Condensing two weeks into on post

Since I last wrote I’ve spent most of the last two weeks trying to put together the necessary paperwork for work. Still have one last thing – a tax number – to collect.

I might get a job on the weekends doing TOEFL teaching. Burak set it up. We’ll see.

This weekend – the Bayram holiday weekend – has been eventful. My roommate Ozgur spent most of the last five days at his cousins; he’s back now but out at his brother’s. While at home I’ve been bored, depressed, homesick, nostalgic – the usual. But Thursday evening I went out with a coworker, Rachel, and her gf. Invited Lizette. Met a group of expats mixed with locals at a bar in Istanbul. Went bar hoping with them. Kareoke – sang white wedding. Raki – like licourace (sp?) in vodka. Bad hangover. Met a girl named Laura from the states – Georgia to be exact. She’s got this huge mess of curly hair, the color of which I can quite place – brown but somehow with a light almost reddish tint – and gorgeous amber colored eyes. She’s my age, but been travelling Europe and Asia for quite some time now. First as a nanny in Amsterdam, then hitchhiking around everywhere. She has some amazing stories. On Friday we visited the Princes’ Islands together. The boat ride was calming, the weather was beautiful. We walked around one of the Islands and found this beautiful secluded cliff, where we sat out and waited for the sun to set. Everything was so vibrant, even the algae was the most vibrant green I’ve ever seen. The sunlight here is remarkable, the way it pulls the color out of things. I think the island was mostly naval buildings and barracks. We discovered a little hidden resort house, empty for the season except for a single man walking his dogs. We ate dinner out by the seafront – overpriced. We spend the boat ride home talking about children and Turkish culture. They really baby kids here – up through late adolescents. Children have a very very close connection with their mothers. They are a very touchy people – boys can be seen on the busses with their arms against each other, heads on shoulders. There are always more men out on the street than women. That kind of thing. It was a great, peaceful day – I really needed it after all this stress.

Laura brought up a great point about language and personality. We’ve both noticed that with non-English speaker’s we’re never sure If we’re being understoond. Laura has a dry sense of humor – very sarcastic – and joked (only partially) that she was always already unsure that English speaker’s understood her, let alone people for whom it’s a second language. She said she’d been kind of feeling like she lost her personality around them… like the more she watered down her language the less she felt like herself. I agree. I’ve been feeling the same way… especially when it comes to sarcasm and humor – my adoration of bad puns and especially innuendo is kind of lost on most of the Turks, even the better English speakers like Burak… although sometimes they surprise me. But oftentimes I think that the linguistic alienation really does come along with a measure of loss of personhood, especially personality. Personality must be pretty intimately tied in with our particular relation to our language. Very interesting insight from Laura.

Today I woke up depressed. Tried to sleep for another two hours. Got up at eleven, determined to make something of the day. Took The Red Badge of Courage – borrowed it from Burak for Ozgur to read, for practice with his English – to the seaside to read. It was warm, the sun was blindingly bright, The sky was a crisp blude, and the sea was unusually unruly. Waves smacked up all along the seaside, sending foam and spray galloping against the concrete. The sound was amazing, like the ocean back in Southern California. I remember one little girl running back and forth, trying to outrun the spray; her dad picked her up and pretended to threaten to feed her to the sea.

The rest of the day has been pretty boring and depressing. I wanted to go out and write but find myself a little too worn out to deal with the language barrier a second time today. I want a guitar, bad. I’m worried about money, again.

Money and language continue to feel intimately connected. No wonder lit theorists love Marx. I feel like they both bestow a kind of agency, a way of buying in, access to the social world.

Travel to Downtown

Bus - metro - tram to Downtown Istanbul today took 2 hours each way. Basiktas, Taksim.

Istanbul is amazing. I've never FELT history before I saw the wall to the old city today... amazing. The U.S. is so young... our cities dont retain anything of their history. IStanbul, on the other hand, IS all historic. It's amazing and huge and beautiful... overwhelmingly so.

Again, I'm so tired I can hardly write. Had a great day, made two new friends who worked at a coffee shop. One of the them, Yunus, offered to help me with my search. He's an expatriate as well, from Morocco. Such a nice guy. Apparently, Morocco and Turkey are allies, and so he came here because he doesn't need a Visa. He wanted to go to an English speaking country, but they turned him down for a visa because he has no credentials... he has not finished high school. I feel bad for him... we live in a time where i feel like all this administrative tape is stupid. But honestly Istanbul is an amazing city and he seems to like it. The girl working with him (Beresh????) lives in Buyukcecmece. She was also very nice. She told me she hated Americans because of our government. But she likes Obama. I told her we also like Obama and hate our government (generally), so we agreed.

The room today was too small, but I like each of the two boys living there. It think it will make for an adequate backup.

Had tea tonight on the bay of Buyukcecmece with Burak, his wife and a friend of his. It was very pleasant. Damn my bad memory; i wish i could remember names better! And languages. =P I will have to work on that while I'm here.

Burak's friend told me a story. He was studying in Oxford and had been there for 6 months when turkish soldiers came to his door (in Oxford!) to take him to the army. He'd been drafted. He was there for 6 months and said it was hell. He said he feared the officers because they can do anything to you. He's training to be a CPA, a real bright guy with a great future and so much promise, just snatched up like that. Imagine! I'm so glad we have a volunteer military in the states... and that our military is very progressive.

Hopefully I will find somewhere nice to live.

One of these days when I'm not incoherently tired I will go back through and rewrite these posts. I feel like my half-conscious rants don't do justice to this wonderful place.

First Day at Work

Briefly, these things went wrong:

Three hours of sleep last night.

Confusion over the shuttle schedule led to a 25 YTL cab ride to the school.

