Birthday Party!

Merhaba all!
First of all, thank you so much for all the birthday messages, it really means a lot; thanks for making me feel not 6000 miles away from home.
And I'm happy to report it was a GREAT birthday, completely exceeded all my expectations. The best part of course was the party my family hosted at our house. It was such a great night- everyone in the program, two of our teachers, and some other students' host families came. I'll just post the pictures because I think they speak for themselves. Enjoy!
First, this is my host mom Fatma getting things ready in the kitchen. She said this is the picture she liked best, even though she looks really serious in all of them for some reason; she's really not:

The garden, pre-party, with our teacher Nur in the foreground

Candles!
yeah, they wrote "Day Clayton" on the cake. ?????

Cutting the cake was a very big deal.

The intermediate class!

Hepimiz! With host mom and dad on the left.

Hope you all are doing well, and I can't wait to see you in less than 4 weeks!

ISTANBUL

Merhaba all!
Unfortunately this post won't be nearly as long as it should be; I'm just a little too busy now to write as long of a post as Istanbul deserves. I'm hanging out with the fam, watching Turkish soap operas, and doing homework due tomorrow, so this will mostly be pictures accompanied by stories. Overall though, as you can imagine, our three days in Istanbul were incredible, especially our last day, a free day to wander around the city. I really do miss it now, and this weekend only strengthened my determination to come back to Istanbul soon, hopefully to work and, at least for a time, live.
We arrived early, at about 7, having taken the overnight train from Ankara (about a 7-8 hour trip), and immediately took the ferry over to Europe:

Gunaydin, Istanbul! As tired as I was, it felt so nice to be back. The rest of the morning, we did the touristy Sultanahmet things. With the execption of Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia- yeah, I use the Turkish spelling now), nothing was really that special. Aya Sofya is truly one of the great buildings of the world, and I can't imagine ever coming to this city without stopping by to wander through for a few hours. Words and pictures truly can't express how incredible it is:

The miraculous dome (it's still not really known how it was built, in the 6th century), still somewhat obscured by scaffolding, as it was last summer. So many of the city's sites (including Sulemaniye Camii, still closed) are under renovation in preparation for the city's being honored ast the European Capital of Culture for 2010. Sounds vague and meaningless, but it is economically (ie tourism), politically (EU?), and socially significant; hopefully I'll be back next summer to see the city in its...cultural capitally magnificence.

After lunch, I took the ferry over to Asia to see my friend Sena, a student at Bogazici University who studied at UNC in the fall of '08. We had a great time, and she showed me some neighborhoods in Asia I hadn't seen before. The Asian side, despite its almost utter lack of historical sites, really is beautiful and the parts on the water are such nice residential areas. I was exhausted returning to Europe, so after a quick dinner I went to bed.
The next day, we started with a tour of Dolmabahce Palace, the extravagant Ottoman palace built in European Baroque style in the mid 19th century (1843-1856). Though the claim that this palace was what bankrupted the empire is incorrect, its luxuriant excesses certainly didn't help the faltering empire's finances. It's really beautiful and impressive from the outside, especially its incredible position right on the Bosphorus, but if you've ever seen a European palace, or even a really nice hotel lobby, it's not that amazing.


View from the balcony towards the old city; minarets of Sultanahmet are visible on the horizon.
Still, Dolmabahce was a good time. Mostly, I was looking forward to our Bosphorus tour, something we kept meaning to do last summer before we ultimately ran out of time. The trip itself was really fun, but the best part was the end: delicious fish lunch and then a quick hike up to a Byzantine castle to see the view of the Black Sea (first time!). The view of where the Bosphorus opens up into the Black Sea was an incredible site:

Looking south, back toward Istanbul.


God it was so nice up there.
The next day was the best day, our free time to explore the city. I had a bunch of items on my agenda, and my friend Jon tagged along to see my favorite parts of the city. Our first stop was to the doner stand that we used to go to every day last summer. The donercis couldn't believe it when they saw me walking up and were even more surprised when I was able to say more than 'Hey how are you!' in Turkish. It was pretty great. Here's Tuncay and I:

