Letter From Damascus

DAMASCUS, Syria — We’re on the road out of Syria, taking the bus through the hard, sun-baked landscape that the Crusaders we’re studying crossed on foot and horseback. It’s quite a bit faster and easier on an air-conditioned bus with plenty of rest stops along the way. Most importantly, we’ve got a fridge full of bottled water and enough Imodium AD to lock up an elephant for a month. Thankfully, no one has been in dire intestinal straits so far; it would be really nice if that trend holds during and after our return to Alanya, when my beard can get trimmed and we can stop being so petrified of tap water and most foods.

The past 10 days have been fascinating and challenging as we’ve moved east and then south from our little tourist town on the seashore through the increasingly conservative and Muslim eastern regions of Turkey and then into the Syrian Arab Republic. From beginning to (nearly) end, we have observed a tremendous amount of variations and apparent contradictions in the political and religious theories and practices of the places we’ve seen.

Politically, there are two crucial differences between Turkey and Syria that make themselves immediately apparent. First, the cult of personality surrounding the political leadership is creepier than in Turkey because the cult in Turkey is centered on Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who has been dead for somewhat less than a century, while the cult here concerns the current president and his late father, the previous president. Being stared at by pictures of an icon of the state is weird in both places, but the Big Brother feeling seems stronger when the man staring at you is currently The Man. Atatürk worship, by contrast, feels more like the usual veneration of a “founding father” on steroids.

It’s also notable in this case that the current president, al-Bashar, succeeded his late father as president (for life) under rather unusual circumstances. The previous president had a couple of sons, but did not groom al-Bashar to take up the mantle of the office. Instead, al-Bashar’s brother—by most accounts a thug—had been a lock to take over for his father in due time. The untimely death of this thuggish brother put a serious wrinkle in the plans, however, so the leadership was faced with a choice between al-Bashar, then working as an optometrist in London, and a cousin at least as thuggish as the original choice. It was decided that the family name should be prioritized over thuggishness, so al-Bashar got the call and was elected president (effectively for life) by a 99% margin upon the death of his father.

These days, an official portrait of al-Bashar stares down at all and sundry from walls, car windows, and every other place you can think of. Looking at these pictures, I have gotten the distinct impression that the president looks quite unhappy in all of them, especially those in which he is dressed up in military uniforms. Whether gazing seriously from his dress uniform or sporting fatigues, aviator glasses, and a scruffy beard and looking through binoculars (at a border station?), President al-Bashar does not look like a happy camper when he is forced to play soldier for propaganda reasons.

This brings up the second major difference between Turkey and Syria: where Turkey is a heavily-militarized state with a big inferiority complex, Syria is a police state with an inferiority complex so severe as to dwarf Turkey’s. In Syria, there is a cop on every corner, beckoning drivers on through green lights and stopping them at red ones. Then there are the other policemen with different shoulder boards who man sentry booths and/or stand around watching the world go by; these are still not as scary as those who wear plain black fatigues and casually wave AK’s at the world. Still scarier are the cops you don’t see but know are out there, watching your every move.

So strict is Syrian security that there are significantly fewer weapons visible on the streets here. In Turkey, it seems like everyone from the official soldiers, jandarma, and police forces to the lowliest rent-a-cops at museums and such, is carrying—and often with a distressing disregard for basic weapons safety. In Syria, those who do carry—openly, anyway—are equally casual in their methods, but they are much fewer and further between than their Turkish counterparts. The power of the police state is such that there is simply no need to arm the traffic police with anything more than little orange-and-white-striped PVC batons to direct cars with. The real enforcers are the guys with no ID’s but pistols in their pants who will spring into action at the first sign of trouble, and everyone knows they’re out there.

As tourists, we knew we were being watched closely at all times, but the police presence was not terribly intrusive on our experience of Syria. This might be a country that lists about a dozen different versions of “911” on signs at major intersections so you can call not just “the police” but the appropriate kind of police to suit your needs (civil, traffic, military, etc.), but all those cops are more concerned with protecting Syria from us than protecting us from Syria. Much more impactful on our day-to-day experience were the social and religious mores of a much more conservative and less secular Islamic state than Turkey.

For the first time this semester, I really, truly felt like a foreigner in Syria. Turkey felt different, but still like a secular, Westward-looking, prospective EU member state. Syria, for reasons of language, culture, and religion, took me aback in ways that Turkey has not. For the first time, I was so aware of the gender differences in (public) society that it felt truly oppressive even to me. Many of the girls in the group found it nearly unbearable.

Whereas most Turkish mosques will ask that women dress respectfully and cover their heads when they visit, the Syrian mosques we visited had stations out front where they handed out drab full-body coverings to all non-Muslim women who wanted to enter, regardless of how much they had covered on their own. Once inside, too, things felt different, as various guides conflictingly demanded that our girls go to the women’s side because they were female and to the other side because they were not Muslim. Eventually, the non-Muslim side won out, but the experience on the way in had already cast a pall over the visit before it had really even begun.

One of the strangest parts of the gender divide was the apparent contradictions it produced. One night, walking home from supper, we saw a woman with a black shroud covering her entire face playing with something with her hands under her veil. After a few moments, we realized that she was texting, showing an odd juxtaposition of the 10^th century and the 21^st.

Everyone was also struck by the phenomenon of “indoor fashion” that has been produced by the covering culture. Almost every other store displayed X-rated lingerie of every variety imaginable in its windows, as well as skimpy, sequined, brightly-colored dresses and skirts. Outside most of these stores would be a cluster of fully-covered women, gesturing and apparently talking about the styles that appealed to them. More often than not, there would also be a few men inside, picking out some new private-sphere wear for their wives. Even the Muslim Barbie-doll equivalent we saw in the souq (bazaar) came dressed in her burqa but accompanied by what the packaging described as her “indoor fashion:” a shiny, sheer and skimpy little number that must mirror what most of the covered women we see on the streets wear inside their homes.

