National Day

In honor of today being Cummurhiyet Day in Turkey:

The Staring Thing

(Note: I am a week behind now in my goal to do one entry every week. I may decide to have given myself a week off somewhere, or there may be a bonus post lurking somewhere. I've written three thousand words worth of Starr King application material in the last three days, and I have another couple pages to go, so bet on the former.)

Imagine you are walking through Times Square with no pants on. Eyes are on you from every direction. They follow you until their owners' heads twist off from their own curiosity. New ones sprout up continuously. They fix you with an unwavering gaze. Your skin, your hair, your clothes tingle with scrutiny. You begin to feel like Maddux at an Alice Sebold conference. You think you have morphed into Tipper Gore attending a Snoop Dogg concert. Oh, the stares.

Actually, this is not at all what getting stared at here is like for me. (I mostly included that last paragraph for the jokes). In fact, I'll admit, I revel in the attention. Take a moment to let that sink in, I know you're thinking "BUCKY! You're not a whore for attention! You've never once gone out of your way to get people to pay you notice!" Be that as it may, I do appreciate the looks here. This is the first time that good-looking college women have stared at me on a regular basis since my summer job distributing Haagen-Daas samples. This is the first time good-looking college men have stared at me since I learned to stop myself from singing "Oh Delilah" as I walked across the Colby campus. In short, everyone here seems to want to taste this eye candy, and I am soaking it in, like a Twinkie vendor at fat camp.

















(How Bucky feels in Turkey)

The Canakkale Trip (Cha NAK kal lay)

So Canakkale is a little further from Ankara than Mery and I had thought....by like about five hours. Much as I like bus rides, it's always a bummer to get to your city acfter dark- makes it harder to navigate, get one's bearings and get a sense for the liveliness of the places, since much of it is already shut down.

First, a note of tour buses (I omit the word "luxury" here only because there is no bathroom on most of the Turkish ones). That these have not become more widely used in the US is surely an indication of the degree to which individual vehicles are regarded as status symbols, because in addition to their economic and ecological advantages, public transport via these babies is incontrovertibly more luxurious. The fact that their use in the US is restricted to those too young, old or poor to drive themselves seems a phenomenon giving manifestation to the beatitudes. For example, the Concord Trailways buses that go from Portland to Boston (one of my fondest discoveries during college not involving the words 'hefeweizen' or 'P2P') is a cheaper, less ecologically-impactful method of transport that provides huge windows and seats orthy of a La-Z-Boy showroom. And in terms of safety, would you rather get rammed by a Hummer in your petite Peugeot or one of these mammoths? We can and should have a much stronger rail system in the US, but as long as we've arterialized our purple mountains and amber waves of grain with highways we should use that system in a more efficient, less stressful way by relying as much on fleets of these puppies for inter-city transport as countries like Turkey, China and Panama do.

The landscape as you leave Ankara in any direction is a a welcome mixture of agriculture and desert. While it might be called the Anatolian PLATEAU, the area before the coastal regions is actually moderately hilly, providing for an interesting variety in the topography and uncultivated flora you to look at. Both times that I have descended onto the coastal regions of the Black Sea and Marmara it has come as a welcome change in geography. The much-higher rainfall makes for greatly increased plant life both on lowland farms and tree-covered hillsides.

It was three hours before we took our first stop, but thereafter they occurred at least every hour to gain and dispatch shorter-distance riders and get lunch. Hence the 11-hour bus ride. At least the bus didn't break down...except on the ride back.

Canakkale itself is neatly aligned along the main streets Cummurhiyet (Republic) Bulvari and Ataturk Caddesi, to the great benefit of travelers arriving late and without maps. The hostel we wanted from the Lonely Planet guide was cheap, easy to find and well-located, but we moved the second night because there was a place nearby with breakfast and our own bathroom for only a little more. After dinner the first night we got in, we strolled along the waterfront, avoiding the casts of fishermen as we made our way to the big Trojan horse statue. On a patch of cement lowered slightly from the rest of the waterfront walkway there was a basketball cout with kids playing both nights we saw it, despite the cold and wind. The waterfront was pretty and nautically-oriented, without feeling fancy and inaccessible. It was well-lit and there were small fishing boats tied up along most of its distance.

The first day in Canakkale we wandered to the Naval Museum, then back to town through some less-touristy back streets (unless those roosters were tourists too), and to a tea salon. We waited for an unsuccessful half-hour at a bus stop to go to Guzelyali, a neighboring town purported to to have some actual beaches, and then stuck out for the archaeological museum at the southern end of Ataturk Caddesi. After passing a bunch of shoe and clothing stores, a bridge with the local bus depot underneath, more apparel stores, some schools and houses, and yet another set of manicans sporting the latest in cheap, Eastern European fashion. There were some ruinous-looking pillars and tablets visible through the fence, but since it was the bayram (holiay), the museum was closed. On the way back to town, we saw a bus labelled "Guzelyali"- unfortunately we got on in the wrong direction and the driver just dropped us in the middle of town again. Then we waited about another ten minutes at that stop, just for the hell of it, and were this time rewarded with another bus coming the other way to take us in the right direction.

