Leave the Path

We had a great weekend!  Here’s an outline and I’ll add photos and details later:

We went to one of the many big shopping malls of Ankara on Saturday and played in the enormous kiddie arcade. Aslan continued to be terrified of rides but eventually went rode on a toy elephant with Zeynep. When we got home several of Emre’s friends from university visited for tea.  It was good to see them again but I felt like a didn’t get to talk much because Aslan was very much in a “go!” mood.

Sunday we went to have brunch at the greenest place in Ankara: the METU lake. Afterwards we went to the Tuneli district and had coffee with Can’s mom. Amazingly enough she has exactly the same color grey-green eyes as Aslan.  Aslan did very well with holding my hand while we walked on the sidewalk.  We met an accordion player and Aslan stopped.  We gave him a couple lira and Aslan blew him a kiss.  I wish I’d taken a photo but I didn’t.

We went to a fancy kebab restaurant for dinner and then to Zeynep’s house to play. Aslan went to sleep easily at 11 pm which, by the standards I have at this point is pretty darn good.

Aslan went to bed at 10 pm last night, woke up at 12 am, and then resisted all attempts to put him back to sleep until 6 am.  He cried inconsolably for probably 2/3 of the intervening time.  Maybe it’s jet-lag, maybe it’s teething (he has pre-molars coming in), or maybe it’s because he’s not been eating well and he was hungry, but nothing I did helped.   We have never had such a bad night — at least when he was a newborn he had limited stamina.  He and I awoke at noon today.  We went to the kuafor (haircutter) and to the park at Zeynep’s house and then we had dinner with the whole family.  We got to talk to Emre briefly on the webcam.  It was a good day but I was tired and grumpy because of last night.

I spent most of the day at the university planning my elective.  I met the right people and I will be starting Monday with the Genetics clinic team.  The rest of the month is loosely planned but I think I have the right contacts to go where my interests take me.  I am apparently the first foreign visiting student in a long time so no one’s sure quite what to do with me but everyone has been friendly and I am excited and very optimistic that this will be a great experience.   I hope that my Turkish improves exponentially, though, because I still have a hard time following when people talk quickly.  I feel like I will be even less helpful as a medical student here with this language barrier and but as long as I can stay out of the way and learn something I will be happy.

Hakan and I had lunch with Can near her office.  She works in a big government building far from the city center.  In the same area there’re some private sector offices and Bilkent University, one of the oldest and most exclusive private universities.  We had lunch on the terrace at a chic restaurant.  My salad was innovative and fulfilled my craving for crunchy vegetables (something there seems to be a lack of in most Turkish food).  It seemed like everyone lunching around us was either a businessman in a very fine suit or a uber-fashionable student with the latest Prada handbag.  Interestingly, the little garden outside the restaurant was filled with extremely tacky painted concrete lawn ornaments.  It wasn’t clear to me whether this was meant to be ironic or perhaps the pond with lawn ornaments doesn’t carry the same kitch factor for Turks.

This evening the rest of the family came to visit us and Alsan got to play with Zeynep.  He clearly adores her and I’m very impressed by how well she’s sharing with him.  Being indoors so much has been hard for Alsan, so following Zeynep around was clearly the highlight of his day.  Tomorrow we will hopefully go to a park near her apartment for some quality outside time.

I never cease to be amazed by the population density in Ankara.  There are almost no single-family homes within the city everything is a 3-10 concrete building with shops on the first floor and either apartments or offices the rest of the way up.  They all have red roofs and are separated by only streets and little alleys.  The geography of the land around the city is arid and harsh and rugged.  The sky seems huge and the air is clear most days.  From any vantage point as far as I can see the red roofs of the city roll out over the hills, the monotony broken by the shiny domes and reaching spires of the occasional mosque.   There are no suburbs and there are no nearby cities that I know of.  The city feels almost like an island to me and it’s visually impressive how many people there are living so close together in what seems to me like an inhospitable climate.

Today Aslan and I got up late and spent most of our time in the apartment.  The rest of the family had things to take care of so we made ourselves breakfast and explored the house.  Aslan really wanted to go outside but the weather was gross and I didn’t have a key.  He kept seeing pictures of Baba or of himself and getting really excited.  I wonder if he’s confused: he’s never been here before but his photo is everywhere in the house.  Maybe he’ll think he’s really famous.  (Photo: Aslan looking extra Turkish in his socks and hurka, talking to Baba on the phone.)