This dichotomous fashion sense seems to point to a vicious circle generated by the religio-social mores of the society. Women are told to cover because men are simply unable to control themselves in the presence of exposed female flesh, which both provides cover for the men to be almost nastily aggressive in their looks at our un-burqa’ed girls and forces the women to feel like they have to distinguish themselves beneath their burqas because they all look exactly the same on the outside. For married women who can no longer even make up their faces, the big fashion items are shoes and handbags to help differentiate themselves outwardly (imagine trying to pick your mother/sister/wife out of a crowd of fully-covered females) and lingerie to feel unique and sexy underneath their shrouding.

***

All of that said, Syria wasn’t all bad and I’m certainly glad I saw it. On a basic level, we’re all pretty strung out from all the time in buses and moving from hotel to hotel, but—knock wood—no one has gotten sick so far and the Syria trip has a reputation for decimating McGhee Center students each year. On a more involved level, we have seen a lot of interesting things that have both challenged us and helped to put our other experiences in perspective.

Though Turkey is 99% Muslim and is an undeniably a Muslim country, it really has not felt overwhelmingly “Other” so far, and this trip to Syria has really driven that home for me. Favorite Turkish catchphrases like “secularism” and “Turkish Islam” mean a lot more to me now that I’ve glimpsed some of the alternatives that Turkey is trying so hard to differentiate itself from. This became especially apparent when our program secretary, a Turkish woman, came to join us for the last few days of the trip and kept mentioning how happy she was to live in secular Turkey, where she is free to dress, act, and worship (or not) almost entirely as she pleases.

Syria also gave us an important perspective on the relative economic fortunes of Turkey and the Arab world. While both countries make fairly extravagant claims about all the developments they expect over the next five, ten, twenty-plus years, Turkey’s claims feel much more realistic in comparison to Syria’s. Our hotel might have been across the street from the imposing Four Seasons Damascus, but the group’s overwhelming impression of Syria was of an economically depressed, socially immobile country. Turkey feels like a nation of people that are individually and collectively pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to become a regional and even global economic and military power, but Syria has a very dead-end feel to it, like a small town that almost nobody gets out of.

While it’s obviously not excusable, the rage Arabs are often purported to feel towards America and the West becomes at least a little more understandable when you see how little their societies have to offer them. As one of my professors pointed out, once the oil money dries up, these states won’t even be able to provide the socialist benefits they now do to keep their citizens quiet. We saw how long the lines were at the state ration stations for rice and sugar; when those goods dry up, will the cult of personality surrounding the political leadership be strong enough to hold the country together?

Finally, there were some things in Syria that were just plain cool to see. We visited one of the three Aramaic-speaking villages left and got to visit the Convent of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, where we heard the Lord’s Prayer said in Aramaic, the language in which Christ first spoke it. It was also surreal to see statues of the Virgin and churches and other Christian sights labeled in Arabic, as everything in that little village was. Arabic might be the language of Syria, even its Christian parts, but it’s still a little mind-bending in a post-9/11 world to read and hear it in a Christian context when all that is Arab/Muslim and all that is Western/Christian are so often depicted as being diametrically at odds.

Also, as the land of the Crusades, Syria has some really exciting castles and citadels and other Crusades-era things to see. That was part of the reason for the study tour in the first place, but seeing the Krak des Chevaliers (where I gave a presentation on the Knights Hospitaller) is a very different experience than reading about the castle in a textbook. We also got to see the tomb of Saladin, whom we’ve read so much about and whose name still resonates strongly in the Arab world today.

***

And now we’re back in Alanya, complete with beards, scarves, and daggers galore. The weather is a bit cooler and cloudier than it was a week and a half ago, but the sun is peeking through and the sea looks inviting. It’s good to be home; suddenly Turkey and Turkish (the people and the language) seem even friendlier and more familiar than they did before. Everyone’s glad to be back, except for the looming reality of all the homework we’ve ignored for 10 days. Oh well, off to Cappadocia with my friends on Thursday…

On the Road Again

Goin' Places That I've Never Been

ALEPPO, Syria—It’s just before 10:30pm, and I’m bedding down in Syria for the first time. We’ve been on the road since 7am this past Friday morning; in that time we’ve made it from Alanya to Tarsus to Urfa to Hatay (Antioch) and, now, across the border and into Aleppo.

Wow, is it different. Sure, we’re a couple of days’ bus travel from home base in Alanya, but it feels like we’re a world away. In many ways, we are. We’ve left more-or-less-democratic, EU-accession-hopeful, secular Turkey for a piece of the honest-to-goodness Middle East. After trying so hard for so long to communicate in Turkish, we now have to leave that impulse behind and go back to relying on English and whatever shreds of French we might happen to know in order to communicate here. We got a 30-second lecture on important Arabic words, but the only one that seems to have collectively stuck is “shukran” (thank you). Life comes at you right to left and in Arabic script; fully-covered women (both traditionally burqa-ed and the so-called “Muhajibabes”) pass you in the street; pictures of the president stare down at you every 10 to 15 feet. Suddenly, Turkey and Turkish seem quite a bit more approachable/manageable than they first appeared.

It’s been a long journey. It started last Thursday night, when my roommate and I went out to a Turkish barber together to get matching haircuts for the Syria trip. It was an amazing experience: my first buzz cut and my first proper shave all in one wonderful package, finished off by a flaming ball of cotton torching off all my ear and nose hairs and a wonderful upper-body massage to send me on my way. Certainly got my 20 Liras’ worth out of that experience. I don’t have much hair left on top of my head (don’t worry, Mom, it wasn’t a full-fledged buzz: I still have some of my golden locks and they should be more or less normal by the time you visit in November), but there’s plenty on my face. Over the semi-objections of my girlfriend, my roommate and I have made a No-Shave Syria pact; I’m currently way ahead of him in the beard-growing standings, but still haven’t quite exceeded the acceptable-scruffiness zone in my girlfriend’s estimation, so it’s good both ways.