Plus the place is huge now! There's an upstairs dining room and they now have pilav (!!!), a outside drink cooler, fresh ayran, and new awnings. Plus a name; I don't think it was called Eryilmaz Kardesler (Brothers) last summer. I'm really happy for them and I'm pretty sure that our continuous business last summer helped more than a little with their little expansion project. Look how awesome it is now:Here's Jon, who spent the better part of the day trying to steal all my Turkish friends, with Tuncay:After our doner stop, we had our failed expedition to Sulemaniye, after which we swung by Kapalicarsi (the Grand Bazaar) on our way to Yeni Camii. Walking through, I decided to stop by Adnan & Hasan's carpet store, the store we visited last summer because Hasan is good friends with Prof. Shields. I was a little unsure of myself, but I'm so glad we stopped by- Hasan is such a great host (gave us tea of course) and told us really interesting stories from his 30-odd years in the Grand Bazaar, including the times when Kofi Annan and Hilary Clinton visited his shop. After a quick stop in the tiny but beautiful Ottoman mosque of Rustempasa, we finally got to Yeni Camii, my favorite mosque in the city:

I could spend all day in this place:


And here's the view from Eminonu (Yeni Camii's neighborhood) across the Golden Horn to Galata:After Eminonu, we wandered around the tip of the city (Seraglio Point, as it's still orientalistically known I think). Somehow last year we never made it to this part of the old city, even though its about a 20 minute walk from Galata. It's a beautiful setting, and tons of people gather to sit on the rocks or even swim in the water (not really something I'd want to try without a lot of preparation). It was a really nice find:

This is looking north, up the Bosphorus (with Asia on the right and Europe on the left) with Bogazici Bridge prominent in the center.

Finally we wandered back through Sultanahmet, getting a rare view of Aya Sofya from behind:

And at last made our way back through Galata to the hotel:

After a quick doner dinner on Istiklal, we walked around a bit to enjoy our last hours on the city. We found a beautiful little used books and old maps store right on Istiklal (can't believe I never noticed it last year). Most of the stuff was in Turkish, including the old maps, which I loved. I ended up getting an Ottoman world map from 1895- a copy, obviously, but still really cool looking. In talking with the store owner, I also managed to get a discount- he couldn't believe I knew about the Second Balkan War (1913, duh, who doesn't?!) and when I went to pay for the map and some old postcards, gave me about 25% off- a "tarihci indirmi," he told me- historian's discount.
Again, it was a great trip, and returning to Ankara was a little hard, especially because this week is going to be pretty grueling: class 6 hours a day every day, and we don't leave for the Mediterranean until next weekend. It's nice to be back with my host family though, and back to delicious Turkish home cooking. Love and miss you all so much, and I can't wait to see you in less than 4 weeks!

Week 3: Kapadokya and AK Party

Merhaba all!
Hope you're all doing well.
So the last time I posted, we were getting ready to go to Kapadokya; over a week ago! Still can't believe I've only been here for three weeks.
Kapadokya was amazing, as it always is. I would post all the pictures I took, but, in all honesty, they're pretty much the same as the ones I took last summer, especially the ones in the rock churches. If you want to see them (WHICH YOU SHOULD) look at the entry from last summer; this is the same blog after all.
But we did go to a few more places in Kapadokya than last summer; last year we pretty much stayed in Uchisar, but we did a fair ammount of driving around the entire region this year (excepting the Ilhara Valley). The views in this place are just amazing:

This is the view of Uchisar from another town; at the foot of that mountain (into which a honeycomb of houses and chambers is carved) is where we stayed last summer.

View into Kapadokya from Uchisar.

William, striking a particularly heroic pose and surveying Kapadokya.
So Kapadokya was great, but no major surprises. Except I got sick again- gonna blame the hotel's open buffet for that little gastrointestinal episode. When we got back to Ankara on July 4, I was feeling horrible, and went to bed almost immediately. I was still not feeling well on Sunday, but my family had a cookout:


That's my host dad Kadir, grilling out. Even though I was feeling bad, and knew that it would be a bad idea to eat anything except bread and rice (let alone some barbecue), I couldn't help it. I at a TON of lentil soup, grilled mushrooms, borek, and kebabs. The best part? I felt fantastic the next day, and have been fine ever since. Also, last Sunday I met the family's new kitten. Everyone, this is Ayıcık (EYE-uh-juk), which means 'little bear' in Turkish:

Also an incredible sunset that night. I just can't help myself! When I took a picture of this one, this woman walking by yelled 'What are you doing!' are me. I guess she thought I was CIA or something. Definitely worth it though:

