Keşke... (If only...)

(Just so you know, this post includes a song!)
[It may also have a few really good photos I don't have right now added to it at some point.]

I would like to open with a quick trivia question:
What word is used in Turkish to refer to 'six-pack abs?'
Hint: It is a food...

You'll get the answer at the same point when I learned it. Part-way through the week this post covers...

So, let's ask a different question.
How is my home life?

A picture is worth a thousand words, apparently.
Here's a picture.

Tuçe on the left, Ece on the right, and it only took me this long to remember which one is which.

Okay, now it's click to read more time, because there will be a lot more pictures.

Yeni ve Eski arkadaşlara! (ve diğer konular....)

My blog, my blog, how I've been neglecting you.
It's been a week without a post, right?
Which means I obviously must have done enough things that I'd be front page news in a newspaper....
Speaking of which....

But I'll get to that in a bit.

Gelecek Tarkan (The next Tarkan)

In this post: Steve tries a (probably only found in Bursa) Turkish food... and a Turkish drink that is new to him. What makes me extremely American according to my teacher. And, perhaps some poetry.

But, let's begin with some omissions from yesterday.

In Ulu Cami (the mosque) two things happened that I did not mention.

One thing is that my American friend John met a Turkish man, and a very good photo for the CLS home page was taken by Johanna.

The second is that I met this group of people.

Or rather, I took their picture as they were standing in a group, and afterwards they all wanted to talk to me. They were missionaries, or something like that, and they had wanted to give me a copy of Said Nursi's Gençlik Rehberi (Guide for Youth), which I accepted. Free and interesting reading material. Yay! They were missionaries, and they made sure to let me know that if I didn't understand it, I could write to an address on the inside and then they would mail it to me.

(I probably did a bad job mentioning it, but I was near the supposed site of Said Nursi's grave last year when I was near İsparta with Allison.)

Also, here's a waffle stand.

Right. And now on for Wednesday's actions.

After finally uploading all of the pictures for last night's post, updating my set of digital flashcard thingies, and staying up a bit late intentionally, I went to bed at around 12:30-1:00ish. I've been waking up around 4-5, and I figured that if I stayed up later I'd pop right onto the right schedule. Nope. 

Therefore, when I walked into class with one bardak of çay and iki tane kola turka, I was banking on not being dead today. Due to the presence of my soda, our teacher insisted I was overly America. After all, Americans drink quite a lot of soda. (Especially if they happen to be named Spencer.)

Class is going really slowly for me, and I wish there was a higher one. However, during class I worked on writing a poem, and unlike last summer, I can actually write stuff in class that is in Turkish and not English when I'm not paying attention. I've also started learning the Georgian alphabet, but that'll be going a bit slowly. Never the less, any language capable of having a cluster of eight consonants is worth my attention. I'm sure it will also be worth the pain. (Here's an example from wikipedia:  /prt͡skvna/ peeling)

After class, I decided to take the plunge and drink an important Turkish drink for the first time.

Can anyone guess what this is?

(If you're on the front page, you will need to click "Read More" to find out... though the answer should be obvious.)

Limon gibi limon (Lemon-like lemons)

I really took way too many pictures, so if you're on the front page of this blog, you need to click "read more" to see this entire post. (you probably won't see this many pictures again because the wifi here is really slow...)

Quite a lot of us needed to get photos taken in order to obtain reduced price transit cards. At the photographer's, this beautiful picture frame was available. Hopefully it comes with the picture of the baby.

Hoş Geldiniz! ("Welcome")

I believe this is somewhere above Serbia.

From Washington D.C. to Bursa was a 22-hour trip, beginning with the shuttle to the airport, and ending with the car to my host family's house. In between I somehow slept enough to not be a complete wreck right now. I don't really understand how either. The most interesting part of that trip, hands down, was the brief layover in a Swiss airport, which was spent mostly going from one gate to another. The train between gates played cow sound effects and had a stereotypical film of a swiss woman in the mountains printed on the tunnel walls so that it animated as we flew by.

Unsuprisingly, the Istanbul airport was way busier than the one in Ankara!

After the airport, the bus drove past this stadium, which is where Galata Saray, my favorite Turkish football (soccer for heathens who don't use the metric system) team plays.

