Leave the Path

I haven’t written anything in a few days. Sorry about that. We sort of got into a routine and I just didn’t get around to it. Our day usually goes like this: we wake up between nine and eleven. Emre watches TV and I putter around or help Nurten set the breakfast table. Then we all sit down to eat. Breakfast is a big deal here. There’s usually at least one meat and several cheeses, tea, bread, jam, tomatoes, olives and sometimes fruits or fresh squeezed orange juice. Cornflakes and other cereals are sold, but most people consider them a poor substitute for a “real” breakfast. One morning Nurten and I made “poaca” which is a flaky, buttery pastry filled cheese and parsley and topped with richly flavored seeds. Cooked parsley may sound weird to Americans, but these are my all time favorite baked savory food and I have loved them since the first time I came to Turkey. We made a whole pan of them and they were wonderful.

Some days Hakan makes fresh orange juice. Most Turks drink fresh orange juice rather than the bottle kind and most restaurants serve it. This family has at least three different juicers and on three different occasions we’ve broken one out and made a glass of the good stuff for everyone in the family.

One morning Emre and I joined his friends at a restaurant for breakfast instead. It was outside of the town in the largest wood building I have ever seen in Turkey (the vast majority of buildings are concrete). The restaruant had extensive outdoor areas with streams and ducks and a few trees. Inside, well-to-do families sat together and waiters brought little dishes of everything that should be on a “real” Turkish breakfast table as well as a few extras like cheese cooked in butter and four types of cheese-stuffed boreks. There was also a flat, stretchy bread not unlike crepes.

One uniformed waiter walked around with a hot pot of tea and personally I think I consumed about a gallon of the stuff altogether. Interestingly, about half of the adults in the place were smoking, even at 10 AM and several lit up before the first cup of tea arrived.

The most interesting thing about that place, in my mind was that it was a step outside of Ankara. We’ve been in the same city for two and a half weeks now. We flew in and we hadn’t left. It’s easy to forget what the rest of the world looks like. I hadn’t seen Anatolian terrain in about 2 years, and that dry plateau landscape starts just on the edge of the city. It was surprising and refreshing. Also refreshing was the clean air. Aside from all the smoke coming from people, there’s smoke from cars and from houses. Many houses are still heated with coal (a surprise to me) and apparently some of the politicians are providing cheap, low quality coal in a bid to improve their popularity.

But most mornings we eat at home. After breakfast we get dressed and Emre checks his email. It’s a scientifically proven fact that for each person getting ready it takes exponentially more time, and with three to five of us leaving it takes a good long time. While we wait for each other we watch TV. The National Geographic channel has Turkish dubbing and is a favorite. There’s also two BBC channels, one French channel, one German channel, one Spanish channel, and a couple of educational channels from various universities. One of my favorite things is that there are programs that teach school subjects up to fairly advanced levels. Just flipping channels you can learn to take a derivative or how to conjugate a very in French.

Sometime in the early afternoon we venture out. Many days we go do “alisveris” which literally means “taking-giving”. We go to the shopping malls (I have seen every one in Ankara more that once) or to the outdoor commercial areas with shops. We have walked from the apartment to Tunali a couple more times. Its only about a half hour walk and down hill, but it’s sort of exciting. The sidewalks are sometimes blocked by cars and we have to go into the road to pass, or we’ll see street dogs at the house with the Mercedes, or once there was a near accident involving a cab and a souped up Peugeot. Certain times of the day there are traffic jams where no one can move and everyone just lays on the horn.

We also see houses being built or torn down whichever streets we take. And we pass several embassies and consulates on our way to the commercial area. One of my favorite things about Tunali, in fact, is that when people hear me speaking English, they often assume that I’m a diplomat or relative of a diplomat rather than just a tourist. Much cooler. I like the shops in Tunali, too. There’s Nine West store and a United Colors of Benneton, both of which you’d find in many an American mall, but there’s also a wide selection of upscale Turkish shoe, pajama, and pastry shops. I feel like since the shops are more established, they have more selection and expertise than many of the ones in malls. They have good service too. I bought a pair of boots and the shop sent them back to the factory to be resized for my “athletic” calves free of charge. Tunali also has a park with ducks, but it’s sort of frozen and less pretty in winter.

