The Southeast: Terrorists, Biblical ruins and Baklava

The Fellowship
Shashank- an Indian-American student from Berkley who was unquestionably the leader on this trip as his command of the Turkish language was head and shoulders over anyone else in the group.
Eb- One of the other Beloit students in Turkey.
Leonard- A German exchange student studying in Ankara for the semester at a different university.
Anya- A Polish exchange student here for the semester who study’s at the same university as Leonard.
Eric- My lovely flat mate, also a student at Beloit.
Travis- me

The cow could not have been dead for more than a few days. Though the skin looked dried and stretched, the organs that were hanging out of the gaping hole in its chest were still bloated, meaning that either the bacteria had not produced enough gas to pop them or that the wild dogs had not gotten hungry enough yet to start eating the biggest piece of road kill I have ever seen.

The cow’s carcass—lying on the side of the small road that ran parallel to the Tigris river—was a strange juxtaposition to the beautiful scene that was before us: the sun setting across the grassy plain just outside of the city walls of Diyarbakir and the an ancient, stone Roman bridge spanning the Tigris a quarter mile in front of us. Diyarbakir is at the heart of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey and was once the hoped for capital of Kurdistan—which sadly never came into existence. The other facet of this scene that should have detracted but only seemed to add to it, were the 4 adolescent who had been following and aimlessly hassling us for the last half hour.

This was the second day of our four-day trip around the Southeast of Turkey. We had boarded a long-distance (15 hours to be exact) bus on Thursday evening from Ankara bound for Diyarbakir. Despite the frequent stops along the way, I had managed to spend a few hours semi-consciously lulling my head against my seatmates shoulder in a poor attempt at sleep. By the time the sun had come, I had ceased this futile effort and was taking in the truly breathtaking scenery that was passing outside the bus windows. The mountainous landscape at first bore a striking resemblance to the Southern Alps of New Zealand then promptly shifted to the grassy mountainsides that I could have sworn were from the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. As the hours passed by so to did the scenery, until by about noon, we were out into the grassy plains of the Kurdish homeland.

Before we continue, a bit needs to be said about the Kurds. The Kurds are an ethnic group that are located in several Middle Eastern countries, and in Turkey, they number about 14 million. Physically, there is almost no difference between them and the Turks; the differences lie in their language and culture. Most of the Turkish Kurds are centered in the Southeast of Turkey with Diyarbakir being their informal capital. The contemporary problems between Turks and Kurds stem from when Ataturk created the Turkish Republic. In an effort to unite the country, he tried to overcome the differences between particular ethnic groups through a process of assimilation. This effort included banning the Kurdish language and not recognizing them as separate ethnic group. Naturally, oppression always breeds some resistance. And in the late 1970’s, the Kurdish separatist movement was born—the most famous and infamous face of which is the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party).

The PKK demanded that the Turkey allow them to have an independent state Kurdistan, which naturally, the Turkish government refused. This led to 15 years of fighting through the 1980’s and 1990’s in which around 30,000 people were killed. Though the PKK still exists, the organization lost the majority of its power when its leader, Abdullah öcalan, was caught in Kenya in 1999. After his capture, Ocalan did a 180 in his view on Turkish government, accepting them as the legitimate government and thus, in the views of many Kurds, betraying the movement. So while the PKK still exists, it is specter of its former self. The problem, however, is certainly not yet solved. A fact that was evident by the multiple police check points we had to stop at throughout our trip.

The main goal of this trip was to attend the Kurdish spring festival of Nevruz: an event that was banned until only three years ago, but that for the last three years has brought out about one million people to a field on the outskirts of Diyarbakir. The festival involves a host of concerts, huge fires and inevitably, political riots and tear gas. It sounded like the perfect cultural experience.


Nevruz, however, did not start until the next day so we decided to head over to Mardin for the night. This involved a fairly simple hour and a half minibus ride through the misty rain that delivered us to the base of this ancient city. Mardin is both a gorgeous and surreal city filled with tan stone houses and narrow alleyways that extend down a steep hill from an ancient castle at the hills summit. From the base the hill looking south across the fertile Mesopotamian plane (that in the mist looked remarkably like the ocean) dotted with small farming villages, it is possible to see into the northern border of Syria.

