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!