We’ve also gone to the malls a few times, though I like them less. In one chocolate shop Emre found one of his favorite things of all time: giant chocolate animals.

One day we went to the Anatolian History Museum. I love that place. There are impressive artifacts tracing the important developments of human pre-history, as well as gorgeous sculptures and treasures from the age of the Romans and Ottomans. The building itself is a 15^th century covered bazaar with brick domes that provide unique acoustics and an appropriate atmosphere for museum browsing. I’ve visited this place on each of my three trips to Turkey and I think about it often when I’m at home.

This trip, however, was complicated by an uninvited new friend. An elderly man volunteered to be our guide. He was approaching 80, a Turkish citizen, but a Korean war veteran by some strange circumstance. He claimed to have been a certified guide since the 60’s and told us many times how lucky we were that he would show us the wonders of the museum. He spoke English, but haltingly and with many mistakes. And, despite his claims, his service as a guide was less than useful. Most of what he told us was oversimplified, obvious (“This is a cup.”), or directly contradicted the written signs.

We realized within the first five minutes of his services that we’d be better off without him, but every time we tried to walk away and look at things on our own he physically grabbed one of us by the arm and pulled us to what he thought we should see. Since he seemed genuine we didn’t want to hurt his feelings and he ignored our first four or five attempts to dismiss him. It took two hours and a tip to dissuade him from following us and even then we had to pretend to leave. I really think he felt he was helping us and he was entertaining in some ways, but if you ever happen to visit this museum, avoid this guy. (Hakan went the next day with friends, though, and had an actual archaeologist show them around. They had a great tour, so don’t discount all guides, I guess.)

The history museum is on the hill with the castle in the oldest part of town, but I had never seen the rest of the hill before. On the morning that we had breakfast outside of town we went to see the castle. One of Emre’s friends, a lawyer named Murat, is very familiar with that area and wanted to show us around. Apparently the area is sort of rough at night and most comfortable Ankoraites want nothing to do with it. I thought it was great, though. The houses around the castle are older even than the ones in Ulus. They are largely in the old timber-and-brick Ottoman style, bigger on the top than the bottom, with red tile roofs. Most of the shops sold “authentic” stuff like wood boxes, jewelery, antiques, fabrics, or glass. The wood shops have a hatch in the back that goes down to the basement where someone makes the objects by hand in a workshop. The prices were very reasonable and I got a gift for some young friends of mine.

Near the walls of the castle, there was an outdoor market with dried fruits and nuts in big baskets being sold by gruff men with grizzly mustaches. The “kale” or “castle” itself looked cobbled together. Parts of it looked like mill stones or column drums. Different sides looked made at different times. Here and there a modern metal fence or cell phone tower stuck out of the rock. It was hardly a fairytale castle, but it was an interesting place. Within the walls of the castle were more houses and shops, equally crowded around twisting cobbled streets.

Little alleys and dirty yards filled with trash dotted the spaces between old-fashioned hotels, fancy-looking restaurants, and small museums. I couldn’t decide what was for the benefit of tourists and what was just the way people lived. Children played in the streets, many of them posing for tourists or demanding tips for “guide services.”

There were also many cats. Most of them were fluffy but thin-framed cats with a distinctly haughty demeanor and dirty paws. I think that these are at least part “Angora cat” though I didn’t see any white ones with non-matching eyes, which are prized characteristics for purebreds.

Murat took us to a restaurant called “Cafe And” (“and what?” I asked, but apparently “And” is a Turkish word for a kind of promise.) It was in an old stone house and we sat in a glass room build onto the side of the upper floor.  The mosque behind us was supposedly the oldest in Ankara.