Guzelyali is a small town with lots of modern-looking (but not fancy) apartments, a couple cafes and a mile or two of sandy beaches with clear Aegean water. It reminded me a little of Punta Chame in Panama, but with more development. The hotel staff that morning, who had obviously never been to Winslow Park in Freeport in April for a dip off the Harb Cottage dock, warned that we wouldn't be able to swim for the cold. I found it invigorating and enchanting. It was great to be reminded that you don't have to spring for an expensive resort in order to find someplace really nice to swim.

Dinner that evening warrants mention thanks to the mussel salad. It only had vinegar, olive oil, pickles, onions and mussels, but it redefined my horizons in terms of culinary possibilities for things with the word 'salad' in the title. Ne lezzetli!

Sunday we intended to visit Troy (Troia/Truva), but it was even colder and wetter than the day before, so we stopped to get a new coat and spend time in a simit bakery and drink coffee. Gotta survive in the wild somehow. the weather made me feel nostalgic for Maine more than I have been in Ankara because there was a true rawness to it and there were actual puddles threatening to remind me what frozen extremities are like. The bus terminal was another setback, because the guy at TRUVA BUSLINES said that no buses go to Troy, just taxis. Driven by his brother-in-law. Very cheap. Special price for you. Okay, I'm making those last three sentences up, but I didn't entirely believe him. A couple other people tried to tell us how to get there, but it didn't work out until someone at one of the other buslines knew the word for 'bridge', because we needed to go back to the local depot we had passed Saturday. Who knew.

The Troy archaeological sites provided ruins from the last four thousand years, many accompanied by apoligist plaques explaining the early (and damaging) excavations of Heinrich Schleimann. Apparently numbnuts there decided to dig straight through to the ruins of Homer's era, the rest of the strata be damned. Which is a bummer, because there are nice strata. These were caused by the fact that each time the city was abandoned, the new occupants had to knock down the old buildings made of crude brick and erect their own out of...crude brick. So only the rock walls and such were left standing. Meredith was the perfect person to visit the site with, because of her depth of knowledge and appreciation for the lore surrounding it. As we examined the millennia-old repmples and columns and walls, she gleefully recounted the literary fate of each of the Iliad's characters. The weather and parts of the scenery were still making me happily homesick, so all in all it was quite a splendid afternoon.

Ankaragucu!! (pron. "Ankaragoojoo")

On Sunday, I went down into Ankara with one of my students (Seccad; he looks like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but is about a million times nicer) to see a football (real football) match between one of Ankara's four Turkish league teams, Ankaragucu, and Sivassport. Once we took the bus into town, the first thing we did was find the park where Seccad's brother works as a security guard...so that his brother could take Seccad's three and five-team teaser bets on this weekend's matches. Nothing like seeing a uniformed guard make change in the middle of his shift to remind you you're not in Maine anymore.

Next, we met up with Seccad's classmate, Osman, in the Kizilay district and found the gathering of Ankaragucu fans in the street there. Everyone was chanting ("ole oleoleoleole" and all that) and waving huge flags. At one point a fight broke out between a couple of the supporters and the "captain" of the fans (yes, they have a captain, more on him later) went over to help break things up. Then a guy went around handing out sparklers for us all to light, and if everyone wasn't already jumping around like their hair was on fire, making the metaphor literal certainly helped. (For those of you keeping track at home, so far we've had mass dancing and singing, with pyrotechnics, and this is BEFORE we started moving toward the stadium; it was a tiring day.)

Marching down the streets of Kizilay, and then through the main avenues leading to the Ulus district where the stadium is, the chanting and singing was joined by derogatory taunting of random opponents' owners and managers, as well as a confident disregard for traffic regulations. It was the first time since the protest at Textron that I have marched through the streets with a throng of people (no one got left behind and arrested this time, that I know of), and it was a similar energy. I think the difference between a political protest and a sports rally really boils down to the protest being cheaper to attend, but with the knowledge your team will certainly lose. So I guess the message to Cubs fans is.... (too early for Cubbies jokes? ok, too early).

Fast-forward two miles to the stadium: meat vendors all over the parking lot (though less so I expect than normal because we are nearing the end of Ramadan), brigades of police making formation outside the entrance gates, enough yellow and blue (Ankaragucu's colors) to satisfy an art teacher. Once inside (Seccad had promised the use of one of his season tickets, but we couldn't find his friend who had them there so he bought us each tickets for about $4 a pop), I discovered that part of the reason those suckers were so cheap is that you weren't paying for a SEAT so much as a place to stand and watch the game from. The hard pieces of plastic with numbers on them were so dirty and grimy that most people just perched on their backs until the match started (we were there an hour early, so half-way through I caved and sat down).

