Amasya: This ain't my first rodeo, but sometimes it feels like it

So, friends, I have been in Amasya since Thursday afternoon and I have had some highs and some lows. Oh my goodness, where to begin? Here's a good place: my new favorite Turkish word is saçma.

--note: there are regular calls to prayer, which I can hear from my room in the lojman (guest house) where I'm staying. It turns out that there are also irregular announcements from the town about cool things that are going on. Like, this guy gets on a loudspeaker (whenever he feels like it?) and just shares cool stuff going on. Welcome to Turkey.---

Anyway, back to my new favorite word: saçma. It means nonsense. Since learning this, I have thought saçma a lot. For example, yesterday I woke up and, despite knowing (or believing) that I would have a class and also knowing the place where my class would happen, I had no idea how to get from the lojman (guest house) to the classroom (bus? which bus? where was said bus caught?). So, I went to the Education Faculty to talk to the most wonderful Turkish man in existence, Rasim Bey, and basically throw myself upon his mercy. Well, Rasim (and his office mate, a very nice history professor) helped me out. It turns out that I never ended up going to my class because so few students showed up for the previous ones they just kind of cancelled (class situations are a long story that is best left for later). But, Rasim did, basically, end up spending his entire day trying to get us our Residence Permits. We went to the Amasya Municipal building twice and then ended up at the police station. However, stuffed inbetween those visits were the following: a visit to a photo center, an apartment for rent, and four trips the University office where they gave us our letters. This must be confusing to read because it's definitely confusing to write. It was even more confusing to experience. Saçma!

However, we ended the day in the most pleasant way imaginable--dinner at the home of a very nice Turkish couple. The food was really good (you'd be surprised by how much soup they eat here). We ended the meal with berry preserves made from berries that they picked themselves, you know, on the mountain. Unbelievable! (that will have to be my next Turkish word).

So, thus ended a confusing, saçma-filled day.

However, here is a reward for sitting through this blog post:

This is what Amasya looks like (not at its best, but close). It really is a beautiful town. Those are old Ottoman houses hanging over the Yeşil river. Pretty pretty. You can't see it in the picture, but there's a castle on top of the higher of the two mountains in view.

A little bit of Anıtkabir

Hello Everybody! Another day in Ankara. Another day without an iron...

I am so desperate that I have started bringing my shirts into the shower, hoping to steam some of the wrinkles out. No. Such. Luck. I wore a wrinkled shirt the day the US Ambassador to Turkey spoke to us. OH WELL!

Things in Ankara are going well for all intents and purposes. I met the representative for my University yesterday (Mehmet Bey) and he was wonderful. He even invited us to a dinner with his family (which we just returned from). Yesterday, during our alloted "school reps" time, he sat for most of it and taught me words in Turkish. He even drew some street diagrams to better explain words like: "round about" and "4-way stop." Now I know how to not only handle, but narrate, most Turkish traffic situations. Hurray!

Aside from meeting him, orientation has been going strong since Tuesday. It's one thing after another--we've met with embassy people, and Turkish language people, and English language people, and all kinds of people, really. It's quite impressive. It's also quite exhausting. I'm back to a normal sleep schedule, but still have weird symptoms of jetlag, like I get hungry at the wrong times and still feel sluggish in the early afternoon (which is when I would normally be asleep).

Anyway, enough about me, let's talk about Ankara! So, since posting last, I have seen more of Ankara and I really really like it. It's surprisingly quite for such a big city and is fairly clean and seems to be well-organized. There is a park nearby (that I may have referenced in an earlier post) that is very pleasant to visit before dinner time. I also had my first trip to a Turkish bookstore, which was 5 stories! The yabancı (foreign) books were on the 4th floor. I definitely got some exercise hiking those stairs! I bought a book of poetry by a Turkish poet named Nazım Hikmet. Apparently he is quite famous in Turkey. I think I will enjoy torturing myself with reading (and not grasping) his poetry for the next ten months. We'll see. Turkish literature is pretty interesting because when they changed to the Latin alphabet about 90 years ago the entire country became illiterate, so it seems like there is a real disconnect between the literature of the Turkish Republic and the Ottoman empire. It's interesting to think what American literature would be like if everything after the WWI was essentially disconnected from whatever had come before (by the way, these are just my musings, don't take any of them too seriously).