The view of the city was breathtaking. Over the roofs of the old houses (some of them crumbling) we could see the progression to old stone buildings in Ulus, and then the concrete modernity of the rest of Ankara. In the distance and under a fluffy layer of smoke we could see the towers of Kocatepe mosque and of the Atakule space-needle-like building. We could also see pigeon fanciers and their birds on another part of the castle and a couple of homes being restored. We only had drinks at the cafe, but the light was good and the view was magnificent. I would definitely go back there. We were sort of in a hurry to get back that day because we had refreshments with Hanzade’s family afterwards, but I want to go back exploring another day.

For dinner we sometimes have big meals or leftovers at home. Alternatively, we go out for meat. There are more types of cooked beef and lamb in Turkey than one would ever imagine and usually a restaurant will specialize in just one of them.  Unlike American restaurants where every part of the meal is customizable and everyone orders something different, the meals at many Turkish restaurants are more or less fixed.  One day we went to the iskander kebap restaurant in the Armada shopping center. It was vaguely like the interior of a cruise ship, in a tower overlooking traffic. I got a picture of the guy pouring melted fat over Volkan’s meal.  The dinner options here, best as I could tell, were  “full order”, “one-and-a-half order,” or for children and dieters “half order.” Iskander is less filling than you’d expect a giant plate of meat and fat to be. Probably that’s because the meat is sliced superthin so the total amount of beef is about the same as a small steak.

We have spent a fair bit of our time visiting, and rightfully so as that’s what we came here to do. Sometimes we watch TV or sit and talk with Emre’s parents. At Volkan and Hanzade’s, we watched the first season of The Office and of course we play with Zeynep — she’s made noticeable strides towards walking since we’ve arrived. One day we went for “tea” with Hanzade’s parents. We did have tea, but we also had wine, borek, vegetable dishes, and sweets.

Often in the evening we go out with friends. One night we went to the office of Murat the lawyer and we got to try on his lawyer robes. I think they’re slightly silly looking, especially when combined with Emre’s luxurious mustaches. He looked like an extra from Harry Potter.

And Mert took this cool picture of me looking like a magician.

On that same night we went out for drinks with Murat and Mert and Sefa.

Afterwards we indulged in the Turkish tradition of soup eating. There are special “soup guys” who have 24 hour restaurants that specialize in soup. One of the favorites of our friends here is called Rumeli and it’s in Tunali. Most people like to eat “iskambe”, which is made with sheep’s stomach, but I stick to lentil. Additionally on this night, Murat ordered a plate of brain salad. Brain salad is made of sheep’s brains. I’m not sure how they’re prepared, but they looked disturbingly exactly like the brains I saw in anatomy last year. I passed.

After we’d finished our soups we sat around drinking tea. Then the lamps hanging from the ceiling started to sway. Everyone perked up and watched as an earthquake rolled through the building for 30 seconds or so. No one panicked, but cell phones started ringing immediately. Most young Turks and their teens and 20s live with their parents to save money. So the moms of all the kids in the soup place were awoken by the quake and called to see that their sons and daughters were safe. We paid our bill and headed out onto the street. All of the car alarms in town were ringing and dogs were barking, though whether they barked about the earthquake or the alarms I don’t know. A light snow fell and it was bitterly cold. Mert gave us a very cautious ride home. In front of the apartment, the trees were covered with a layer of white frost crystals and snow.

There was another earthquake again the next morning, again a small one. These little tremors aren’t dangerous, but they get everyone talking about what could happen. Geologists can’t agree whether these little quakes are good because the release tension from the faults or bad because they might irritate a big one ready to blow. People aren’t so worried about a quake in Ankara. It seems that Ankara has never had a massive, devastating earthquake and even if there was a big quake, most of the buildings are made to withstand it. Istanbul is a different story, though. There’s a very active fault there and it has giant earthquakes a couple times a century. With all of the old buildings, something crumbles every time. There’s also a possibility of all the water around Istanbul moving. Every time there’s an earthquake anywhere in Turkey, the news channels show pictures of the massive damage of quakes past with titles like “when will the big one come?”