The ride across southeastern Turkey was exhausting but incredible. Tarsus, our first stop, was no great shakes as a city, but we did get to see a great ruined Roman village on our way there. Urfa, where we spent the next day and a half, was the consensus pick for the group’s favorite city since Istanbul. It’s a very different feel from Istanbul—everyone felt really foreign for the first time in a while and it’s a much more conservative and agriculturally-based place—but the people were unbelievably friendly even by Turkish standards and the city had a great energy to it that everyone enjoyed. There was also a lot to see: the still-impressive citadel, the cave in which Abraham was born, the fountain full of fish that would supposedly turn anyone who ate them blind, and a particularly happening bazaar.

The past two days were spent in Hatay/Antakya/Alexandretta/Antioch (nobody really knows the name of this city anymore, apparently). Hatay was a big let-down after the fun of Urfa. It was nice to spend two consecutive nights in the same bed for the first time in days, but the city itself seemed to rub everyone the wrong way. It was gritty, small, and unfriendly—even the citadel we’d gotten excited to see turned out to be a hilltop with a café and a few old-looking stones on top of it. We did get to see the ancient Church of St. Peter—essentially a worship space in a cave with a nice façade—which was interesting, but it was a long couple of days there nonetheless.

This morning, we got on our new tour bus and headed for the border. It was about a 45-minute drive out of Hatay to the border crossing point, and it became clearer and clearer as we drove that we were leaving the semi-Westernness that reaches even into southeastern Turkey for the undeniably Other of the Levant. The last few kilometers were essentially a no-man’s land, with barbed wire fences springing up from the semi-desert landscape, guard towers, and a constant though not overwhelming flow of military traffic towards and away from the border itself.

Once we reached the crossing point, we had to dismount from the bus, walk up to the customs officer, hand over our documents individually, and then walk across a few hundred meters of empty concrete parking lot to get to the Syrian side. Once across the open space, we walked into the Syrian immigration control station, where we sat on benches for what must have been about a half-hour while our tour guide and professors wrangled with our passports and group visa to get everyone over the border in one piece. Eventually, we got the word that we were good to go, and got back on the bus to head into Aleppo proper.

Our first stop outside of the border area was a part of the old Roman spice road that intersected the main road to Aleppo. We paused for a few minutes of picture-taking, then boarded the bus again to get into town and lunch, which we ate at a nice café right outside the walls of the famous Citadel of Aleppo. Sated, we got ourselves checked into the Baron Hotel, which has hosted everyone from Lawrence of Arabia to Agatha Christie to Atatürk. It’s lost a little of its edge since then, but it’s still fun to be staying where all those famous people did.

fter lunch, we got a quickie tour of the local bazaar, then got turned loose with what felt like oodles of cash (the Syrian pound is roughly equivalent to two U.S. cents, so we’re all walking around with wads of 500-pound notes in our pockets like it’s Monopoly money). I spent a productive afternoon racking up the brownie points by playing Brinks truck/bag man/attentive white man for my girlfriend and one of our other (girl) friends as they shopped the bazaar for scarves and little wallets and such. Thoroughly shopped out after a couple of hours, they took pity on me and we resurfaced from the covered bazaar to take a sunset walk around the citadel, which was glorious. Wanting to see the butchers’ and spice merchants’ section of the bazaar, we decided to go back in and see what we could see.

Turns out that closing time is sunset around here, so the sides (and heads) of lamb and chicken were coming down off the meat hooks, the steel curtains were rolling down over the storefronts, and everyone was rushing to get home. After tourist hours, the bazaar became a much more intimidating place, and we started looking for the exits ourselves. Thankfully, no less than four or five Syrian men decided to lighten the mood by complimenting me on my two wives. One of them even called me “Superman.” I might be the Man of Steele, but where I come from we keep it to one girl at a time.

Once we’d worked our way out of the bazaar, we emerged onto some kind of a surface road but were still amongst crowds of men and without a solid idea of how to get back to the hotel. After skedaddling up towards a better-lit portion of town and taking stock of our surroundings, the “wives” proved their worth by coming up with the bright idea to ask directions at the Aleppo Sheraton across the street. (This is why Superman always travels with at least two wives in tow: it doubles his chances of having a good idea.) The Sheraton’s bell captain came to the rescue, providing a map of the city with clear directions on it for us to get back in time for supper. We followed his directions, made a lucky guess on which left to take (street signs have not caught on yet in this part of the world), and made it back to our rooms safe and sound—and with a new appreciation for the power of sundown in an Arab town.

The "Interrupted Sea"

ALANYA, Turkey-- It's true: as I predicted with the quotation from The Earl of Louisiana in my pre-departure post, the Mediterranean does feel like another corner of the "interrupted sea" comprising the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Med itself. Having hit the first two corners of the triangle in March and June, respectively, I find myself once again in the land of bright sun; warm, salty, and clear water; red tile roofs; semi-tropical flora; and touristy faux-pirate culture. Fins up!

My apartment is on the second floor of the lojman, or student residence, about half a click downhill from the villa where we go to school. Our common room/porch face east over the sea just 300 meters or so straight down, which makes for a very impressive breakfast as the sun rises over the Taurus mountains that encircle the town which encircles the sea. The mountains are to our north and the sea to our south, with the lojman perched on a finger of land reaching out into the sea to form the western arm of the harbor outside my window. To the east is the harbor, the nightclubs, and "downtown;" to the west is the nicer beach that we spend as much of our days as possible swimming at. It's unbelievably impressive scenery: the mountains appear to come down from their highest point almost directly to the water's edge, leaving just room enough for the little crescent of the town along the beach before the sea stretches out over the horizon.