So, pictures. I almost abandoned this blog for a Tumblr because I thought it would be easier to upload pictures. Well! What's not easier about Tumblr is figuring it out in Turkish! I spent 30 minutes tonight alone, just scrolling through pages, hoping to be able to find a log out or log in or sign-up button. Something! Instead, it just kept taking me to "Mehtin's" Tumblr page. Mehtin has one follower. I have since abandoned both Tumblr and Mehtin and am sticking to Blog Spot. Whatever.

Anyway, I finally got to upload this picture:

How do you like my 'fro? This was taken at Atatürk's Tomb (Anitkabir) in Ankara. It's really cool because the site is (huge) and on a high hill that affords a great view of Ankara. The city is kind of dusty and hazy, but once you are on the ground it's quite nice. It's a third of the size of Istanbul (population: 15 mil.). Though 5 mil. is still a lot for one city, at least in my opinion, it's nice.

Going to Atatürk's Tomb helped me understand a lot about the Turkish love of Atatürk as a leader. No matter how patriotic you can get as an American, we do not have a single leader who we revere and love in the same way that Türk's love Atatürk. It's very interesting. At the Mausoleum, they have tons of his stuff, pictures of him, quotes from his speeches. Everything. It's very interesting. The entire complex is huge!

Anyway, tomorrow we get to go to a castle. A CASTLE! I really really love castle's. I will definitely have more pictures. I think that's it for now. I'm going to go to sleep and rest up for another fun fun fun filled day of orientation!

Vege on the Edge...of a landmass called Eurasia

Wow, it has been a crazy ride so far, ladies and gentlemen. I am in Ankara at my hotel (The Niza Park, in case you were wondering) and I just finished my first _______(Ex: long, interesting, trying, exciting, terrifying, wonderful) day of orientation. I am overwhelmed, but in a good way.

So, part of this whole Fulbright thing is that they buy your ticket. In my experience, you get what you pay for and that means that when you pay nothing you get...well, a long long travel schedule. It took 24 hours to get from Austin, TX to Ankara, Turkey. But, I was flying with some great people and when our flight was almost delayed (break problems, whatchya gonna do?) in Detroit, we stuck together like troopers. Thankfully we made all of our connections and arrived at our hotel last night, tired and scared and mostly nonverbal (turkish + jetlag = trouble), but alive!

Today was our first day of orientation and as I referenced earlier, it was really something. Actually, it was great. The problem was jetlag. It's hard to listen to even the most interesting lecture when all you want to do is crawl back to your hotel room and sleep for a day. But we persevered.

This evening we went to a Turkish bar, which turned out to be a lot like an American bar. Due to my already scattered system, I passed on the libations, but for anyone who's wondering, yes, Turkey does in fact have beer towers (Don't know what a beer tower is? You're better off that way, so just leave it).

Surprisingly, there have been no really remarkable events so far. At dinner tonight we were discussing how much it sucks to read boring blogs where people just bullet point all the stuff they did. I feel like this current entry could very well fall into that category, but sometimes you don't have much to work with. Maybe tomorrow will bring a mild disaster that I can exploit for a good story on here. Fingers crossed!

I will say that I have had two successful exchanges in Turkish with only minimal use of gesturing. I asked for an iron so convincingly that the hotel desk clerk responded in rapid fire Turkish. I'm 50% sure that he's going to have the iron sent to my room when it's available. He definitely took down my room number (which I gave him in Turkish). I also bought two (2!) bottles of water from the shop next to our hotel. It wasn't nearly as invigorating as the experience with the iron. Oh well.

That's all for now. Iyi geceler! (good night)