Government Bureaucracy? Solved with Dancing!

This past weekend was the mid-year meeting for all Fulbright ETA's in Turkey. The Fulbright Commission paid for the Ankara Hilton this time - BOO YEAH. They had a pillow menu. The hot tub wasn't that hot, but I was definitely there for a long time because where else am I going to find a hot tub in Turkey? In comparison, the last meeting we had in Ankara was in an orgetmenevi, or teacher's house. Three plus out of the fifty Fulbrighters got food poisoning, and the railing on my balcony was broken. I could've died.


On Friday, we went up one by one to a stand and microphone and gave a summary of our individual situations. By the second presentation, I realized I am ridiculously lucky to be in Van. Most everyone had some outrageous complaint: my boss doesn't talk to me, my peers think I'm not a real teacher, I'm not getting paid, Cass stares at me when he thinks I'm not looking (I overheard the last one at breakfast). Almost every single girl, even the ones who stated that they loved their situation, said men think they are prostitutes, and will on occasion shout that out in the street.

I get paid regularly. I love my department head and my peers. I have yet to be called a gigolo. Plus, no one else lives in a city with its own animal. Van cat outside my window - high five! Or run away because of my sudden movement.

It's obvious that Fulbright regrets these difficulties - I mean, they gave us each 300 lira in incidentals (of which I spent 50...on keychains). It remains to be seen how well the problems will be fixed by the time we leave.

However, Saturday was a free day and I'll just come out and say it - the best day I've had in Turkey, hands down. After switching hotels (no one could afford the Hilton if the government wasn't paying for it), a few friends and I played Dungeons and Dragons for seven hours. I can't say much now, because it deserves its own post, but it is definitely the greatest thing I've ever done, right behind regularly serving the homeless at the soup kitchen where I made BANK. Per hour of work, I don't think I've ever made more.

Saturday night, everyone wanted to go out. In our respective villages, no one drinks much because of the stigma, so when Fulbrighters get together, people drink a lot (not me, Mom). On Friday, at the pinnacle of drinking time, I had a guy offer me a job in the fall at a camp in California; at breakfast on Saturday he not only couldn't remember it, but admitted that he had no authority to hire anyone. Anyway, on Saturday, I did not want to go out, but I am a follower so there was really no choice. As it turned out, the bar we went to had a dance floor. CHA-CHING.

I realized after a few hours of dancing that people in Fulbright don't really know the actual versions of each other. Though no one tries to hide themselves, inevitably what we get is the Turkish version of each other. No one knew I liked to dance.

I've often dreamed about being able to play the piano well but never doing so. That way, after weeks or months of knowing someone, I could sit down at a piano and make people cry. Then all the girls would be like, "Cass, I totally see you for the stud muffin you are, underneath your big eyebrows." However, when I started dancing, all the girls would say is, "You're crazy," or "Your shirt is on inside out."

During special events at Camp War Eagle, I'll often be given a corner where I dance for two hours without stopping. The kids will come over in twos and threes and watch, amazed, as someone with the level of coordination I have tries to scissor kick. Beyond that, I haven't danced for fun as I did Saturday since college. And when my friends said, "I didn't know you liked to dance," all I wanted was to confess  my love for it. About how I was runner-up two years in a row for my fraternity's "Best Dancer Who Is Not Named Simoni Kigweba Award."

We named the award after him...sort of.

Or how my voice cracked while dancing in front of an audience of thousands of my peers. Listen how they laugh at 7:54. However, they seem impressed with my high kicks around the 3:15 mark.

Regardless, I got to relive my glory days and I only hit one Turk it the head with an elbow. Or he's the only one who complained. All in all, great weekend.

I'll Be There In Two Months

To celebrate Thanksgiving, a good majority of the fifty Fulbrighters in Turkey are gathering in a couple of cities and having dinner. They even have actual turkey birds, which took quite an effort to track down. I was excited about attending one of these dinners until I learned that Van is at the end of the universe and in order to get from the end of the universe to the Black Sea or western Anatolia you must pay hundreds of lira. That's why there are so many people in Van. They can't afford to leave.

However, one of my students, Ahmed, invited me over for dinner. He had no idea it was Thanksgiving, and I had no idea what his name was (I actually don't know many of my students names, but people here always call me Mark, after the other American in Van. Some people call me Cats).

Ahmed is in his late sixties, and so is his wife. The first thirty minutes of my visit were set aside for photo albums. Ahmed showed me his three daughters, as well as his three grandchildren (triplets of his eldest daughter and her Spanish husband). It was odd to see him in that context. In class, I only knew him as the older opinionated guy who would not shut up, who when I tried to cut him off would speak louder to finish a point. But I found out that he was not only a grandfather, but a cuddly old man. From pictures. I found that out through pictures.

Ahmed is Kurdish, like 90% of the people in Van, and his wife served us a traditional Kurdish meal until the third time I said I was full. She didn't eat - she hovered, until one of the two plates were empty, and then laid down more meat.