The man-made scenery isn't bad, either. Just a few hundred meters up the hill from the lojman is the first of two 13th-century castle walls that encircle the point, providing at various points the Byzantines, Seljuks, Ottomans, pirates, and Romans with a nearly-impregnable redoubt; these days, they mark the boundaries of a legally protected historical preservation area in which works of both man and nature may not be altered without a serious permitting process from the state. The villa is within the walls, so beginning on Monday I can say that I'm going to school in a house built by a Greek merchant in 1803 in a 13th-century castle. With five kilometers of walls to walk and endless nooks and crannies to explore, the castle alone should provide a semester's worth of entertainment--I'm sure it will take us almost that long to settle on the just-right spot to watch the sunset from, and maybe somewhat less time to find our favorite crenelation to lean up against to do a little reading between classes. Then again, I could always do my reading on a bench on the cliffside under a grape arbor at the villa. Oh, and the home-cooked lunches and dinners Monday through Friday are pretty fantastic. Welcome home, indeed.

***

By this point, I'm sure you're dying to know about Turkey itself. I'll try to draw an initial sketch for you now, but first, a disclosure: according to most Turks, I haven't seen Turkey yet. Istanbul is too European/cosmopolitan/international; it's definitely located in Turkey, but seeing Istanbul and claiming to know Turkey is like going to New York and thinking you've seen America. Ankara is a capital city: 1960's brutalism in long, low concrete buildings; lots of administration and not a lot of culture of its own. Alanya--at least the seaside crescent south of Ataturk Avenue--is a tourist town set up to separate Northern Europeans from as much of their money and their hopelessly inadequate white skin as possible. I'm not exactly sure where, when, or whether, I'm going to find "real" Turkey, but I'm already glad that we'll be going on field trips nearly every weekend to see other historically and culturally important locations: at least for the next few weeks, Alanya will remain in the throes of tourist season. It's fun as hell, don't get me wrong, but I'm at the McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, not for the study of free-spending, free-wheeling white people like myself in skimpier bathing attire. Luckily, things will calm down significantly after this weekend (the four-day celebration of the end of Ramadan) and keep trending that way until the town is almost literally ours by sometime in mid- to late October.

The two big issues in Turkey are the role of the state and the role of religion and how both operate in the lives of the individual, the state, the religious authorities, etc. Geopolitics, especially Turkey's ongoing EU accession bid, are certainly in the top echelon of issues, but the EU question is really a question about governance and religion anyway, so those two topics take the top spots.

Since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the state has been strictly secular. That said, it's also a 99-plus percent (Sunni) Muslim country, a fact that can't be ignored when considering how the country functions. In Turkish politics, there is said to exist a "deep state," a shadowy cabal of individuals, institutions, and interests that exists to predict the status quo. Nobody seems quite certain of who exactly makes up this "deep state," but it's the opponent that everybody loves to hate: both the opposition and the ruling party blame the "deep state" for what's wrong with Turkey, and individuals blame it for what's wrong with government in general. In that way, the concept of the "deep state" functions like the concept of "special interests" in American politics--everyone blames them, but they're always a bit ambiguous--but it's important to distinguish between the two in that the undercurrent of Turkish politics is referred to as a state interest while that of American politics is seen as an outside force.

Beyond the "deep state" idea, the government is always caught in tensions, some historical and some of its own making. The chief historical tension is that of the legacy of Ataturk himself: the man who took the name "Father Turk" remains a living force in the political and personal life of this country. His image--painting, photograph, statue, or unnerving jutting face relief--is everywhere; people go to his tomb in Ankara and write notes to him asking him to fix what they think is wrong with their country; both major political parties (and of course the 70 or so minor ones) compete for election largely on the basis of the correctness of their interpretations of Ataturk's legacy and will in current times.

If the state sounds fairly religious, the religious landscape is remarkably statist: as a secular but almost wholly Muslim country, all religious activity is state-controlled. Turks are very specific in distinguishing "Turkish Islam" from Islam in general, taking great care to present their version of their religion as a distinct entity, part of and yet apart from the umbrella of Islam. Several days ago, in Ankara, we were able to visit the minister of religious affairs himself, whose office is in charge of vetting, certifying, promoting, and keeping an eye on all of the religious figures--from imams and muezzins (those who sing the calls to prayer) to muftis--who are active in Turkey. Officially, the office of religious affairs cannot weigh in on policy and has a voice independent of the government; as many of my classmates pointed out, though, it's very hard to call an office independent that does not raise a single krush (cent) of its own and is thus entirely beholden to the government it is set up to advise. For a foreigner who still pricks up his ears at the five daily calls to prayer, it's a strange to consider the thought that each and every one of them is being issued by a government-inspected muezzin chanting through government-powered loudspeakers, etc. The Friday sermons are likewise delivered by government-salaried imams who, if they stray off message while an unidentified government investigator is in the congregation, are subject to official sanctions and/or dismissal. Your Turkish tax lira at work.

These two cardinal issues of state and religion suffuse the national debate here, and color the international debate about Turkey as well. Can the EU find room for a Muslim nation with somewhat questionable courts? Can Turkey find a way to "modernize"/"democratize"/etc. in such a way as to satisfy the conservative European voices of Sarkozy and Merkel, in particular? Is Turkey looking eastward as the conventional wisdom claimed in the wake of the Gaza flotilla debacle, or westward, as suggested by the very legitimate and ongoing EU talks and stated policy of resolving all regional disputes? Through classes, field trips, independent readings, and otherwise, those are likely to be the kinds of questions I will spend this semester wrestling with, and I'll try to bat them around in blog format when possible. This is going to have to do for now, but I hope I've shed some light on both my own situation and the bigger picture, framing the major issues to keep a finger on for the rest of the semester. Today was the first day of classes, so we've barely begun. Hold on tight!

Moving On

Sunset Cruising, Highway Dreaming

All good things must come to an end. And so closes the very good thing that we've had going here in the 2010 Culture Capital of Europe over the past week and a half, a.k.a. forever. Our group has done and seen more than I ever thought possible in that amount of time, and the last two days have imprinted themselves in my mind for what I'm sure will be a long time and may very well be forever. Like the rest of the group, I'm excited to see what the next four days in the capital city of Ankara will bring, as well as our move to our official home in Alanya after that, but none of us feels ready to leave Istanbul.

