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.

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.