Horse Poop, Rocks and the Dating Game

It's one of life's little truths: it's just not a beach without sand.

With my gastric-intestinal distress behind me (hooray for Imodium!), I headed for Buyukada today, one of several islands off the coast of the city. Together, these islands are known as the Princes' Islands and have a reputation for scenic beaches and streets. Interestingly, aside from a few municipal vehicles, there are no cars on the islands. Consequently, the islands are quiet and smell strongly of horse poop.

It takes almost two hours by ferry to reach Buyukada. Sunday is the day to visit the islands -- arrive less than thirty minutes before ferry departure time and you're not getting a seat. No matter. I have a miraculous ability to fall asleep anywhere and my spot on the stairs was no exception.

When we arrived on the island, things were still going as expected. Scenic? Check. Lack of motor vehicles? Check. Smelly horses? Check check check. So we boarded a carriage pulled by one of the aforementioned farm animals, paid our 6 lira fare and headed to the nearest beach... which just so happened to charge 20 lira a head for entrance and prohibited outside food and drink. Somewhat disappointed and more than a little irked, we found a shady spot off the side of the car-less road and set up our picnic. Admittedly, the sidewalk is an unorthodox place for lunch. But this is Turkey, where public spaces are used for seemingly everything; I saw two old men playing chess between two parallel parked cars last week. Compared to that, three American women picnicking off the curb shouldn't be so strange as the Turkish passers-bye seemed to think it was.

Chatting with the locals revealed that there is in fact a free beach on the island. So we headed back in the direction of the ferry, found a beachy looking grandma-grandchild pair and followed them to the public beach.

...The sand-less public beach. In fact, there wasn't even grass to speak of. But there was trash. And slime. Maria and I were out of the water almost as soon as we were in it.

Like the water in the Bosporus, the Marmara is cold and choppy. This particular area was also dirty. Hardly the resort atmosphere we had anticipated during our ferry ride. I don't want it to sound all bad though: even if rocks aren't sand, they are good for lounging about and drying off. I found a nice, big flat one, waved good-bye to Maria who was off to explore for a bathroom and refocused -- water, splashing children, a beautiful view -- it wasn't what I expected, but nevertheless it did have some redeeming qualities. I got twenty-minutes of relaxation before the man who had been lurking since I got out of the water sat down on the rock beside me. I am always torn when this happens: one the one hand, I want to speak Turkish with Turks. On the other, I am tired of playing the Turkish dating game, answering the same questions over and over with the same answers. This conversation, like the others, went like this (although in Turkish, obviously):

Hello! Where are you from?
Hi.... (I ignored his question)
Do you speak English?
Yes, but I also speak Turkish.
Oh, good good. How old are you?
I don't think that's important.
Why are you in Turkey?
I am studying at Bosporus University.
Where are you from? Germany? England?
I don't think that's important either.
Why won't you tell me? I just want to know...
You know I speak Turkish and am a student. I think that's all you need to know right now.
So you won't tell me where you live? Tell me about yourself... have tea with me? What is your name? I love girls with white skin. You have such white skin. Is this your first time in the sun? You are very beautiful.
....thanks....
Have tea with me?
You know, I really just want to sit here. I am waiting for a friend.
A boy friend?
[lying] Yes in fact.
Will he hit me? Will he be very angry?
No, I don't think so.
[More awkward questions ensue, Turkish man's friend begins looking over at me... Maria still isn't back...]
Well it was nice meeting you! [walk away]
[Various protests, invariably including "But when will I see you again?"]

The whole conversation sounds benign, I know. But it would never happen between a Turkish man and woman who didn't know one another. This kind of attention is reserved for obviously foreign woman and often makes the city feel like a construction site. While Turks who know one other are overtly affectionate, strangers are just as overtly formal. It is not appropriate for a man to begin asking a woman on the street questions like, "where are you from?", it's just not the way gender relations work here. So the beach incident was but a variation on a theme, only this time I was half-naked. Whatever -- I got 20-molestation free minutes to watch the salty water splash against the rocks and the clouds roll by over-head. It's hard to complain too much about an afternoon on a Mediterranean shore, even if it does lack sand.

You say you want a revolution...

For about a week my mental dialogue has been running in Turkish and I fear it has had a deleterious effect on my English. Among these new linguistic idiosyncrasies is a tendency to speak in a strange combination of languages and start all emails and blog entries in Turkish. For your sake, I backspace and start over.

Virginia is still in the hospital. After ruling out meningitis (which, by the way, required a lumbar puncture) the doctor concluded salmonella poisoning before changing his mind again. The source of her infection remains a mystery and perhaps is less important now that she is getting better. In Turkish we say "Inshaallah" when we hope something will happen. Therefore, inshaallah, she will be home tomorrow.

Combine the stress of Virginia's condition with Thursday's looming mid-term exam and you begin to understand what kind of a week it is. After the exam, I intend to resume my adventures in Istanbul, and, perhaps more exciting, begin new adventures in Ankara. Virginia and I both have bus tickets to the capital city. Assuming she is well enough to travel, we will be on a bus headed six hours east after our exam this Thursday. Many students are heading for resorts over our three-day weekend.... but it's election season and Ankara is the place to be to see the real madness unfold. After all, the possibility of a coup-d'etat doesn't happen here as often here as it used to.

Someone's going to emergency...

I spent the better part of yesterday in the former capital of the Ottoman empire and the better part of last night in the hospital. Despite feeling incredibly ill, Virginia (Virginia of the fireworks and Turkish weddings reported previously) trudged through Bursa. "Trudged" being the operative word here -- the tour was terrible.