You can't just have dinner here. They won't let you leave before you have tea, and tea usually takes an hour or two. Two, with Ahmed. He did most of the talking, and it was actually quite fascinating - he talked about his family, which has 1000 people in it. No lie, unless that's a translation error on his part, and I don't think it is. I wrote out the number '1000' and he said, "Yes, one thousand." He talked about Turkey's problems. At one point his neighbor Hamdi, an Iranian, came over, and we talked together. Hamdi had the cutest little girl with him, who everyone kept referring to as a boy. Turkish people have a lot of trouble with third person singular pronouns - in English we have he/she/it, but in Turkish there is only one article for all three - so I didn't think anything of it. I told Hamdi how cute his little girl was. It turned out it actually was a boy.

After two hours of tea, I was ready to go. Actually, after one hour; it's a pleasant strain to communicate with someone with the level of English Ahmed has. However, as I got my coat on, he went into his room and came back with a traditional Kurdish scarf, which he gave to me, and he said, "If you ever need anything, call me, and I'll be there in two months."

It was quite sweet, if confusing.

Then, as I was finally leaving, Ahmed opened the door and there was Hamdi, with a plate of anchovies for me. Ahmed clapped his hands and helped me take off my jacket. He told me I couldn't possibly leave now.

I Have No Pictures Because I Didn't Do Anything

This past week was Kurban Bayram, which celebrates the non-sacrifice of Ishmael by his father Abraham, and the provision by God of a substitute ram. In all my conversation classes leading up to this, I've had multiple students tell me this story, and then ask me to tell the Christian version. Usually the only change I make is to turn Ishmael into Isaac, and the ram into a majestic unicorn with a sixteen foot wingspan. Then my students will poke their neighbors and whisper in Turkish, "See, I told you it was the same."

But more importantly, Kurban Bayrm means a week off. I went to Istanbul for the week to meet up with most of the other fifty Fulbrighters in Turkey. I was estatic to finally see other Americans again. I soon found out that everyone else had been traveling every weekend to see each other. This is the first time I've left Van, I'd tell them, and they'd always ask why, because, I agree, it didn't make much sense to remain in such a quiet place for seven straight weeks. So I'd say, Thousands of years ago God built a wall around Van to make sure that nothing would ever get out. That wall is nothingness, and it stretches out from Van in a circle with an eight hour radius.

That's a bit harsh. Since this was the first time in seven weeks that the Fulbrighters were reuniting, How is BLANK was a question each man or woman had to answer fifty times. So I'd say: It's great. It's quiet and beautiful and no one will ever let me read in peace because they think I'm lonely.

I'd love to post pictures of myself in the Sultan's old bedchambers or looting the Hagai Sophia for gold mosaics like my ancestors, but the truth is we didn't do a lot of Istanbul-ish stuff. In traveling to Istanbul, I had one goal - to not have to try. I didn't want to try to understand people, I didn't want to help people with their English, I didn't want to translate anymore. I wanted to sit with people and not have to try in order to be friends. And it worked beautifully.

We did a lot of America-ish stuff. We saw Harry Potter. We ate at an Italian chain restaurant. We bought a lot of English language books. We talked about video games. A lot, actually. If there was one benefit from Kurban Bayram, it's that I learned that at least three other Fulbrighters own a copy of Age of Empires II and are eager to play online together. We spent a good deal of time on strategy, in between arguments about Pokemon (which I did NOT participate in - talk about a bunch of dweebs).

The whole experience is probably best summed up in the Princes Islands. These are islands maybe an hour from Istanbul by ferry. These islands are pretty hilly, and there are no cars - it's all foot traffic. At the highest point on the largest island there's a monastary that was there before the islands got there, or something like that. Really old. We rented tandem bikes and tried to pedal the whole way. My bike was obviously broken (why wouldn't it be - oh yeah, because that's a crappy thing to rent to someone), and I ended up pushing while my partner Lucien steered. It was a lot like the relationship between the guy pushing the Corolla and the guy on the steering wheel shouting commands out of the open door.

When we finished pushing the bike up the hill (which was one of those hills where you ask for its birth certificate because there is no way it should be pitching in thirteen and under little league), instead of checking out the monastery we decided to rest for a while on these cliff rocks that were probably out of bounds. Someone brought a couple of bottles of wine, and we drank these and talked about mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons for a few hours (we're planning to meet before Christmas for a game). As the sun was setting, we picked up our bikes and our trash and started walking down the hill.

We didn't even pose for this. It was that resplendent.

At this point, you'd think we'd realize that we hadn't even been inside this older-than-Pangea building, but no - instead, we realized that we were almost late for the bike rental return. So with Lucien steering and me literally running full speed behind him, we made it all the way back without hitting more than one person and damaging forever more than one of Lucien's fingers.

This aptly describes the whole week. There were monuments, but we forgot about them, and the vacation was that much better because of it.