack, and so Yasemin and us were alone in the house. Kristina helped out with making dinner while Amanda and I took a short, much-needed sleep. After dinner, the entire group congregated in our house and we just hung out for a while. When everyone had gone home, Yasemin showed us her amazing dowry full of wonderful towels and other intricate little things that she has been preparing since she was 12. Helped out by her mom and older sister at times, of course.

We woke up the next morning, had breakfast, packed up, and congregated at our house again for good-byes. We left in the morning to go back to Konya, where we picked up all our other stuff and went on our way to Cappadocia, or Kapadokya, as I will write it from now on.