The past few days, it's been hitting me over and over again: how crazy is it that I can now navigate "my" little corner of Istanbul, whether by foot, taksi, Tramvay, or group bus.  Less than a year ago, this city wasn't even remotely on my radar screen; by tonight I'm the only person I know in my friend group outside of the other people on this trip who can lay claim to a corner of it.  While it's true that I primarily encounter the city as a tourist, living here for this time and with the combination of structured activity and unstructured exploration time (never walk the same street twice), I do feel that I've got a better handle on it than your average tour group sheep fresh off the cruise ship from wherever.  A big part of that is language training: with an unsightly but utilitarian patois of English, Turkish, German, and body language (in my roommate's case, swipe hand under armpit in pharmacy = "Where's the deodorant, please?"), I can order a meal, say please and thank you (but not "you're welcome"), and generally hack my way through a day here in a place, language, and culture that I might never have known if an email about this program hadn't piqued my interest in the right way at the right time last fall.  Full disclosure: I didn't even make it to the info session the email was advertising, but this is waaay better than any advertisement.

We've toured.  We've eaten.  We've clubbed.  We've Tramvay'd.  We've spoken horrendous Turkish and been laughed at.  We've nasally Americanized our way through an honest-to-goodness four-sentence, call-and-response "good morning" exchange.  We've waited for hours in the police station for residence permits.  We've seen our first couple of cases of GI distress (new cuisine washed down with drinkable yogurt does not a particularly solid waste product make).  We've done all that and more, but as I mentioned, I'm sure it will be the last 36 hours that I look back on the most when I think about my time in this city.

It started yesterday morning, when we spent two hours exploring a fascinating exhibition called "8,000 Years of Istanbul," in which we saw the history of the city evolve from the earliest known Paleolithic settlements to the modern day city that spans two continents and is angling to become the eastern anchor of the European Union.  On our first day of touring the city, our guide, Günhan, called it a "city of layers"—the modern over top of the Ottoman over the Roman over the Byzantine…—and nowhere was that made clearer than in seeing that exhibition that exhibited different archeological "slices" of the city, demonstrating the evolving technologies, religions, aesthetics, and art forms of its successive rulers.

After lunch, we went to the police station to pick up our residency permits, which was scheduled to take no more than a half-hour but turned out to be memorable for all the wrong reasons.  Ten of the permits were ready when we got there, but five of them weren't—guess who got to be one of the lucky few to spend two hours sitting on the floor in the waiting room of the über-efficient Turkish police?  At least I can now cross "nap sitting against wall in Aksaray waiting room" off my list of things to do here…

Then things got good.  At 7pm, we gathered again for the supper of a lifetime.  Me being me (i.e. casual to begin with and spartanly packed), I went with my usual Mellencamp look: white polo, jeans, Chaco flips.  The other guys were in about the same mode, but our 11 companions of the fairer sex decided to make it special.  I'll set the scene and leave the rest to your imagination: four guys, 11 American girls dressed for a night on the town, 10-minute walk down the sidewalks of Istanbul to meet the bus that would take us to dinner.  Massallah!

Dinner itself was, by unanimous group consensus, easily in the top three if not the best of our lives.  We met up with a few other professors who are friends of our group's professors, a handful of program alumni who have returned to Istanbul after graduation (!), and three other American students whom we'd met when we toured the Turkish Cultural foundation where they're interns.  The location was the Galata Restaurant and Bar in the happening Taksim district, and the four-hour event consisted of course after course of unbelievable Turkish food (stuffed grape leaves, eggplant in yogurt, spiced bulgur, grape leaf-wrapped sea bass entrée, etc., etc.), traditional fasıl music played by a live band, and plenty of dancing fuel in the form of Efes Pilsen (Turkey's Miller Genuine Draft) and rakı (the country's 90-proof social energy drink).

How fun was it?  Enough so that even your loyal scribe's notoriously stiff, white self was out there shake-shake-shakin' his booty with the rest of 'em.  Not for all four hours, but I did make two trips to the dance floor.  That was my first taste of the Euro-evening culture of long, loud meals; drink; and the special camaraderie of establishments in which twenty or so of our people can dance around everyone else's tables and another customer can get up and take a turn as lead singer for 20 minutes to the delight of everyone there.

Naturally, the Euro-evening didn't stop there: by 11:30, we'd been at dinner for four hours and the twentysomethings were getting restless.  Leaving the older folk behind, students, alum, and interns hit the streets of Taksim for some Euroclubbing.  Again, a whole new nightlife experience for me; I'd say it will take some getting used to, but by the time I wrap this thing up at the end of May I'll probably have a handle on it.  After two hours or so of club-hopping, one of the girls in the group started to feel badly and needed to go home.  Two hours of Euroclubbing was starting to feel like about enough for a first time anyway, so I grabbed a water from the bar for her and got us in a taksi back to the hotel.

After making sure that Melinda was safely back in her room, I headed up to the rooftop terrace in search of water.  I found water, but unexpectedly also found our Turkish program director, Kahraman.  "Kahraman-bey," I greeted him, and he told me to grab a beer out of the hotel fridge—his treat—and pull up a seat.  We talked life, the universe, and everything until just after 4am—about 45 minutes before the first call to prayer.

The next morning, I rolled out of bed at 0830 or so to answer nature's rather insistent call, but lay in bed till after 1000, just reading, thinking, and grinning.  Finally, I made it up to the rooftop again for breakfast.  As I ate with some of my friends (fellow early-riser/recoverers) we tried to buy tickets to a FIBA international basketball playoff game that night.  Sadly, they were sold out, but that left us absolutely free to plan our last day in Istanbul as we chose.  As you can imagine, we did good.