(I did, however, manage to get some good pictures, available here. More on the awful trip later.)

By the end of the three-hour bus ride back to Istanbul, Virginia could barely walk straight. At one o'clock am she called, telling me she had decided she needed to go to the hospital. I met her downstairs where the dorm security officers and Suleyman (soon to be a major character in this story) were helping her make some phone calls. Within an hour, we were in Suleyman's car with his friend Hasan headed to the emergency room. They stayed with us at the hospital, helping translate and telling jokes, until we finally left (without Virginia) at four o'clock am.

Although her MRI came back clean, Virginia's blood work indicated the presence of an infection. That coupled with severe dehydration caused the doctor to keep her overnight. While Virginia was being examined I had plenty of time -- over three hours -- my new Turkish friends. Suleyman will be an assistant professor of finance at Bosporus University next year; Hasan is practically weeks away from earning his masters in industrial engineering. Both, as indicated by their willingness to spend the night at the hospital for two American strangers, were extremely kind. They harassed me a little for not speaking to them exclusively in Turkish (Suleyman speaks English fluently but Hasan's speech was more halting) but 24 hours without sleep did little to improve my already somewhat lacking foreign language abilities.

Virginia should return to the Superdorm today -- I'll keep you updated on her progress and my future adventures with Hasan and Suleyman.

Grammar and Architecture

"Your Turkish is good -- you speak very fluently," said the man selling interesting, if somewhat garish, jewelry. "But I think you need some new Turkish words."

Yes, yes I do. I refrained from commenting that while his vocabulary was adequate, his diction was somewhat lacking.

My classes are consuming. On Friday, I was chastised for, well to be honest, I am not really sure what -- the explanation of my error was in rapid Turkish and utilized a lot of specialized grammar vocabulary (embedded clause, nominalization, etc.). After four attempts at filling the blank with the correct suffix my menacing grammar instructor gave up and proceeded to ask what was wrong with me in English. Never mind that the correct answer (the ablative suffix) transformed the main verb of the sentence into a noun, thus leaving the sentence without a predicate.

I am really scared of this women.

But enough grammar. This weekend the program hosted a tour of some historic sites around Istanbul. By "sites" I mostly mean mosques (cami in Turkish). Cami cami cami... our adventures in Ottoman architecture began at the Suleymaniye Mosque, pictured immediately below. Like the (Byzantine) Hagia Sophia, Suleymaniye has a main dome flanked by two semi domes. On account of this similarity, some "orientalist scholars" have argued that Ottoman architecture was really neo-Byzantine architecture. That is to say, the Ottomans have no architectural style of their own.

As you can imagine, many Turks take issue with this.

Suleymaniye

Our tour was a day long refutation of this argument, supported by two more mosques (Sehzade and and Fatih Sultan Mehmet, also pictured below) and several Byzantine churches, all of which demonstrated what our guide considered a distinctly Ottoman style -- mathematically precise symmetry, corner towers, a main hemisphere surrounded by four partial hemispheres. These elements are also included in buildings such as the Taj Mahal and several famous Russian churches, the names of which I don't remember.

Sehzade

Fatih Sultan Mehmet

Byzantine Church Mosaics

It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to convey the presence of these buildings in pictures. A more complete collection is available in my flickr account.

The tour, which was scheduled to end at three, concluded at six o'clock. The final site we visited was in a very conservative neighborhood. In Fatih, girls as young as 7 were covering their hair and almost all of the women past their teens were completely covered, their black robes hiding everything but their eyes. Despite my modest dress, I have never felt more like an obnoxious American tourist.

Hoş Geldiniz!

After two years of Turkish class, I felt moderately confident about traveling to Turkey, and you know, maybe even trying to talk to some of the people living there. After tossing around some greetings and thank yous though, two things -- and by things, I mean significant barriers to communication -- became very clear. First, classroom Turkish is not real Turkish. "Your father has beautiful eyes" nicely illustrates a double genitive construction but doesn't help get lost luggage out of Munich to Istanbul. Second, the problem with actually revealing that you (an American!) speak Turkish is that it causes people to speak Turkish back very, very quickly.

Welcome to Istanbul.

My introduction to the city began in a neighborhood named Ortakoy. Following my misguided adventure in beef tongue sandwiches (I blame jet lag for my brief lapse in vocabulary pertaining to anatomy) a handful of us set out to see the Bosporus, chase stray cats, drink Turkish beer and otherwise conspicuously mark ourselves as Americans. Sunday is market day in Turkey (aptly named "Pazar") -- Ortakoy's streets were lined with vendors wares ranging from beaded curtains to tea sets. Oh, and rabbit hair bracelets. Or at least what I thought were rabbit hair bracelets made from hair combed from these incredibly sedate rabbit families. Further Internet research revealed that these rabbits are actually regarded as fortune tellers. And while this doesn't explain their un-rabbit like behavior -- marked absence of hopping about, ear twitching, bunny sex, etc. -- it perhaps makes about as much sense as bracelets woven out of combed rabbit hair.

When I returned to my hotel room later that night I was greeted by a Turkish wedding taking place immediately below my window. Virginia (my roommate) and I eagerly assumed our front row seats and watched the madness, complete with Aretha Franklin renditions and strobe lights, unfold. The wedding was so loud it might as well have been in the room. Night two in Ortakoy brought a simialar scene on the patio below our window. Virginia didn't quite make it all the way under the bed when the first celabratory firework went off, but she definately had all vital body parts under cover. I may or may not have fallen out of my chair. I maintain that these reactions are natural among students of international relations. And, well, dogs.