The rest of the week was good: just class every day so not too much to report. On Friday though we had a surprise trip to the headquarters of the AK Party, the political party that has been in power here since 2002:
So pretty much every Turk I've ever met is terrified of this party and thinks that it is a crypto-Islamist party that aims to turn Turkey into Iran. My family in particular HATES the Turkish president (Abdullah Gül) and Prime Minister (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), both of whose wives wear the traditional Islamic headscarve. The headscarve, as you might know, is one of the major flashpoints in Turkish politics. The parliament (controlled by AKP, which won about 47% of the vote in 2007 elections and has a huge majority in parliament) passed a law allowing the wearing of headscarves in universities in 2008, a law that was quickly annulled by the staunchly secular Constitutional Court. In fact, in 2008, the country's top prosecutor brought a case to the court accusing AKP of anti-secular activities and asking that the party be banned and that 70 of its top leaders (including Erdoğan and Gül) be banned from politics for five years. It was, as you might imagine, a political storm that both the party and Turkey weathered. This episode is an example of the considerable, thought now reduced, power of Turkey's secular establishment, the same forces that brought about three coups in the past 50 years.
Because my interaction with Turks is generally limited to those who speak English, live in America, and/or are fairly affluent, I've only met people who tell me really scary things about AKP. After Friday though, I'm not really scared. True, AKP is conservative, and some of its members have histories of participation in Islamic parties, but the party, as it stands now, is fairly moderate, especially compared to how it is usually portrayed in the West. Additionally, AKP is staunchly in favor of Turkey's membership in the EU (a fact which alone does much to combat 'AKP is secretely Islamist' rumors) and has done more than any other party in Turkey's history to make this dream a reality. Also, the party has stabilized the economy and improved the financial prospects of many Turks. Finally, the party has brought many ordinary, previously marginalized, Turks into the political process; in fact, many AKP leaders point to this as the reason that secular elites ('Istanbullus who speak perfect English and have never been east of Ankara' as someone put it) despise AKP so much. We talked to the party's head foreign relations expert, an extremely enlightening conversation. Of course, when I talked to my host mom about it that night, she said 'Well yeah, he's a politician. AKP wears a mask; it has two faces," and proceeded to give me the same talk I've heard from many Turks in the neighborhood. Maybe I'm just naive, but the visit really allayed my concerns about the threat AKP poses to Turkish secularism. Plus they gave us lunch, served on AKP china:

After visiting AKP, we went to the parliament, a frankly unremarkable building, though the grounds of the mosque in the parliament complex were really nice:

The next day, Saturday (yesterday) we went on our trekking expedition, basically a 6 hour hike around a park an hour outside Ankara. Though it doesn't compare to most national parks in the US I've been to, it was a really nice hike and had some really beautiful views. Plus it was nice to be in the woods:




That's about it. Right now I'm drinking Turkish coffee, watching my host dad and the neighbor play tavla (backgammon) lightening fast; I can barely see the pieces. Also, I need to go pick the family's cherry tree; they're making cherry preserves later this week. The program's going to Istanbul Wednesday (!!!!!), so probably no updates for a while. But you're used to that. Love and miss you all!

Second week

Merhaba!
(Turkish for hello, for those of you who have not taken the initiative to start learning the necessary Turkish with which to welcome me back to the US). Hope you all are doing well and not suffering too much because of my failure to post for the past week. Right now I'm sitting outside with my host mom and sister...they invited me outside, and I found them waiting with a few of the neighbors who I haven't met before, so hopefully I'll be able to write this in the midst of this lil impromptu block party.
So it's been a week, and I've now been here for...10 days, I think. I have to admit, before I left the States I was really worried about being consumed by homesickness the whole time I was in Turkey. And while I think about home a decent amount, and miss you all of course, I'm happy to report that I'm really loving it here and this experience has already surpassed many of my expectations.
The family is still great, and I can't imagine any kind of intensive language experience that wouldn't include a homestay; it's really invaluable. Because the dad and son are gone a lot (work for the former, still don't know about the latter), most of my contact is with the mom and daughter. The mom speaks NO English, but the daughter speaks a decent amount. Definitely able to communicate with both, which is nice. There are good days and bad days though; sometimes I'm conversing pretty well with them and other days I'm mostly nodding and smiling
(I'm talking with the neighborhood ladies right now about my favorite Turkish foods, this is AWESOME). Quick note about the Turkish language, since most of you, understandably, have a lot of questions about it. First, Turkish is not Indo-European, so it's not related to Greek or Persian or any of the other geographically close languages. It's also not related to Arabic, which is a Semitic language. Instead, as part of the Turkic language family, it's related to Central Asian languages like Uzbek, Kazakh, and Uyghur. It has a lot of vocabulary from Arabic and Persian (Farsi), but isn't related in any other way. It's a pretty simple language, very logical and ordered. It's agglutinative, which means that eveyrhting is done by suffixes. For example, ev is 'house'; evim is 'my house'; evimde is 'at my house'; and evimdeyim is 'I'm at my house'; evimdeydim is 'I was at my house'; you can pretty much go on all day, all in one word. I don't really know how to describe how it sounds; probably not pretty, in the sense that most people think French is. If you want to know how it sounds, videos on Youtube is probably the best way to go (Youtube, by the way, is actually blocked in Turkey; the government banned it a couple years ago after videos insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were posted). Oh one more grammar note: Turkish has 5 main verb tenses; they have the normals ones (present continuous, future, etc.), plus one called the 'reported past tense.' Basically, it's an entire verb tense that describes events that the speaker did not personally witness. It's usually translated in English as 'apparently' or something like that (Clayton yazmis- Apparently Clayton wrote), but it's so confusing as to when to use it. Still, it's a really interesting part of the language and society. I keep trying to use it and my family usually laughs.
That's probably enough linguistics for now. Now it's time for PICTURES. This kind of sums up the past week, which has been mostly class, plus an Ankara tour and a terrace party. Enjoy!
First here's some of the sunsets. They really are incredible here:

And awesome storms too. It stormed almost every afternoon last week:


The highlight of our Ankara trip last Thursday was Anitkabir, Ataturk's mausoleum. Ataturk, of course, was the founder of the Turkish Republic. He is universally revered in Turkey, and is a constant presence (statues everywhere, his face is on every coin and banknote, there's a picture of him in almost every home and business, etc.). It's easy to dismiss the extent to which he is revered as a 'cult' and a government sponsored one at that. But while the government surely plays a role in propogating Ataturk as a, perhaps the, symbol of secularism and the Turkish Republic, the very real accomplishments of Ataturk himself merit the respect and reverence he is accorded. From the wreckage of the Ottoman state after the First World War, it really was the sheer force of Ataturk's personality which forged a Turkish identity, defeated the various European forces seeking to seize parts of Anatolia (particularly the Greeks, against whom the Turks waged what is perhaps one of the world's most unique conflicts- two countries that won independence, at different times, from each other), and, most importantly, put the Republic on path to become a Western, modern nation. It's been a rocky road, but the transformation from 1923 (a rural, uneducated, isolated country) to the present is remarkable and due in no small part to Ataturk. His mausoleum is equally impressive:







This is a good example of the kind of rhetoric use to talk about Ataturk; it can seem over the top, I know, but he really was an incredible figure:


Oh and here's out teacher, Nese!! Nese is the best, an indomitable little Turkish woman who is such a great language teacher and an even better person. That's her in the front of our little bus (in the safari jacket???):

We had a great little party on the terrace of our school last Friday and went to a bar after; we called it a night pretty early, but it was a great time. Here's the club, empty and kind of creepy:

And here's some of the group:


We were planning on going to the Citadel, an ancient castle that sits on a hill overlooking the whole city, but a storm came so we went back yesterday. The views are just breathtaking, and the citadel district is full of interesting old houses:




Finally, Jon (a friend in the program) and I went to Kocatepe today after class, to get bathing suits (apparently our hotel tomorrow has a pool!). Kocatepe is famous for the huge mosque built between 1967 and 1987 in classical Ottoman style; it's one of the biggest mosques in the world and can be seen from almost everywhere in dowtown Ankara. Also, there's a mall under the mosque, so that's normal. It's really really impressive:




Well I've been writing this over the course of like 2 hours, interspersed with conversation with the neighbors (so far we've talked about Michael Jackson, politics, the economic crisis, my favorite foods, if my mom's a good cook, and how many kids I want to have), so I'm bout to call it quits. We head to Kapadokya tomorrow for 3 days, so expect some GREAT pics on Sunday or so; I won't have my computer until then. Love and miss you all, and I'll talk to you soon!