Once we'd mobilized around 1100, the first stop was the Museum of Islamic and Turkish Art off of the old Hippodrome area across from the Hagia Sophia.  That proved to be 10 TL and a couple of hours well-spent; the four of us who went were happy to see (and make up stories about) the ancient art of the region and get our daily dose of culture.  Hungry again, we crossed the main street to grab some pide (pita bread) sandwiches at a Turkish fast-food joint, where we met up with another member of the group, with whom we decided to take one last tramvay ride to parts previously unseen.  After a quick freshening-up at the hotel, we met once more in the lobby to begin our adventure.

The tramvay trip itself was actually pretty uneventful; even the station where we got off didn't seem to have that much new to offer us after we'd walked about 20 minutes up the hill further into the city.  Unimpressed, we headed back towards the tramvay to grab some Mado ice cream cones (best in town), eventually deciding to walk back to the hotel rather than take another crowded tramvay ride and wind up with too much time to kill.  That decision produced a hour-long promenade of what appeared to be Istanbul's Little Bulgaristan; though we were only a block or three south of the main (tramvay) road, we got to see a completely different and not even necessarily Turkish-speaking face of the city than we'd seen before.

Back at the hotel, we refilled water bottles and emptied bladders once more, then headed out to the free exhibition of 1001 İcat (ee-JAHT; inventions) two blocks away.  We spent about an hour exploring a fascinating if somewhat politically slanted exhibit of all the great discoveries and advances in science, technology, and knowledge made in the Muslim world while Europe was in the depths of the Dark Ages.  (I'm not trying to take away from the validity or importance of these icats, but the editorial tone of the British-sponsored exhibition felt a little haughty.)

Finally, we did the best thing of all, a sunset cruise of the Bosporus on a ludicrously small and unstable boat.  We'd gone to the docks hoping to take a sunset cruise from the same company that we'd sailed with on our third day in town (the subject of my last entry), but we hadn't read the fine print that said it ended on 9 August.  Whoops!  Turning around, we saw the little boat rolling wildly alongside the docks with a loudspeaker blaring "Bosporus!  Bosporus!  Komm komm komm komm!"  Hey, it was only 10 TL (half what we'd expected) and it was right there, so what the hell?  We piled on, slipping and sliding across the pitching upper deck and falling into place along the rails, glad we'd decided to dine after cruising.  Luckily, we seemed to gain a little more equilibrium once we'd set out from the dock, and we wound up spending an enchanting hour on the water, watching the sun set over the Sultanahmet and Taksim neighborhoods behind us, the moon and stars come out in front of us, and the changing-colored lights of the "Bridge to Asia" come on right after we'd sailed under it and began turning around.

By 8:30 or so, we were docked back on the waterfront from which we'd left, happy and hungry once again.  Wanting a memorable change of pace, we headed to a fish restaurant under the bridge from the Golden Horn area to the old Genoese district where we were promised a 10 percent discount and free çay and coffee after dinner when the host pegged us as the "student peoples" we were.  Sure enough, they brought the show-and-tell platter of fish offerings to the table, which produced some interesting reactions among the more squeamish/less seafood-oriented among us.  I went for the grilled calamari and Efes, which was quite good, but one of the other guys opted for a whole snapper so we got to do another dissection dinner.

By 10pm or so, it was time to head back: Kahraman had texted us all that afternoon to tell us that we needed to be packed, fed, and in the lobby with our luggage by 0730 the next morning.  Unsurprisingly, we all had a fair amount of packing to do, so we took one last stroll up the hill to the hotel to take care of business.  Not wanting to break the spell just yet, we all headed up to the rooftop once more to play a little backgammon and enjoy our spectacular view of the city at night once more, but by 11 or so the four hours of sleep we were all operating on finally caught up to us and we drifted downstairs in ones and twos to pack up, brush our teeth, and try to grab a little sleep before our early wake-up call.

***

And now we're on the road to Ankara, with Europe three hours behind us and going deeper into Asia at 100 km/h.  (Turks don't make such a big deal out of the continental thing, but it's still a novelty for most of us so I thought I'd mention it.)  We've traded the sprawl of the city for the rolling hills and pastoral Spaghetti Western landscapes of Anatolia, rolling down the highway on our bus packed to the gills with sleeping students and our luggage past fields and cows and trucks.  We've just stopped at a Turkish rest station for Sunday brunch (oh, wow!) and the ever-popular dash to the WC.

It turns out that the stop for food/use the bathroom experience is remarkably similar to the one I'm used to, but there are some differences: we're in the culinary capital of Turkey right now so we got some of the best food around even at the side of the highway—a big upgrade over BK and Starbucks, let me tell you—and tuvaletler are the usual hole-the-ground/pail-on-the-side jobs we're starting to accustom ourselves to over here.  Thanks to NOLS, I can assume the position and take care of business with aplomb—and the coping strategies necessary to keep my pants out of the line of fire—but woe betide he who forgets his wet wipes: there normally isn't even a Hurriyet or Sears, Roebuck within reach.  (Something to practice if you plan to visit.)

On the road again; we should be in Ankara in about two hours.  The next four days will be full of the usual capital city things: a visit to Atatürk's tomb this afternoon, visits to government officials and ambassadors in the coming days, etc.  The New York City/Washington, D.C. comparison is apt here between Istanbul and Ankara, but apparently the difference is even starker—perhaps on the order of NYC-Albany, with a huge, vibrant port city vs. an administrative inland city.  Whereas D.C. is a big-enough city with a personality and fairly obvious divisions amongst its neighborhoods and activities, Ankara is supposedly quite small and administrative.  It's just been rated the most livable city in Turkey, and we're told that we should be able to navigate it comfortably after an afternoon of exploration.

All in due time; for now, the bus ride backgammon tournament is starting up so it's time to close down the computer and participate.  One of these days I'll settle down and start sharing some pictures and second-level insights instead of observations out the window.  In the meantime, it's a wonderful thing to be among friends on a bus, laughing and napping and talking and dreaming: when you're 20 and life stretches out ahead of you like the highway under our wheels, over the horizon and into the unknown, it's a good time to plan our roaring twenties of backpacking trips across Europe, sails around the globe, and being the generation that finally changes the world.  What can we do but smile and dream and say evet (yes) to everything?