We went to see a band a couple of nights later. The venue was a bar below street level filled with a cross section of liberal, young Turkey. I saw more men with long hair than I had seen in any one place in Turkey. Initially the place was pretty cozy, but as the evening progressed and two-thirds of the folks there smoked constantly, the air became thick and my eyes twinged. The band was good, though. The lead singer had long hair and glasses and he wore a t-shirt with an image of the lyric advisory sticker. One of the other guys had an 80’s reminiscent silvering mullet and several members sported earrings. They sang predominately in English. They opened with a very authentic blues number. They also covered a bunch of old songs by Dire Straits and Genesis, as well as a few American rock-sounding tracks that I didn’t recognize but everyone else in the audience knew the words to. It reminded me of the sound track of pancake Saturdays with my dad when I was a kid. Emre and Hakan and I made up a bunch of really silly dances and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We went back to the same soup place after. No earthquake this time.

So that’s it. We’re making ourselves at home in Ankara. We head back to the states on Saturday. I’m comfortable here and we’ve had a good time, but I’m kind of looking forward to seeing my family again and getting back to my projects there.

Merry Christmas! Today’s the 25^th and it’s Christmas all over the world. Christmas in Ankara, however, isn’t exactly “celebrated”. It’s a little weird given that many of the shops have Santas and trees and play Christmas music constantly, but this isn’t a holiday here. Hakan left for school before breakfast and everyone who works is working today. In fact, since last week was Korban and some took Monday off to extend the break, this is the first day back to work for some Ankara-ites. All of the “Christmas” traditions that secular Turks have adopted have been transposed onto New Years (including gift giving, tree trimming, and turkey eating) and so for most people today is just another day.

Emre’s family, however, is making a big deal of it because I’m here and they know that Christmas is usuallly the biggest holiday of the year for my family. I really appreciate that they’re trying so hard to make me comfortable and happy. Nurten and her sister cooked most of the day yesterday and started making preparations for the meal as early as this morning. Everyone in the family agreed to come to a long dinner despite the fact that most of them had to work today and will have to work tomorrow.

Nurten also let me borrow her kitchen for a couple of special Christmas projects. I made a pumpkin pie and cheese balls. I’d never made pumpkin pie before and it was a challenge to do it here. We had to substitute a few of the ingredients, double the recipe and use a huge quiche pan instead of a pie pan, and gestimate the oven temperature — but it turned out pretty well. I used the extra dough to make decorative things around the outside and the result was that it looked intentional and not like we just used the wrong pan. In the end, not everyone liked it, but it was an authentic-tasting pumpkin pie.

The cheeseballs were less of a success. The vegitarian cheese ball was too soft and it didn’t make a ball so much as a squishy mess. The one with meat was better, but Turks don’t really do “dipping” foods, and we were all so stuffed by the time that it came out that no one really wanted to eat it.

Other than those things, there wasn’t anything on our Christmas table that we would have eaten at Grandma’s house. In addition to what Nurten and Nuran made, other guests brought food. We had veal and rice pilaf, stuffed grape leaves and vegetables, Russian potato salad, fava bean paste, some sort of chicken stuffing with yogurt, and many more foods rich in spices or olive oil. It was delicious and I enjoyed every bite.

The table was as beautiful as it was delicious. Nurten brought out her best china and a special embroidered tablecloth she bought for the event. The cloth had poinsettias, which in the states are known as a Christmas motif, but are often refered to as “Ataturk flowers” here for some mysterious reason.

Early in the evening we had a visit from “young Baba Noel”.

Our Christmas table had twelve people, including Emre’s immediate family, Hanzade’s family, Janna, and Nuran. It’s fortuitous that we had exactly twelve for dinner because I brought exactly twelve paper Christmas poppers from the US. My family doesn’t do the poppers but a few years ago I spent Christmas in England and I remember what fun the families there had popping them after dinner. They were a big hit. It took a few to get the hang of it (the cardboard “strings” kept falling out) and perhaps we built it up too much (people expected more of a bang) but it was good fun.

Afterwards everyone wore their hats from the poppers and we started opening gifts.

We brought Zeynep English children’s books and she really liked her copy of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” She didn’t understand the story of course, but the shiny cover was very appealing.