One of İstanbul's many bridges

The ferry was a much needed opportunity to stretch, get some air, and make sure I wasn't confusing the words for 'certain' and 'doubtful.'

The other interesting thing that happened is that on the bus/ferryboat to Bursa, Mesut, director of our program and a thoroughly likeable individual gave us all cookies that he and his wife baked specially for us with our names on them. Adorable and delicious!

:))

After arrival, I met my host family, and got acquanited with my new digs for the summer. The surrounding apartment complexes share a swimming pool. I have a TV in my room. Etc. More importantly, the food is delicious, everyone is super nice, and I believe only my host mom speaks a little English. The language pledge is mad legit. I also know and understand so many more things than at the beginning of last summer. This is absolutely fantastic for my Turkish learning, and means that whenever I'm writing these things I'm really taking away from my many opportunities to speak and study Turkish! (It's ok, I love you all. And you can use google translate, right?)

 Me and my host family upon first meeting. They are grandmother, mother, and two kids.

Additionally, there is also a host nanny who is from Georgia (not pictured), and yes I am going to take this as an opportunity to try and learn a bit of Georgian too. It sounds a bit difficult.But, if I have any success I'm sure I'll make my phonology professor proud.

On my second day, I had a traditional Turkish breakfast of tomato, cheese, bread, egg, and olives (well, ok, skipped the olives.) Went to class, took the hideous Tömer placement test... and took forever doing it. Hopefully I will be in the right class this time....

After that, there was some uninteresting orientation Q&A, and then I met Uğur, my conversation partner, who studies German language education even though he doesn't like German as there are jobs availible. Together, we were supposed to go on a "scavenger hunt" around Bursa, which really was an excuse for him to show me useful things, like where to change money, where to put money on my phone, and where his favorite çiğ köfteci is (sadly closed for a month).

I got to see a lot of Bursa, and I love what I've seen so far.
Here are some pictures for you to love too:

View from classroom building window #1

Part of the market in the old part of the city (which is beautiful!)

Extremely good statue of Atatürk

That's all for now. I may or may not update this post with more pictures. For now, it is time for me to study... or go swimming. Hmm. Difficult choice.

Brooke... the Thank YOU Fairy (Aka CLS Pre-Departure Orientation in DC)

This is a pretty pointless post, except that I need to kill time at the moment. I don't have much news to report... other than that I'm in Washington D.C., and I've just done all the pre-departure orientation stuff for Turkey which was surprisingly entertaining, because even if a lot of the content was almost identical, the anecdotes were refreshingly different (for the most part.) I was briefly on an alumni panel. Hooray.

Here in brief is the important news to report:

• I will be living with two three-year-old girls.
• My program-mates seem pretty cool.
• I will be taking a bus that goes on a ferry. Ahhhh!!!
• Bursa sounds pretty legit. 
• I have narrowly avoided being pressured into making a song about people's anecdotes, and successfully told another 46 people that I like waffles.
• My program-mates are nice, and unlike last year there is a definite skew towards females (over half.)
• I AM SUPER EXCITED TO BE RETURNING TO TURKEY

"Asian restaurant" right next to "Mexican food." Naturally I instead had dinner at an establishment called "We the Pizza."

I also got to wander around D.C. a bit, you know, walk to the White House and around Capital Hill and the like. Ironically, I went to the White House when I didn't plan on it, and failed to return to it when I actually tried. Something about being on Pennsylvania Avenue SW which goes across a river between the 1500 and 1600 block. I won't bore you with a picture of the White House, so I'll only include a picture of my good friend from high school, Mr. Daveberg, standing in front of the river.

Dr. Fivehead is familiar not only with the importance of nuclear physics, but also sunglasses.

Heading back to the hotel, we encountered a number of odd vehicles including the Oscar Meyer weinermobile (not pictured)

This friends, is an eight foot wide fake nutella container carried by the nutella truck

And (apologies for quality) this is Brooke... the Thank YOU Fairy, as printed on the Give Thanks to God BBQ Competition Truck. Your guess is as good as mine.

Washington DC is a cool place, and I look forward to when I see it again. For now, onwards to Turkey!