Welcome to Istanbul

ISTANBUL, 27 August 2010—I think I'm living in a movie.  Writing this, I'm sitting on the roof of the Hotel Noah's Ark in the Sultanahmet neighborhood of Isatanbul; to my left (north) I can see the Bosporus Straits, spanned by what our group has taken to calling the "Bridge to Asia" (yes, Asia is indeed visible past the bridge and beyond the dome of the Hagia Sophia mosque at my 10 o'clock).  Immediately surrounding me are the distinctive reddish terra cotta rooftops so ubiquitous in Mediterranean lands; just visible at about my 1:30 are the minarets of the enormous Blue Mosque.  Of course, I'm sipping a Turkish tea from one of the distinctive glasses the drink is served in, about four inches high with a rounded base, narrow waist, and flaring top.

For the first time in my life, today I have dined on two continents: breakfast on this very rooftop this morning, lunch on the Asian side of the straits as part of our Bosporus cruise, and supper somewhere in this neighborhood back on the European side.  It's so surreal as to be almost impossible to keep track of.

***

So that was supper.  We ended up going out to the same place that we went to last night, where we all queue up inside the restaurant, point at what we'd like to eat, and then head outside to the table, followed by the waiter carrying the plate of food we've just selected.  The food is delicious, but the custom is not to combine hot and cold foods on the same plate, which is a bit of a pain since I'd often like to sample some of each.  After the meal itself was over, we got to sample our first taste of Turkish baklava as well as several packages of dates.

Back to the Bosporus: we started out of the hotel at 0930, walking down to the waterfront to board a ferry tour of the straits.  It took close to two hours to travel the twenty or so miles from the dockside to the end of the line just a few kilometers from the mouth of the Black Sea, where long lines of oil tankers were visible all the way out to the horizon, stacking up at the mouth of the straits in anticipation of the afternoon reversal of traffic from north to south.  (Because the straits are a half-mile wide at their narrowest point and only three times that at their widest, commercial traffic travels from south to north in the mornings and heads back down towards the Mediterranean in the afternoons.)

At the far end of the cruise, we disembarked at the site of an ancient Ottoman castle, one of many twin castles that was built by the various ancient empires who desired to control the most strategically and commercially vital shipping route in the Mediterranean world.  As the boat pulled up to the dock, we were welcomed by the shouts of waving shopkeepers, who all crowd the waterfront rails of their restaurants and try to put on the best show to attract boat tourists to lunch at their establishments.  After a quick bathroom break, we headed up the hill to view the castle, which had an expectedly spectacular view of the straits to both sides.  Once the history had been explained and the pictures taken, it was back down the hill to our "official" welcome lunch at one of the dockside restaurants we'd seen earlier.  (Its owner had made the best overture by having his waiters stand along the rail waving the flags of Turkey and most common tourist nationalities, but we had made reservations previously.)

Lunch consisted of salad, fried mussels, Efes (the local brew, tasting suspiciously like Miller but for half the price), and whole grilled fish.  Unlike in Belize, I ate the eyes!  Afterwards, we bought cones of Turkish ice cream (gelato-esque) and wandered off to spend our free hour and a half or so before departure exploring the little port town.  We wandered out of the restaurant in a big group but quickly split off, with most of the group headed back up the streets we'd taken to hike up to the castle earlier.  For my friend Kari and I, that was just too tame: we followed Kari's rule to never retrace our steps in any particular location.

And off we went, past the Turkish navy installation at the end of the row of restaurants, up the hill past the otopark to a little playground, which proved too irresistible to pass up.  After running up one slide, across the rope bridge and down the other slide, we took on the other half of the playground, which apparently consisted of odd-looking, light blue equipment.  It turned out to be an exercise facility, so we did our leg extensions, pull-downs, and crunches before finding the torture device at the end of the line.  I recognized the contraption for what it was, an inversion table, and promptly hooked my feet in, grabbed the sides, and flipped myself backwards until I was hanging upside down.  Kari got a couple of phenomenal pictures, but demurred on actually trying the miracle of inversion for herself once I was through with it.

At the top of the hill past the castle, we were passed by the loudspeaker-blaring "Vote yes on the referendum!" van, whose occupants insisted we take a couple of "Evet!" ("Yes!") pamphlets of our own.  Doubting very much that we'd find ourselves voting either evet or hayir on the referendum (the exact nature of which neither of us was clear on in the first place), we continued on up the hill, until we both stopped at the same thought: This isn't an island, is it.  No indeed—there might have been water on both sides of us, but the next time we'd see the ocean if we continued east would be the Sea of Japan, an entire continent away.

With only twenty minutes to go before boat time, we decided to leave the pan-Asian challenge for another day, opting instead to stroll down a lovely cobbled street back to the harbor, eventually sliding right into the line of fellow students boarding the boat without even breaking stride.  Waving goodbye to Asia, we set sail for Europe once more, alighting an hour or so later (the current's pretty strong) back at the port we'd started from that morning.  We had just enough time to squeeze in another quick tour of the Grand Bazaar on our way back up to the hotel before supper.

After we'd eaten, we took a walk up to one of the big mosques a few blocks away to see the official Ramadan celebration of Istanbul.  It was great fun, with music, dancing, hawking, colored lights changing the façade of the University of Istanbul every few moments, and spotlights dancing across the sky.  We stayed for an hour or so, watching a band perform, taking silly pictures, and laughing our heads off.  Finally, we walked back to the hotel in order to get some sleep before having to get going at 0830 tomorrow for a full day of touring famous sites, including the Blue Mosque and Top Kapi.