We spend the remainder of that Friday wandering through the back allies of the city trying to walk off the cramps that—unavoidably—occurred after spending an excess of 15 hours on a bus. After a cheap dinner and desert of Turkish ice cream, we returned to our hotel to finish the night playing cards and charades. Unfortunately, as I was feeling a little worse for ware, I turned in early and missed charades and the quote of the trip, which occurred shortly after the game when Leonard was lying, sprawled across one of the beds, bits of potatoes chips littering his chest, and in his slow German accent declared, “My body is a battlefield.”

The next morning after a quick, glutinous breakfast at our hotel (the meal was included with the room and we are college students), we left to finish our wanderings of the city before returning to Diyarbakir for Nevruz. The rain from the previous day had cleared and the hot sun lit up the unreal landscape that only a day before had been shrouded in mist. The affect was stunning and it was only with difficulty that we were able to pull ourselves away from the perch we had found next to the castle wall and board the minibus.

On our return to Diyarbakir, we were devastated to find that the police had seen fit to the end the festival, which usually goes into the early morning until around 4am. Though this was a bit deflating, I have come to realize that when traveling abroad like this, the best thing you can be is flexible; nothing will ever work out quite as you expect, but then that is the beauty of traveling.


We decided that to check out the sights of the city and after wandering to the old Roman bridge and seeing the dead cow, we boarded a minibus to the center of town to find a water pipe bar and dinner. After accomplishing this, we went to a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar filled with Kurdish men chatting and playing cards. Everyone in the bar—and in the entire city for that matter—was incredibly nice and talkative, despite their inability to speak English and our inability to speak adequate Turkish or Kurdish. To finish up the night, we met up with some friends who had also come down for the festival and chilled under the crescent moon up on roof of our hotel; a very cool and memorable way to end the night.

Our journey to Hasankeyf the next day was one of the most beautiful drives I have ever taken. The road to these 14th century ruins that sit precariously on a sheer cliff over the Tigris River winds through a fairy tale landscape of eroded monoliths capped with lush patches of emerald grass and the occasional tree. We spent several hours wandering, dumbstruck, around the hundreds of cave houses. It is difficult to describe how it felt to be in this ancient city surrounded by such incredible scenery, but I felt that were this moment to last for the rest of my life, I could easily die happy.

Upon arriving in Diyarbakir, our fellowship parted ways with Eric and I continuing on our quest and everyone else heading back to Ankara for classes the next day. Though there were several places that Eric and I planned to visit the following day before heading back, the main reason for our divergence as simple: Baklava. The city of Gaziantep is renowned across the world as the birthplace of this delicious, honey-soaked treat and we were going to be damned if we were going to be this close to it and miss it.

However, before we reached this sweet-tooth Mecca we had two more places to visit; Urfa and Harran. Our stay night in Urfa was one to remember simply because of the hotel we stayed in. For $8 a night we got a tiny concrete cell with two beds, no heat (unfortunately the beautiful weather we had had early that day did not persist), no hot water and Eric got a blanket with a stain that looked distinctly like human feces. We were so tired that none of this really mattered and after a mid-night walk around the town and a kebab, we slept like babies. We awoke to heavy rain and after a quick meander around town, we got on a bus to the small town of Harran.

Harran is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on the planet. It is mentioned in the Book of Genesis as the place where Abraham stayed for several years around 1900 B.C. The town is small and only required an hour or two to wonder around, but the feeling of insignificance in the face of such history was striking and once again, the misty rain only served to heighten this sensation. After drifting through the goat pastures surrounding the ruins and taking in beehive houses, we caught the bus back to town and boarded a bus to Gaziantep.

After the watching a Turkish comedy based on the Exorcist, we got of the bus and took a minibus into town to the store that was said to have the best baklava in the world.