Hakan kindly drove me to Hacettepe today (pronounced Hahj-ay-tey-pey).  It’s in an older part of town right next to Ankara University hospital.  This makes no sense to me – wouldn’t it be better for the hospitals to be spread out so that you’re always near one in an emergancy?  And if the universities are right on top of each other why didn’t they merge faculties years ago?  There must be some politics involved.  The directions I got for finding the Dean’s office started with “go to the sqaure with the Ataturk statue” which is about as helpful as saying “turn at the church” in the American south as every open space in this whole city has an Ataturk statue.  This one in particular was of Ataturk emerging from the sea ala Venus, best I could tell.

We finally managed to find the Hacettepe Faculty bulilding (I’m not sure I would have on my own) and got my official elective acceptance letter.  The person I was supposed to see about lectures and physician contacts was not there today but I have some names of people to contact tomorrow.  I didn’t realize how poor my academic vocabulary is or how hard it is to speak Turkish to strangers.  Hakan ended up being my translator and I hope I catch on quickly because I need to be able to navigate on my own.

The building where the dean’s office is located reminds me very much of the Joseph Fourier university where I studied in France.  It’s hard to pin down the similarity – maybe it’s the 1960’s architecture, or the lack of technology in the hallways, or the faint smell of coffee, cigarettes, and dust collecting in the stairwells – but it brought back memories for me, some fond, some full of frustration.  I also got my first glimpses of the hospital.  The shiniest parts (and none of it is as shiny or futuristic as UNC) were the Radioloji department and the Gloria Jean coffee shop just outside (this big American chain apparently got a strong foothold in Ankara, I’ve seen 3 shops now).  Most of the rest of the hospital has an architecture from an era of smaller rooms and lower ceilings and looked like it had been painted over quite a few times.  It looked clean and busy, though.   I recognized the worried parents in the waiting rooms and medical students running errands in their short coats; it felt like a teaching hospital should.  I still haven’t met anyone who I will work with directly, but I’m optimistic that it’ll happen and I’ll have a good experience.

We went to Volkan and Hanzade’s tonight.  After a day of begging to go out and being denied I thought Aslan would love it.  Instead he had a total meltdown at their door when I took off his shoes.  I wonder if he thought we were sleeping there.  (After all the new places he’s had to get used to I don’t blame him.)  His cousin was very helpful, though.  We went into her room and he cried himself out.  She showed him her toys one by one and eventually he calmed down and played nicely.  They drank pretend tea and she cut wooden fruit for us to eat (this is the first time I’ve seen Aslan make-believe eat) and then dumped all of her toys on the floor for him to choose from.  His favorite? He made a bee-line strait for the VW bus model — this is certainly Goko-son.  Aslan also got to meet more of his extended family here – Hanzade’s parents and sister and a cousin of Ali’s visiting from Tunceli.  Once he got over his spell he was at his cutest, smiling and posing with Zeynep.  He’s still tired from the trip, though, and by 9 pm he was standing at the door with his shoes looking plaintive.  He went to sleep easily again tonight and now I’m just waiting around for Emre to call.

For my friends and family in the states:  I have a Turkish cell phone for the next month.  I’ll have it on silent in the hospital but there’s a phone in our apartment that you can call if there’s something urgent and they will get in touch with me.  Send me an email if you want the numbers.   The time difference is 7 hours (e.g. noon in NC is 7 pm here) so it’s best to call before 5 pm but Turkish phones don’t charge for incoming calls so call as often as you like.

Addendum:  Just after I wrote the above, Aslan woke up and cried for almost 3 hours straight from midnight ‘til 3am.  We went to the kitchen to have milk and crackers (his schedule is messed up and he isn’t eating as well as usual).  Everyone else in the house woke up, too.  Now he thinks we have parties with cookies after he goes to sleep so he may possibly never sleep again.

We are now safely installed in Ankara.  Our trip was actually pretty uneventful.  The worst parts were at RDU before we even got on the plane.  We rearranged all of our bags at the ticket counter (baggage weight limits are to be taken seriously, by the way) and then Aslan got pretty bothered saying goodbye to Baba at security, but it was downhill from there.  Our planes were on time, people were helpful to us, and we and all of our luggage arrived safely.