So now it is time to sleep, even as friends and family on the East coast are just heading out for coffee to fight off the midafternoon case of the drowsies.  Here in the 2010 culture capital of Europe, the full moon is high over the Hagia Sophia, the "Bridge to Asia" is doing its changing-color light show, my fellow guests (not groupies) are paying their bar tab, and I'm off to bed.  It already feels like we've been here for forever, and there's so much to see and do.  I can already navigate the little corner of Sultanahmet around from the bazaar to the waterfront and out to the Hagia Sophia; by Kari's logic that means it's time to branch out further tomorrow.

Young Turks

Young Hearts, Be Free Tonight

As my parents--and Rod Stewart--remind me, time is on my side. At 9:40pm, Eastern Daylight Time, I'll push back from the gate at Boston's Logan International Airport and jump off into the exciting and challenging world of international travel with both feet. Aside from a couple of weeks in Vancouver on family vacation several years ago and the week I spent on a service project in Belize at the beginning of this summer, this will mark my first serious foray into the exciting and challenging world of international travel. And I'll be jumping in with both feet, waking up to change planes in Zurich and ultimately touching down in Istanbul, which I strongly suspect will be Exotic with a capital "E" after 20 years in the U. S. of A., whose shores I'm not scheduled to see again until May 31, 2011.

Yes, that's a long time to contemplate right now, but I'm confident that it's going to be a fantastic, truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. And it's time to move on: though it's strange to think I'm not headed back to Washington in a week or two, I can tell that I'm getting ready to move on and get back to school and Georgetown friends new and old. I've put in a long, challenging, and rewarding summer of landscaping by day and waiting tables by night to help make this trip a reality; sweat equity achieved, I'm ready to put it towards an unbelievable experience. Besides, not that I haven't been any fun at all this summer, but now that the first hints of fall are in the air, the light's getting longer and the days shorter, I'm ready to hit the Turquoise Coast. Sure, I'll have homework to do, but somehow doing my reading on a Mediterranean beach just doesn't sound like all that bad of a deal.

In keeping with the musically-inspired theme of this first post, I see this trip as my time to keep "Movin' ahead so life won't pass me by," as Jim Croce sings in "I Got a Name." In many ways, it's the culmination of so much of my experience over the last few years: going to college, the trials of freshman year, the joys of sophomore year, the outdoor and life lessons of NOLS, and most recently a week in Belize this June. In many ways, I knew I was ready for this on spring break. After finally making up my mind about where I wanted to take my year abroad and getting my applications in, I remember very distinctly when it hit me: having downed a cup of cafe au lait and the traditional beignets at Cafe du Monde, I walked out into the New Orleans sunlight with my fellow volunteers, looked around at the city--arguably America's most "foreign"--and thinking, This is it. I like this traveling thing! NOLA is kinda like a little slice of Europe on the Gulf of Mexico; I can't wait to see the real deal next year!

Incidentally, that's a very good omen, according to the epigraph to the classic novel of New Orleans, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. He quotes A. J. Liebling's The Earl of Lousiana thus:

" 'You're right on that. We're Mediterranean. I've never been to Greece or Italy, but I'm sure I'd be at home there as soon as I landed.'

"He would, too, I thought. New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York, although all seaports resemble one another more than they can resemble any city in the interior. Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico form a homogeneous, though interrupted, sea."

I might have been raised on the North Atlantic, but this year I've visited the Gulf in March, the Caribbean in June, and now the Mediterranean in August/September. Though I'm visiting the different parts of this "homogeneous, though interrupted, sea" in the reverse order of how Liebling listed them, I fell in love with and felt very much at home in the first two. The first impression, of the Gulf, was naturally the strongest, and it was in New Orleans, as I mentioned, that I first felt the exhilarating rush of what I suppose might be that unique "Hellenistic" culture that unites the interrupted sea. My trip to Belize and the Caribbean taught me about traveling and living in the developing world, and what it's like to be unmistakably an outsider. Alanya, though perhaps not Hellenistic, will extrapolate on both of these experiences, as I land on the actual Mediterranean as an unmistakable outsider, this time without the benefit of sharing the same religious and linguistic background as the people I'm living amongst, and I'll be there for much longer. But I could have happily stayed longer on the Gulf or the Caribbean, so I'm hopeful that "I'll be at home there as soon as I land" in Alanya. I've swum in the Gulf and snorkeled in the Caribbean; once I dive into the Mediterranean, I hope to feel myself at home once again in the interrupted sea I've come to love so much this year.

So this is it. Showtime!, as I like to call it. I've got a ticket from Boston to Istanbul and a ticket from Shannon to Boston, but my in-between itinerary is TBD. There are sights to see, people to meet, pictures to take, leases to sign, languages to learn, an even greater measure of independence to experience, mistakes to be made, and confidence to gain. (I'm sure I missed a thing or two.) There will also be pictures and blogs to post in order to help you keep track of me and share in the experience from wherever you might be.

I'll wrap this first post up with one more song, this one by Brendan James, called "All I Can See." I've been finding a lot of meaning in it lately as I've been mentally and physically preparing for this trip; you can see it here, and I'd highly recommend giving this a couple of listens as you think about the journey I'm about to undertake and/or as you face the journeys of your own life. Without giving it all away, here's the second to last stanza, the mini-theme song of my trip:

Those who journey can easily understand, the more they see the more they'll learn, the more that they will be. So this I swear to you, and this I swear to me, I'll never rest till I've seen all I can see. No, I'll never rest till I've seen all I can see.

I won't see everything this time around, but I'm determined to do and see as much as possible in the next nine months or so. By the end of next May, I'm sure I'll be equally determined to return as many times as I am able over the course of the rest of my life to keep seeing a bit more each time. Now it's off to Istanbul, do not pass "Go," do not collect $200. Take us there, Rod:

We got just one shot of life, let's take it while we're still not afraid....
Young hearts gotta run free, be free, live free.
Time is on, time is on your side.
Time, time, time, time is on your side, is on your side, is on your side, is on your side.
Young hearts, be free tonight.
Tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight...