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!