The personnel manager was not in and therefore I will not get to sign my contract or get my plane ticket reimbursed until Monday.

These things went right:

One doting student!

One super cutie (alas, another student) with a crush on me!

MANY AWESOME NEW FRIENDS!

Musings:

The person who made the biggest impact on me today was my new friend and colleague Burak. Burak is 36 with the humor and spirit of someone half that age. He has a wonderful wife-a lawyer! An English lit major (like me!) He joked he couldn't ever divorce her, lol. A reformed party-boy. He not only gave me a ride back to the hotel room today, but he helped me find and purchase a cell phone!

Perhaps the thing that struck me most about Burak is his attitude towards God. He spoke sincerely of his love for religious studies. In the states, religion is mostly rhetoric; people who speak about it never fail to seem like mere ideologues to me. Burak, on the other hand, thanked God several times today without sounding the least bit preachy. The first for it being Friday (though he has to work during the weekend) and another because today was the day he payed off his car loan. What a simple and sincere thing to thank God for! He said: "thank God, thank you thank you thank you, God. Today is the day I am loan free." He does not say cliche things; he is too sincere for such things. I have rarely in my life met someone with such religious convictions that I respect so much (the convictions as well as the person, that is).

Another thing today; i went to a little corner restuarant and ordered doner (chicken). The woman at the counter and I failed to communicate... i was so nervous I almost simply walked out. But her husband came down and spoke just enough english for everything to go right! We both laughed at ourselves while he took my order. When I left, she helped me pronounce alti (altuh), which means six, which was the amount of money my food costs. She asked me if I spoke Turkish, I told her was trying to learn... which I think she understood, because she told her husband "(inaudible) Turkce" gesturing at me.

I think there are two sides to this country. I think on one hand, this is perhaps what Adorno would have called an "administered society." The government seems to have its hand in everything, from religious restrictions right down to cell phones! (Apparently, they have been canceling service over the past few days to anyone without residency status... which I will have soon) Also, the education process is all state run... tests basically decide your future here. Additionally, the rapid industrialization of the suburbs has created a vast amount of urban sprawl and overpopulation. It is apparently to the point that people have stopped migrating from Anatolia altogether.

On the other hand, these people themselves are amazingly generous and hospitable. They are always pleasant and helpful. They are folkish, almost; not simple, but very very much a unique kind of people.

Okay, If you can't tell by the poorly written post, I am ridiculously tired. Now, for some sleep and another big day tomorrow as i head towards downtown!

Buyukcekmece

Spelt wrong.

A few quick impressions:

This city is crowded with traffic during the day. Turkish drivers have to be the most aggressive ever met. The buildings are all very tall, as if the builders where in competition.

At night, this little city is absolutely beautiful. The streets are thin and cobbled, there's a beautiful park with a cobbled stone wood bridge, and the bay sparkles with the glowing lights of the lamp posts.

The Turks are all very nice, but I still feel like an outsider. But I no longer feel afraid. Maybe a bit overwhelmed, but starting to understand what Giscombe said about never being so conscious as when you're in a new place.

The hotel is less than impressive, but functional.

I'm tired, and I have to be up at 6 am tomorrow to catch the bus for my first day at the University.

Thoughts on Departure

I'm sitting staring at a gray and white wall in the Airport terminal at the NKY/Cincinnati airport, realizing - not for the first time - that this is probably the most difficult thing I've ever tried to undertake. I am jittery, a bit distant; I feel almost outside of myself. I've felt this way a few times before in my life - moving from Kentucky to San Diego, from San Diego to the Bay area - but nothing compares to this feeling. On the one hand I feel utterly empty, as if I am just going through the obvious motions; on the other hand, the minute I stop to reflect on what's happening I feel utterly paralyzed by the abyss of possibilities unfolding before me, as if there's this huge weight pulling me down.

I have decided that what makes this adventure so ponderous is not that I will be leaving the country, crossing an ocean, and arriving on a whole other and utterly unfamiliar geographical landmass, in a completely new city. After all, I've done that several times in my life. In fact, I have come to realize that none of that concerns me at all. Instead, the scariest thing is not that I will be stranded in a whole other country, but rather that I will be awash in a completely unfamiliar language. If anything, my entire life, the vast amount of social mobility, cultural capital and downright respect I have been able to command from almost everyone I've ever met have all been completely contingent upon my faculty with my native language. Language, I am coming to realize, constitutes a good amount of one's agency; I'm afraid that without English to fall back on, I won't know what to do with myself, how to function. Just think about it for a moment. From anywhere in this country you can get up and move to any other with relative ease, all by virtue of its shared language. Worlds as vastly different as my rural hometown in Kentucky to New York City are all equally accessible because they are really not separate worlds at all; the same language permeates them both.

But now I am throwing myself up against a wall, as it where. My knowledge of Turkish does not extend beyond very few simple expressions; what ultimately separates me from the place I will be living for the next year is not the vast distance, the mounds of earth and sea that lies between here and there, but a world composed almost completely of the Turkish language itself. I think this realization, itself rather plain, is more profound than one first thinks.

Airports are strange places. They are so utterly transient that they really don't belong to anywhere at all. In fact, I have come to believe that airports are essentially a kind of nowhere. I have a layover in DC, then I hop a plane to Vienna, where I will have about one hour to get my boarding pass to Istanbul and make sure that my bags have been transferred. In Vienna! But not really; I imagine the airport will be must like all other airports, people sitting alone, wondering around terminals, completely isolated from one another though they will for a temporary time be confined to the same small place rocketing around the globe. Again, rather obvious, but when one really stops to think it's all rather crazy to say the least. I'll be in Vienna without ever really being there at all.

Okay, enough ranting for now. My nerves have stirred a rebellion in my digestive system, and I might just have to go throw up.