It did not disappoint. Both Eric and I had been fasting all day in preparation for this encounter and after a delicious dinner, we had about 3 pounds of baklava that can only be described as orgasmic. It would have been worth the 20 hour round trip from Ankara just for 1 hour in this place. And as if the food were not enough to bring us back, we also had the two coolest waiters in Turkey who chilled with us for most our meal, giving us a cigar and bringing us free coffee and tea.


At the end of our incredible meal, we thanked our host, offering them our email and making our way outside to find a minibus back to the bus station. We asked one of the doormen where we could find the Otogar and were immediately approached by a man who said he would take us there. Past experience made me a bit suspicious and worried that we would have to pay an exorbitant price as we were the only ones riding in this van, but the driver assured me that there would be no money involved. Though I still did not believe him, after that meal I was in no state of mind to resist anything, so we got into the van.

It turned out that the driver’s friend—who had brought us to the van—was an ex-professional soccer player named Mustafa. As we drove, he told us that he was in town to visit family but that he lived in Istanbul. Upon hearing that we tried to go to Nevruz, he told us that he did not trust the Kurds and that they had recently stolen $200,000 from him, but luckily, he had friends in the military and police who were helping him get it back. Eric and I both looked at each other as we could only imagine one of two things that would get you that kind of money and get it stolen. He did not choose to elaborate on what his business was but upon arriving to the bus station gave us his number in Istanbul and told us to call him anytime we were there. It also turned out that he and his friend were just that nice and wanted to help out some travelers and would not except any money for the ride to the bus station. We thanked them, said goodbye and still in shock at how nice everyone in Gaziantep was, I found myself hoping that this would not be the last time I was here.

It was the perfect end to the most intense four days of travel that I have ever had. Unfortunately, the female attendant on the bus back did not see fit to continue this trend. Despite there being about 20 free seats on the bus, she forbid me to sit any where else on the bus beside the seat that was assigned to me and scolded me in Turkish every time I slipped my shoes off. (However, I decided to keep doing it anyway partly because it was much more comfortable, but mostly just to spite her). I did manage to slip into another seat for the last few hours of the bus ride and made myself feel a little better by giving her a dirty look as we de-boarded into the chilly early morning of Ankara.

Olive head

Scene open: (Fade from black)

As the scene opens, we find our two young American protagonists sitting right in the middle of a long-distance Turkish bus. Outside the windows, the suburbs of Istanbul can be seen, as mosques and back-lit signs for Efes beer flash by in the humid night. Our heroes are tired, you can see it in their glazed over eyes; a long weekend in Istanbul has left them happy, satisfied and exhausted.

(Camera pans around behind the two Americans)

We see that their glazed over eyes are glued to the tiny television set located above the bald head of the slightly overweight Turkish man three seats ahead. The television is playing (and has been for the last half hour) an orgy of Turkish music videos depicting men who seem to have given up on buttoning their silky shirts halfway through the song while scantily clad women undulated to a base line that hasn’t changed since the bus attendant put the DVD in.

(Scene fades out into black)

Scene open: Camera fades in on the baggage rack located four feet above Travis’s head (the taller and less topically haired of the Americans).

We see that the oversized North Face backpack that Travis has been using for the last seven years was smashed into the luggage in a precarious position with only a third of the bag actually in the rack. The bus jostles slightly; the bag plummets down, stamping its thirty pounds straight onto Travis’s head. As the camera quickly focuses in on his face, we can see that Travis was dozing with his ipod headphones on and his mouth slightly agape. However, as soon as the bag hits him, he is jarred into semi-consciousness and looks around. It seems to that this embarrassing incident has managed to awake half the bus. Trying to remain cool and surprised that his bag—which is only three times too big for the rack—fell down, he dejectedly pushes the bag under his seat.

(Camera zooms in to see a single tear sliding down his cheek in the light of the fiber-optic lamp)

The large, friendly looking Turkish man who is sitting across Travis leans over and touches him on the shoulder. Travis turns somewhat surprised to see what this gentleman could want. In response to Travis’s questioning eyes, the Turkish man pulls out a large loaf of bread, tearing off a piece for our American champion. (Camera angle switches for and we see Eric—the second American—take his ear buds out and look over inquisitively. “What could be happening?” his blue eyes seems to ask.) Travis smiles and politely declines. But Mustafa (for convenience sake we will give this name to our portly new character) keeps on insisting until Travis accepts the bread and thanks him. However, Mustafa is not finished, he proceeds to hand Travis several tomatoes and a bag of olives as both Travis and Eric giggle and how ridiculously hospitable Turkish people are.