I guess, what I can say about Turkey going into it is that I really want to hit the ground running and improve my Turkish proficiency to the greatest extent possible. I'm not saying that that isn't something I've been trying to do before, but in the US with competition from other classes and only so many (completely wonderful) class hours a week, it's hard to stick with it. I've got some Turkish films to watch on the plane, just to make sure I refresh my vocab before I get there and then am half-asleep anyway. But, I really want to improve my vocabulary and all around communication skills. I have been studying Turkish for a while. It's time I get really, really serious so I can become as proficient as I want to be.

End of Ankara (Hoş Cekal!) >>> Return to Turkey (Döneceğim)

So, I sorta stopped posting at July 31st after saying I felt slightly sick, leaving all the numerous readers of this blog who never met me to conclude that I had died of some horrible disease. Not true. What actually happened will be appended to the end of this post.

To make a long story short, the Critical Language Scholarship is an awesome program, and I loved spending last summer in Ankara! I made a lot of really good friends, and did a lot of cool stuff. In addition to improving my Turkish, I definitely feel that I really grew as a person thanks to my interactions with so many cool people!

As a result of my experiences, I have continued studying Turkish at the University of Pittsburgh through the Less-Commonly-Taught Language Center,. Pitt has a fantastic Turkish program, with a truly passionate instructor, and I am truly grateful that I have been able to continue studying Turkish on an independent study basis over the last year. I recommend anyone to take Turkish (not that I've ever convinced anyone, but I sure have talked people's heads off about how much I love the language.)

So, anyway, having completely loved studying Turkish and being in Turkey, I applied for the 2014 Critical Language Scholarship program, and have been accepted to study Turkish in Bursa! I leave for orientation on Thursday. Yay.

But, before I talk about Bursa, I really should finish up talking about my time in Ankara, which I can do pretty non-briefly here...

Geçmiş Olsun = Let it pass (Get well soon!)

So, it's Wednesday now, and when this blog last heard from me it was Friday, and not even Friday night yet. Have I done things since then? Oh yeah, you better believe it! For one thing, I learned just how much I appreciate Schweppe's. But, let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Domates Biber Patlıcan - Tomato, Pepper, Eggplant

In this post, I will attempt to interweave the story of things I have done this week with the story of Turkey's greatest singer.

Dikkat Sulama Var! - Caution: Sprinklers!

What did I do this weekend? I'm not quite so sure myself, because it contained what is easily the single most interesting and surreal day I've had my entire time in Turkey, as well as a mixture of strenuous hiking and relaxing swimming. In short, I went out of town to a place called Eğirdir. The tale of what passed there is about to be told... (It is mad lengthy)

Hammamistan - ("Hamam land")

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Right. What have I been up to lately in Ankara?
Answer: Fantastic things.

İstanbul Konstantinopolis değil.

Istanbul, Istanbul. What an amazing place. To say that I've seen Istanbul would be a massively misleading statement. Istanbul is an absolutely huge place (its population is a little over five million more than New York City), and even though I spent two days and two nights within city limits, I barely saw any of it. What I did see was astoundingly beautiful.
---

Kim waffles? - Who is waffles?

How's life in Ankara? Spectacular! Every day living here is just so wonderful. It's hard to put it into words, but I'll try to. And, I'll try by describing the last couple days of my life which are slightly mixed up in my head.

Mistranslation: Please do not prance =/= Lütfen zıplamayınız = Please do not Jump

Day three of the Amasra/Safranbolu trip...

Gül seven dikenine katlanır (One who loves roses should beware thorns.)

Turkey has two major seas. The Akdeniz and the Karadeniz. (White sea [Mediterranean], and Black sea.) From my experience swimming in the Black Sea, it's easy to see (no pun intended.) how they got their names. The Black Sea isn't the clearest body of water. It's not bad, but there is an amount of seaweed, which was used to comic effect. I did not feel bad doing a handstand underwater, or swimming about.

This post is part two of Amasra.

Bu yoğurdu sarımsaklasak da mı saklasak, sarımsaklamasak da mı saklasak? (Should we put the yogurt away after adding garlic to it, or before adding garlic to it?) [A tongue-twister]

This weekend was a three-day program-sponsored trip to the Black Sea including all students, teachers, and conversation partners, as well as CLS staff, and the friendly visitor from the State Dept. Suffice to say, it was phenomenal and the town of Amasra is staggeringly beautiful and also historic.
(Again, if you are on the front page, you are required to click read more. LOTS of pictures.)