Aslan was a surprisingly pleasant traveler.  He cried as we got on the plane all three times (maybe because he didn’t want o leave the airport) but he also slept through all of our landings.  The first leg (Raleigh-Charlotte) he sat quietly on my lap.  Perhaps the cutest thing that happed all the long day was when on that first little plane Aslan noticed the air-blower things on the ceiling and told us emphatically that it was a hairdryer.  I don’t think he made the connection that we were actually inside of an airplane so I wonder if he thought we were in a big group hair-dryer.

Aslan loved the Charlotte airport.  Thankfully since he was sleepy when we got off the plane I could just pop him in the carrier and we could move quickly with our hands free for luggage.  When we got to our gate at Charlotte I let him out.  The international terminal at CLT is perfect for kids.  It’s a big open glass room like a greenhouse and there’s a real one-man plane suspended from the ceiling in the middle.  Most of the terminal is carpeted, but under the plane is a 30 foot-wide shiny tile circle which acts as a child-magnet.  All the kids in the terminal (most of whom ended up on our flight) ran laps around and around the circle and would periodically lie down to look at the antique plane.  Every time Aslan saw a plane (even the indoor one) he pointed and clapped and made engine noises and then gestured to everybody waiting in chairs nearby as if to say “Hey, why aren’t you excited?  Didn’t you see that?!?”

Apparently only three types of people travel from NC to Germany on a Monday afternoon in March:  European families with small children, Grandparents returning to Eastern Europe after visiting their grandkids in the states, and people who don’t show up at all.  There were at least 5 kids under 2 on the plane and almost all of them were within 3 rows of us.  The families closest to us were Romanian and German.  A nice Polish grandfather gave everybody who would take it a piece of hard candy and an unintelligible story.  And half the seats were available for stretching out or diaper bag storage so we were actually pretty comfortable.   Nurten and I were seated a couple rows apart but with all the empty spaces it was easy to visit back and forth.  On that long leg I learned that Aslan likes people and he likes buttons even more.  Our seat had a built-in touch-screen TV and built-in friends so he was thouroughly entertained.  He charmed a friendly stewardess early on and she made silly faces at him all through take-off.  He played with his toys, talked to other kids, and discovered an empty, unlocked cabinet across the aisle from us.  He also loved the tiny button-filled bathroom, which we visited probably 10 times in our 8 hour flight due to some amazing cabin-pressure effect on baby kidneys.  The only snag was when we encountered an hour or more of “bad turbulence” after dinner which kept the seatbelt sign on and the toddlers all got frustrated that they couldn’t move around.  Aslan also had a hard time going to sleep because he could play peek-a-boo with the 2-year-old behind us between the seats, but by 11 EST all the little ones had drifted off.  Here’s a picture of him in his special bassinet, which looks creepily like a coffin in photos but really it was quite cozy.

With the 6 hour time difference 11pm EST is 5 am German time, though, so breakfast service started an hour later.  Aslan slept until landing, getting all of about 2 hours sleep.  Nurten and I didn’t sleep at all.

The third leg (Munich-Ankara) two thirds of the passengers were businessmen of one sort or another and they were all very helpful, volunteering to stow our bags or pass things to the stewardess.  Aslan slept the whole flight.  This worked well for me as I was really too tired to be entertaining at that point, but I was sure that he would cry something terrible when he woke up so I was afraid to move.  It’s a three hour flight and all I could think about was how having a toddler sit on your lap is definitely a DVT risk factor.  Thank goodness I don’t smoke or have cancer because I’m sure I had some venous stasis going on.

We arrived in Ankara last night and Aslan has adapted surprisingly quickly.  He was a little tentative and clingy at first but took very quickly to his “new” relatives.  He quickly discovered all of the dangerous or breakable objects in BabaAnne’s house.  He was charmed by his cousin Zeynep and happily shared toys with her.  He ate a big bowl of Efser’s yogurt soup and made his “yum yum” face over and over (a big compliment, he only does this if something is delicious).  The he willingly (for perhaps the first time ever) went to bed at a very reasonable 9 pm and slept for more than 13 hours, giving me a chance to unpack and talk to Emre on the phone (I really miss him) and still get a full night’s rest.

Traveling with Aslan was in most ways harder than traveling alone but it was also fun to share the experience.  It’s hard to find traveling companions who get genuinely excited every time they see the airport golf carts (indoor cars!!) or giggle hysterically about brushing their teeth in a public bathroom.  I kind of look forward to the return flight.