Travis thanks Mustafa in broken Turkish with an accent that would indicate he had recently suffered severe head trauma. Mustafa smiles and begins talking to Travis in Turkish, which surprisingly, Travis and Eric seem to be able to get the gist of. He asks where they are from, what they are doing there, and tells them that they are both exceptionally handsome. Giggling like schoolgirls, the two American demigods except these compliment, but are quickly mystified when Mustafa points at Travis’s head and says zeytin. (Scene cut briefly to show both Americans staring dumbly at the friendly Turk) Though both Eric and Travis know that this means olive they cannot figure out what he means. Eric takes the quick and easy escape route, as he is on the inside seat, putting his earphones back in. A metaphorical light goes on in Travis’s head and he assumes he must be referring—in some way—to the bag that has recently dropped on Travis’s head and assuming it had olives in it. This does not appear to be the case, however, as Mustafa shakes his head and more emphatically points at Travis’s head saying, again, zeytin, then pointing at Eric’s head and saying zeytin yok (no olive).

(Camera angle switches back to close-up of Travis’s face as a look of stunning realization dawns upon it.)

Begin montage: (begin song: Apologize by Onerepublic) A flash of white light fades to reveal Travis at middle school graduation, he bends down to pick up a pen that a pretty girl in front of him dropped. He is startled when he feels her hands separating the hair on the top of his head; a look of horror comes across his face as she asks him why his hair is thinning. (Another flash of white light) We see Travis in front of his bathroom mirror that same night desperately clawing through his hair trying in vain, to prove to himself that the wench at his graduation must have been hallucinating. (Another flash of white light) We see Travis getting a hair cut two years later from Carla, his mother’s hairdresser, as he sadly tries to explain that he wants a haircut that will make him look less balding. He smiles bravely as Carla tells him that its hardly noticeable and that it happens when a young man has too much testosterone, but the audience can see that he doesn’t really buy it. (The montage continues for the proceeding three minutes and ten seconds; awkward scenes about hair loss punctuated by flashes of white light. Through the montage we see the bare spot over Travis’s occipital lobe grow as two hairless driveways work their way up his temples. As the audience watches Travis’s face throughout this process, they also see an interesting progression starting with denial, moving on to shame (the period in which Sam’s Choice generic rogaine was used), then next to self-defacement (in the hope that if he makes fun of it enough other people won’t) working its way up to acceptance and (after person #362 tells Travis he is balding) finally reaching it.

(Final flash to white)

(As white light fades the audience finds themselves back on the long-distance bus careening through the Turkish night with Mustafa and our two American megastars (Eric still hiding beneath his headphones).)

Though the montage of hair loss, it took only half a second to flash through Travis’s mind’s eye (as it seems to do every time someone new tells him this) and, after swallowing the mouthful of bread and olives that Mustafa had so generously given him, he smiles and says, “Evet (yes), zeytin,” and points to his head.

Scene close: (As scene fades to black Lucky Man by The Verve begins fading in and, as the slow fade out ends the last thing the audience sees is Mustafa and his wife helping Travis and Eric get a cab for a reasonable price at 4:00am, then waving them off. The scene ends with Mustafa popping an olive in his mouth as he turns to the camera and winks.

(Full fade)

(Role credits)

How to get an apartment in Turkey

The idea to get an apartment for my time here in Ankara was first planted in my mind by Alice, a fellow Beloit student who had spent all of last year here at METU. She had lived in the dorms for one semester and in an apartment for the second semester and had told me that while the dorms were survivable, living in an apartment in the city was much better; and after two weeks of my roommates alarm going off every five minutes, starting at 7, for two hours I decided that she had to be right.