Direniyor (He/she/it/they are resisting)

Everyone has the most annoying voice possible in the Turkish dub of Arthur. Just wanted to share the most important piece of information I found from channel surfing.

Right, I'm going to write this quickly, since this post only covers the Fourth of July, which wasn't the most interesting of days. In fact, in some respects, it was a very sad day for me.

July Fourth I had no class, due to the fact that our excellent teacher was at a conference presenting. We made up for the lost time with lengthier classes on the other weekdays. I made use of my time off to get some extra sleep in. Then I headed to Kızılay and had to go to Turkcell to put more minutes on my phone. Ignoring the fact that there are packages available, I just put slightly more money on it than there was at the beginning. Turkcell then immediately began spamming me with messages about their great deals. What a company!

Then, I wandered around town for a bit, found a music store with everything overpriced and in USD, and then eventually went into a "Vitamin cafe" because I wanted lemonade. I had a long conversation with the owner and another patron in which I exclusively used Turkish. They told me about some other Americans they knew, and repeatedly told me how great my Turkish was. At some point I explained my parents' occupations (psychologist and geologist), and they assumed for whatever reason that my parents must have pretty cool cars. Well, they do. The owner showed me a picture of a motorcycle he has from the '40s. It was neat.

I departed from the shop, and met up with my friends for lunch, where I had some more mantı. I unfortunately did not return to the Iraqi restaurant I previously went to, and apparently the waiter was asking about me because I named all the fish on his wall and he really liked that. He apparently said imagination was 90% of life.

After lunch, we had another one of our weekly meetings with our resident director, though this week we had a visitor from the State Department who wanted to see what our program was like on the ground. He was a super cool guy.

With the meeting over, I went with my friends Jack and Erin to an antique shop in Tunalı, a neighborhood of Ankara which I hadn't visited yet. It's a cool place. I still don't like antique stores very much in Turkey, but I liked how the stuff had much greater potential to actually be old. For legal reasons, nothing was purchased.

We rested for a bit in a cafe in Kuğlu Park (Swan Park) which is where a lot of the protest action has taken place. The tea was nice, and I took a lot of pictures of graffiti and the park itself, which is small but nice. Obviously, the title of my blogpost comes from the graffiti.

One walk back to Kızılay  later,  I hopped the metro home, had some dinner, grabbed my  Cümbüş and hit up the CLS July 4th festivities: a Turkey vs US soccer game. Sherri provided wonderful musical accompaniment on the trumpet that I could not match. Eli gave a rousing speech about how if the American team lost the game, then America would lose. Jack valiantly fell over repeatedly during the game. America lost. We then were handed sparklers and they went out after thirty seconds. Happy Birthday, America!

Future careers not in the cards for Steve - Sports Photographer

Zevkler ve renkler tartışılmaz. (Literally: Tastes and colors are not discussed/questioned. Figuratively: Different strokes for different folks.)

Turkey, oh Turkey! How I love being here.

*Ahem.* Stuff. What have I done since I wrote last?

Well, Salı Günü İki Temmuz  (That's Tuesday, July 2) was pretty cool, because I ate kumpir for the first time. Kumpir is a fast food thing popular in Turkey that is pretty much a baked potato with stuff on it. The potato is baked, split open, and then I guess somehow infused with butter and cheese. I went to the kumpir place for class lunch because our teacher wanted to go there. I ordered the Mexican Kumpir, because I couldn't resist the thought of a Mexican-Turkish baked potato. It had doritos, beans, olives, jalepenos, and meat in it. Not bad, though my stomach was a bit less happy an hour later...

After the backed potato, Eli, Rebecca, and I hit up Kocateppe, the largest mosque in Ankara. (For background info and a nice stock pic, check out wikipedia.) The outside is big and gorgeous, and the inside was even more beautiful. The carpet was comfortable, and the imagery definitely evoked the majesty of god. In an efficient use of space, there was also a shopping mall underneath. You'll have to wait on Eli for more photos for I forgot my memory card.

