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.