Though the alarm thing was really annoying it was still a hard decision; living in the dorms would give me a completely different experience than living in an apartment off campus would.
On one hand if I stayed in the dorms I would be able to spend a semester living with three Turkish roommates, whom, other than the alarm thing every morning, I liked quite a bit.
There was the Arda, the guy that slept along the same wall as me who had gotten arrested his first night back on campus by the soldiers in charge of campus security for getting in a fight with a dorm receptionist who would not let him up to girl friends room. Anil, a really nice guy with an extremely, almost manically friendly disposition who spent most of his days watching American T.V shows on his computer and whom I had spent by far the most time with of my roommates. And finally there was the guy with the cell phone alarm whose name I never learned and who spoke a little more English than I spoke Turkish, which meant that we could only communicate on about the level of 3 year olds, but who was always very nice and friendly to me.

By living in the dorms I would also have easy, ready access to the large group of potential Turkish friends that lived in the dorm with me and I would be much closer to all the buildings my classes would be in. Another factor that weighed heavily in favor of choosing the dorm was that it would simply be much easier to stay in the dorms than it would be to got out and find and rent an apartment in a country were I did not speak the language.

On the other hand there were a lot of attributes to getting an apartment in the city. For instance, were we to get an apartment it would mean that Eric and I would each get our own room, have a kitchen to cook in, greater access to the city, a place were we could host people, and we could avoid the midnight curfew at the dorms.

In the end we decided to go with the apartment, thinking that while it may isolate us more from Turkish students on campus, we could fairly easily counter act this by joining clubs and by having a cool place that we could invite people over to. Also, while living in the dorms may be easier I have found that the easiest option is rarely the best. Finally, I had never rented an apartment or lived on my own off campus before so I figured what better place to start than Turkey?

This started an epic endeavor that lasted for three weeks, resulted in 2 put-off trips to Istanbul, countless hours of work from our saint-like host students, an encounter with the incredible bureaucracy that is the Turkish government and involved more upfront cash than I thought I had in my bank account.

To start out we had to find an apartment. This was not as simple as I would have thought as there are no good, free websites to use to find them and to use a real estate agent would mean that we would have to pay about an extra $300 finders fee. So on the advice and with the help of our host students we set to do this the old-fashioned way; pounding the pavement. This involved walking through the residential area of Yuzuncu Yil, an area within walking distance to campus that has cheap apartments, and looking hopefully into the windows of the apartment buildings for signs that said ‘For Rent’ in Turkish.

After about an hour searching in this way I got a call from Eric, who was with the second half of our group (we had split up for efficiency sake) who said he had a found a promising spot. Firat, Merve and I (the other half of the group) found Eric, Orkuan and EB in an 11th floor, 2-bed room, 2-bathroom (one with a shower and one with a squatty potty) apartment with a great view of the city. The current tenet looked like a Turkish version of Jason Statham who had let himself go and dressed in a grey tracksuit and slippers. His name was Murat and after showing us the apartment, which was far nicer than anything I had hoped to find, he made us tea and we started the negotiations.

This method of negotiations was used in just about every interaction we had dealing with the apartment and consisted of our Turkish hosts deftly wrangling the price of whatever we were buying down while Eric and I stared on with our uncomprehending cow-eyes. After the bartering was complete they would usually fill us in on what had happened and ask if the deal they had struck was suitable. To these questions we would usually just nod dumbly and than go back to wondering what we did in a past life to deserve these hosts and how we could be so completely useless we were when it came to this type of task.

We decided to get the apartment, but declined Murat’s obscene offer to sell us all the furnishings for 2000 lira (we ended up getting much better stuff for a little less than half that from some very nice middle aged women who were all engaged and living together until they moved in with their new husbands). However our lucky ran out in that we did not have a co-signer for the apartment, forcing us to pay all four months of rent up-front. With all this arranged and after several days of twice-a-day trips to the ATM to withdraw the maximum amount of cash that we could we arrived on Saturday ready to move into our new apartment. There was only one problem, Murat was still there. Apparently he had understood the contract just fine but had decided that he really wanted to stay another day or two and he hoped it wouldn’t be a problem for us. No, Murat of course not, why would it be? We had only arranged our entire week around this date, signed the contract, dragged 6 of our Turkish out of bed early on a Saturday morning and had promised those lovely women to get their furniture off their hands by the end of today. I'm so sorry that we are disturbing your schedule by being here.