Stole this from Rebecca's facebook. I have to say I really dig the small spheres orbiting around a huge sphere.

Again, courtesy of Rebecca.

We then hung out briefly at a cafe that is primarily notable because it's name was Guido's Cafe and you had to walk through a bookstore to get there.

Before Guido's, we encountered a small demonstration from the CHP, the main opposition party to Erdoğan's AKP.

Courtesy of Rebecca

What was the protest about? Sherri provided me with an answer. Here it is.

-----

Wednesday I decided to dress classy for class with my Ataturk tie. Naturally it could not go unphotographed, as it was admired by all who looked upon it.

Wearing his Atatürk tie, staring pensively at Anıtkabir. It doesn't get much better than this.
(Description and Photo Courtesy of Rebecca)

In class, Sherri was talking about how much she enjoyed dried chickpeas, while I claimed they tasted like dirt, causing our teacher to teach us the phrase that is the title of this blogpost. Yay. We then had a pop quiz, which was horrible.

Another favorite silent g.
Also: half of my class.

We got to pick class lunch, and we did a dope job. We went to an Iraqi restaurant and the food was killer. Before the meal proper came we were served two small plates of each the following things: fried onions, some sort of yogurty thing, tomato & cucumber salad, herb salad, hot peppers. And, of course there was plenty of bread. I ordered some lamb sarma that was absolutely delicious. The free tea afterwards was also great because of the mint and lemon from the herb salad. I was laborious in mixing my tea for the perfect taste. Mmmm. Also, there was a nice mural of fish.

Went home after that, watched some Turkish TV, ate dinner, and then went on a lengthy walk. Could Steve successfully walk from home to the Atatürk Kultur Merkezi by virtue of knowing what direction to go? Yes. Would he take strange attempts at arty photographs of intentionally blurry cars along the way? Yes.

  

Click on these if you're in a browser and then you get a fancy gallery view. I don't imagine it works on a phone, but let me know if it does.

The one thing I didn't do though was follow an actual road to the Ankamall. So instead I sorta cut through things awkwardly. I walked through the Gazi University campus, which is the only university campus I've seen with colorchanging LEDs projecting their colors onto plants. Then I came to a dead end and had to go sideways for a bit before crossing underneath a metro line in a weird sketchy passage way. After I emerged, I walked through what I think was the ground for some company. Then I could have hit another dead end. There was a fancy looking park with a couple of guards at the door, but since they weren't paying attention, and since it was a park and not anything important I wandered through it and out the locked gate on the other side. Then I had to walk around the Ankamall so that I was where people went in instead of where trucks went in, across the bridge, and into the festival....
It was a thoroughly excellent walk.

It was also a purposeful walk, since I was going there to meet up with my friends Jack and Merima and go to a concert. It was a bit difficult to do the meeting up part because the place was crowded, and I successfully ran out of money on my phone. But, we did it. The concert itself was great, and Petek Dincöz defınıtely paled in comparison. I have no idea who it was, but they were talented. The place was rightfully completely packed.

Besides the concert, we did a bit of shopping. I should explain that this takes place at the same place I was at on Saturday, with the pictures of the water exhibit, but it was instead packed with people and awesome.

Did I just wander into the set of a (rightfully) critically-panned Michael Bay movie?

I somehow doubt this guy wants hordes of cats following him around.

One tent we wandered into had a boxing ring for some mysterious reason. A boxer appeared out of nowhere to pose in photographs with people. He then disappeared afterwards. I assure you that Jack and Merima had an amazing boxing match. Mermima won.

I then convinced them that it would be an absolutely fantastic idea to climb inside one of the clown tilt-a-whirl things intended for children and spin around. This happened.

If you read the last post and remember the videos being played of people hanging out with people dressed as raindrops, then you'll definitely be excited to know that the raindrops were out and they wanted to partay!

This is a cringeworthy photo.

I also decided to take a picture of the salt exhibit so you could see just how exciting Ankara's road salt really is.

But all good things come to an end, and after drinking some pitiful lemonade (though not A-Treat lemonade bad) we hopped on the metro, and I returned home thankful not to be walking...

Also note that there are about three more pictures added to the cooking section of the last post.