I liked my presents, too. In a bout of silliness I put all of them on at the same time. I had a whole outfit except for shoes, so I borrowed Emre’s favorite gift: shoes that don’t match. (Don’t worry, they’re designed to be that way. The orange stripe goes vertical on one toe and horizontal on the other. It’s a very Emre sort of thing.)

So Christmas was a success. I had a great time. I hope our family here enjoyed what traditions we were able to bring from the states.

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Sorry it took so long for me to get this post up. We’ve been having a couple of technical difficulties. For some reason the site doesn’t seem to be working well on Internet Explorer, even though Emre updated everything yesterday. We’ll continue to work on it. We’re also having some trouble with the camera. Probably 80% of the pictures are fine, but once in a while it will do this crazy Warhol-inspired thing and/or delete half of the picture. It’s annoying, but an interesting effect.

This morning Emre and I had an adventure  loosely inspired by a program we watched about arctic explores on the National Geographic Channel. We got up early (and by that I mean before 10), bundled up as warm as possible, and walked through the city. I hadn’t realized how close we are to the center of town, but it took less than 30 minutes to walk to Tunali and in two hours we’d made it almost all the way to Ulus. This was by far the most exercise we’ve had in weeks (pathetic, I know) but it really wasn’t very far. I feel like I’ve got my bearings a little better and I hope we walk more of the city later this week.

We saw lots of interesting things on the way. Of course the things that we saw the most of were apartment buildings and cars and shops. I noticed a Mexican restaurant and a Chinese restaurant. All the guide books I’ve looked at say that Ankara is extremely poor in non-Turkish foods, but I think that that is changing as people travel and expand their palettes. We also saw two Starbuck’s within a half mile of one another. Espresso hasn’t quite caught on yet here, but the colonization process has begun.

We also noticed some things that I wouldn’t have seen from the car. First of all the sidewalks in Ankara are widely in poor repair. They are uneven and cracked. Drivers have no qualms with driving up on the curb, so the edges are sometimes pulverized in popular shopping areas. Often storekeepers or homeowners will make a big marble patio-like thing on their part of the sidewalk, leaving deep steps or big cracks between that piece and the rest of the sidewalk. And all of the cracks get widened by ice in the cold Anatolian winters. Additionally, any of the embassies and the U.N. House put huge concrete barriers on their sidewalks to dissuade pedestrians and cars from getting too close. Ankara also leads the world in number of temporary guard cabins (they look like porta-john’s with windows) and those also take up sidewalk space, forcing pedestrians to walk in the road. The sidewalks in pedestrian areas are much much better.

Between the apartment where we’re staying and Tunali, we saw a house being demolished. A guy with a sledgehammer was busting up the concrete walls and another guy with a wheelbarrow carried chunks away. No explosives or heavy machinery were being used, or at least not while we were watching. Seeing apartment buildings constructed or demolished makes them seem eerily fragile.

Near that house, we saw a family of street dogs sleeping in the yard of an expensive house. (Notice how there’s a Mercedes in the driveway.) I love the street dogs. They barked at us, but I don’t feel threatened by them. I haven’t seen one growl or even get close to a person. They’re wild animals of an urban landscape and they seem largely indifferent to people. One of the ones in this group had a bad leg injury, though, and it hurts me to see dogs that have been injured. I think most of the leg injuries must come from run-ins with cars. I wish there was a way for the street dogs to coexist better with their human neighbors. I think if I lived here I would let them sleep in my yard. I would even adopt one – all of my pets have been strays and they’ve been great. These dogs usually seem to have good temperaments and they’ve got a great history behind them. But then an adopted dog isn’t really a street dog anymore. A dog that is part of a human family doesn’t have the freedom that I admire about the feral dogs. People here also think of them as dirty and untrainable. It’s a difficult problem for Turkey and I fear that the eventual result will be no more street dogs.