But there was no point in getting upset about it so we told Murat the situation and after some arguing he benevolently agreed to allow us to move our furniture into a corner of the apartment until we actually moved in. So for the next 8 hours we carried all the furniture we had bought from the women down the 10 floors of their apartment building, put it in a truck, drove over to our building, and then carried it up an additional 12 floors to our apartment. This was not quite as bad as it sounds as most of the stuff we had fit in the elevator, but the couch refused to follow this trend so we had to manhandle the thing down all ten flights of stairs and then push and pull the damn thing back up 12 stories. After getting it up to the 8th floor I began telling the couch, in no uncertain terms, exactly what I would do to it were it not an inanimate object while Eric tried to cover up his laughter at my awe-inspiring rage.

Again, words cannot describe the saintliness of our Turkish friends, they worked unceasingly right next to us all 8 hours without a word of complaint. After we had finished, we took our friends out to dinner than went down town to celebrate our success.

In an effort to make this already over-long description a little bit shorter I’ll make a long story shorter by saying that, due to several factors, including another surprise move by Murat to take everything in the apartment down to the mirrors and the light fixtures, and a Turkish super-virus that attacked Eric and I simultaneously, we didn’t end up moving in until Thursday that next week. And while living in the apartment has not been problem free (Eric has had a hilarious time adjusting to the Turkish toilet, we still don’t have internet, most of the drains are clogged, and Eric’s radiator stopped working) we made it in and as I sit here writing this, sipping my tea, looking at our bad-ass view of Ankara, and listening to Dragonforce I think I can safely say that it was well worth it.

Killer Dogs on Campus!!!

We were about forty-five minutes into our run when we heard them. The barking in the distance; a sound I have learned to fear…

We had received daily warnings from our saint-like host students and the Middle Eastern Technological University’s study abroad office about the starved packs of wild dogs that roamed the several thousand acres of forests and hills that surround our campus; semi-wild beasts just waiting for a foolish student to stray into their wooded domain. Despite these warnings we had decided that this same forest was preferable to the muddy, clay road that we had started our jog on.

It began with a shrill bark that came from somewhere off to our left. It took a moment before I realized what this barking meant; like Sam Nealson in Jurassic Park, we were being tracked. It was at that instant that I saw the pack. I felt like Arrowin racing to get Frodo (in this case Eric Dunford) back to Elvin domain when she sees the ring-wraiths through the trees, the undead servants of evil that she thought she had outwitted. There were eight of them running parallel to us, out about 200 meters. The adrenaline main-lined and we decided that we could out run them if we really pushed it and we cut to our right. However, after a few second we realized the futility in this as the pack ran through the woods to circle in front of us, trying to cut off our potential escape route in classic sweeper formation.

It was then that we started to think that maybe our evolutionary advantage was not our speed but brains that were larger than the size of a walnut. When this light bulb flicked on in my head I turned to Eric, who by this point was armed with a semi-rotten stick in one hand and a large rock in the other (I had been unable to find such suitable weapons and thus stood empty handed), and told him that maybe we should try running back the way we came to confuse them. He agreed that perhaps this made more sense than trying to out run animals that could obviously outpace two out-of-shape Americans. As we ran back up the symmetrically forested hill (all the trees had been planted at the wish of Ataturk who thought that Turkey did not have enough forests) I was grateful that despite Eric’s superior weaponry he had, in the last three days, smoked 4 packs of Turkey’s strongest cigarettes, giving me a distinct advantage should the dogs catch up to us, and the old adage of not having to be faster than the bear, just your friend, come true.

Thankfully it did not come to this. After an exhausting sprint across rocky fields, down eroding sedimentary hillsides, and about six rolled ankles later we finally were able to outsmart the starving canines and make our way back to the wet clay road. From here it was an anxious half-mile down a steep hill to the border of campus, past which these feral killing machines transformed back into man’s best friend.