About ten or fifteen minutes before the match started, our fearless leader came angrily (he did everything angrily as far as I could tell, except kiss his friend on the cheek after match) marching along the inside of the fence separating the fans from the field and demanded one of the personnel to open the gate so he could climb up and direct our cheers. He stood next to a couple kids with huge drums (even for percussionists they were not particularly gifted musicians) and began orchestrating wildly our collective reactions to the announcements of the starting lineups. This part was basically hiss and whistle as loud as you can at the opposing team (my eardrums still hurt from that part) and chant things about the greatness of Ankaragucu while we take the field. I even missed the opening kick-off because I was trying to decipher this guy's hand gestures in relation where exactly I was supposed to be waving and chanting at the moment.

In fact, the action definitely took an overall backseat to the cheering for most of the match. It seemed that at any given moment, we were either shouting at one of the other groups of fans (there were actually two or three other sections like ours on either side of the field, ours being behind one of the nets) or inwardly focused on keeping time with the drummers and joining in the most recently begun jeers. The only times this was interrupted by action on the field was for injuries (booing the immoral fakers on Sivassport and cheering the fallen, heroic comrades of Ankaragucu) and goals (I was really impressed at the way the fans rallied around the home cause after they gave up a goal).

Did I mention that personal space is not a big thing here? Our section of the stadium resembled a mosh pit much more closely than any crowd of fans I have recently witnessed. The first few times that someone from behind put their full weight on my shoulder to stay standing during a chant that involved everyone jumping up and down in time it freaked me out, but I got comfortable very quickly with bracing myself against Seccad and the people in front of me. For about thirty-five minutes each half we did the whole jumping-waving-chanting routine and then the captain would call a rest where people went back to perching on their hard plastic chairs. It was not a relaxing spectator event, it was WORK to cheer there. It was thousands of has-been footballers channeling only slightly less energy than they would have used on the field into vocal and choreographic support. At one point in the second half, Seccad looked at me and said "Captain say, now we go down". I thought, we can't be leaving, there's fifteen minutes left! Turns out, he meant the group had decided to have an impromptu fitness test for my knee by combining the collective jumping routine with all moving down several rows of seats at the same time. Then back up. Then to the left and right. I still have no friggin' clue why that happened, but at least I survived with my ACL intact. Let's just say that I have a few more very close friends now than I did Sunday morning. And that "Eau de crazy Turkish football fan" will not be sweeping the world perfume markets any time soon.

As for the match itself, the end was much more thrilling than the beginning. Ankaragucu, despite the deep enthusiasm of its fans went down a goal in the first ten minutes and it was 2-0 at the end of the half, both of them on breakaways. The goalie of course was typically calm and classy about it, shouting at his defenders and pointing vigorously at who the manager should take out. Early in the second half our boys put one in on a header off a free kick a ways to the left of the penalty area, and tied it up a half hour later with another header on a cross from the left. A tie at home may not seem like a great outcome, but Sivassport is second in the league right now, and we were really giving it to them for most of the second half, so nothing to be ashamed of.

ANkara-gu-cu, AnKARa-gu-cu! ANkara-gu-cu, AnKARa-gu-cu!

Dikkat! (Caution)

Yesterday going to the supermarket Real (and I mean SUPERmarket, in the sense of like Stop'n'Shop plus JC Penney plus Bed Bath'n'Beyond all in one [sorry, that's probably less remarkable to people from outside Maine]), I was almost run over in the maddeningly complex and pedestrian-unfriendly rotary/entrance. Once inside, I found myself boxed out of viewing the kefir collection, reached in front of at the cookie aisle and cut off at nearly every turn through the produce section by fellow shoppers with the willingness to accede the right of way equal to your average NFL defensive back. The most potentially aggravating setback was when I turned around to set my frozen vegetables in my cart and it was gone. Apparently someone else helped themselves to it because it was empty. (Mom, I know you are thinking "why on earth were you getting frozen stuff FIRST!". Another lesson learned, I promise.)

I recount all this not to carp about how difficult life is in a foreign country (I'm actually as happy here as I have ever been I think), where rude people with mustaches and B.O. could use a lesson in courtesy, but instead to say that I don't really care about any of it. People's perceptions of personal space and pedestrian rights are very different here than in the US, and I'm pretty much OK with that. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, the people you interact with on a regular basis are so nice that it's hard to take any of perceived "rudeness" in these situations personally (except for those guys that almost hit Meredith in your white sports car- I have your license plate number and a bag of sugar with your gas tank's name on it). It's a combination of "just getting used to it" and cultural awareness (mostly the first one, I would be giving myself toooo much credit to claim I was aware of much beyond the fact that Red Sox games happen during my best sleep cycles here and instead televised sports matches in prime time tend to feature at best three scores in an entire game, if you're lucky), where the 437th time someone turns their cart in front of you going towards the Chokella (a delicious, less healthy, cheaper version of Nutella) you just make sure to get close enough to them going through that the next person doesn't close you out also.

It's amazing what you can get used to.