When we reached Tunali, we bought a bag of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor. I think he overcharged us because he could tell I was a foreigner, but it seemed very appropriate to be eating roasted chestnuts on Christmas eve. I learned two things from buying those chestnuts: 1) don’t speak before we ask the price of something. English is a dead give-away and my Turkish is very foreign-sounding and 2) there aren’t any public garbage bins on the streets in Ankara. Emre and I carried handfuls of chestnut shells for probably a mile before we found a bag of trash by the curb and slipped them in. I’m surprised that a country with such a great resource of labor doesn’t have more sidewalk-repairers and garbage-collectors.

From Tunali we walked to Kizilay, crossing over the pedestrian bridges. There are hundreds of big metal pedestrian bridges in Ankara. Some city official promoted them heavily as a way to cut down on deaths and injuries from cars. The fact is, though, that in order to use one, a pedestrian has to walk to an intersection, go up about two flights of stairs, and down two flights on the other side. Most people don’t use them but we did and we got some great views of the city streets from above.

In Kizilay I got a good look at the statues of the girl reading. Inside it says “Insan haklari bildirgesi” which means “Human Rights Decloration.” Interesting choice for light reading. Hakan says this part of the city has lots of historical sites related to human and particularly women’s rights.

We also saw a well-maintained vintage car that reminded me a lot of my brother’s rabbit.

Probably the most impressive thing we saw on our little urban trek was a big mosque. The Kocatepe Cami is one of the biggest in Ankara and it is monumentally huge and shiny. It was also sort of a surprise to come upon it because despite it’s size it’s not easily visible behind all of the hills and tall apartment buildings. We rounded a corner and there was a giant mosque, bigger than several city blocks. I would have liked to see the inside, but there was a funeral in progress on this particular day and it seemed rude to wander in with my camera. From the outside all we could see were stylish women in all black and a couple of people carrying giant flower displays. Emre explained that Muslim funerals must be held within a couple days of the death because it’s not acceptable to use any sort of embalming or preserving solutions. The body is washed and then wrapped in white cloth. During the funeral service at the mosque it is carried in a simple wooden box and then just the cloth and body are buried in a graveyard outside the city where it is expected to decompose quickly. This is one of the few Muslim practices that does not show signs of being abandoned any time soon. Turks (and other Muslims as well) find the American open-casket funeral really bizarre. And if you think about it that way, it is a little strange that we cover the bodies of the dead in preserving solutions and makeup and then seal them into waterproof caskets. Eventually all living things return to the earth and so, once a creature is dead, what good does it do to delay that inevitability?

On our walk, we mostly stayed on the commercial streets so we stopped a few times for shopping. We found a neat painting store and also a silver shop where we picked up a gift for one of my relatives.

Our best purchase of the day was a fancy man-bag for Emre. Almost all Turkish men carry purses. They even use the same word for men’s and women’s handbags. There’s one style of bag that is kind of like a small leather folio with a wrist strap that’s known as a “thinking man’s bag.” Some men alternatively carry small briefcases or leather bags with lots of pockets and a handle on top that look to me like camera bags. Younger men sometimes prefer small messenger bags or backpacks. Emre brought his small messanger bag to the states and he carries it sometimes, but it’s sort of beatup and sad looking. We’ve been looking for a new one for almost a year now and we finally found one that’s perfect. It’s kind of like a messanger bag, but small and made of very good quality black leather.  I’m so glad that he finally found it.

For lunch, we called Hakan and Nurten and together we went to eat a kind of shish kebab that comes on very small skewers. I was very bad at getting the meat off the skewer and I kept knocking things over and dropping things on the floor. It was pretty delicious, though. Who knew that “meat on a stick” could come in so many varieties?

After lunch we went for more shopping. Everyone had presents left to buy for Christmas (because of me we’re exchanging gifts then instead of new year’s). Honestly I’m bored of shopping malls and there’s not much more to tell, but I did take a picture of the ingenious parking lot in Cepa. There are little lights over each space in the parking garage. When the light is red the space is taken, when it’s green the space is free. The sensors don’t always work, so sometimes there are false alarms, but it’s a good idea.

We also saw an underwear store with the same name as a friend of ours from Chapel Hill. Happy Christmas, Berk!