Coming to Turkey

The first segment of my trip to Turkey began about three and half weeks before I actually left the country. I flew back to Chicago, leaving a on a balmy forty degree Colorado day and arriving to sunny, negative ten degree Chicago evening; weather that even my Michelin Tireman down coat could not insulate me from.

It had been hard decision for me, trying to decide whether or not I wanted to go to Turkey for the semester or return to Beloit College. Though I had been more than ready to leave for a year abroad at the end of my sophomore year, the longer I was away from Beloit the more I missed my college and the people there. However, in the end I decided that while another semester at Beloit would undoubtedly be fun and enjoyable, in the long term a semester studying in Ankara would be a more rewarding experience. My decision was also shaped by the fact that my program at METU (Middle Eastern Technological University) did not start until early February; three weeks after Beloit’s semester began. Thus I figured that I would be able to have my cake and eat it too; I would be able to go spend nearly a month with the people I had missed at a place I loved and I would also be able to spend my semester in Ankara, having what I hoped would be a life changing experience.

The weeks at Beloit were better than I could have hoped and positively flew by. Along with having a great time catching up with wonderful friends, those three weeks also helped me a great deal to figure out and come to terms with the fact that people and places never stay the same as you remember them; a fact you would think I would have realized by now. But somehow the changes that occur in people in my absence always seem to surprise me.


After this relatively brief honeymoon period I was off again back to Chicago O’Hare. This time leaving to Frankfurt, Germany, a city that I feel has become like my second home with the amount of time that I have spent there in the last 9 months during a few several day layovers. This layover, however, only lasted four hours, just time enough for me to grab a bratwurst and beer (when in Rome…) from one of the airport restaurants and to catch up on some of the goings on in the world at a newspaper kiosk.

Through some strange stroke of luck EB, one of the two other Beloit students who was doing this same program with me, ended up on the same flight to as me from Frankfurt to Ankara. We caught up briefly before taking the bus out to some obscure corner of the tarmac to board the Turkish Airlines 777 and once aboard took our seats at opposite ends of the plane.

The interior of the plane looked like something out of a movie from the 1970’s; the upholstery was a light teal highlighted by the kind of pink you see on old women’s hats on Eastern Sunday. The beautiful flight attendants were dressed accordingly and, had they not been constantly moving, serving us drinks and some kind of delicious cheese pastry, would have ran the risk of blending in with the hilarious background and going unnoticed.

We landed and deplaned at Ankara’s beautiful, new international airport, an airport that was surprisingly empty for 7pm on a Sunday night. I said a little prayer of thanks after seeing that my bag had managed to keep up with me (a feat that happens much less often than I would like) and waited for EB to collect her luggage. She was equally lucky and together we left the terminal to meet our hosts.

I was the first to see the three Turkish host students that came to meet us. Three people whom I now have no doubt are reincarnations of the buddha of compassion, so great is their patience and so much have they helped us. Firat, my chain-smoking, Kurdish host student who looks exactly as I would envision a Turkish Raskolnikov, met me with a smile and a handshake but told me that, as he had to wait for another student who would be arriving at 2am, it would be better to for me to drive back to campus with his two friends and he would meet me outside my dorm tomorrow morning. Those two friends were Orkaun and Merve, EB’s host students. They are both engineers and one of the cutest couples I have ever seen. Orkaun took us to his Ford Focus and, after helping us load our bags into the trunk, proceeded to rocket us back to campus doing things with his car I never thought a Ford capable of.

After we had dropped our bags off at our dorms, Orkaun and Merve took us down to the campus shopping center for our first Turkish meal. Over our Beyti Kebabs we got to know a little more about our host students, and by the time I had finished both my kebab and EB’s and Merve’s, I felt sure that if the rest of the Turks I met were anything like the three I had met so far this would be a pretty good semester.

I returned to my empty four-person room, a stark and lonely environment in comparison to the one I left at Beloit, and, too exhausted to care about the lack of sheets on my IKEA-esque bunk, collapsed onto my bare mattress and fell quickly to sleep.


I was in Turkey.