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Well.  I may well be the laziest blogger on the planet.  This is disgraceful.  I have a thousand excuses for not talking at you over the internet for so long, but none of them are very compelling.  So I think I'll just tell you that I was waiting until I had something interesting to say.

Oh, where did we leave off...?  Okay, a few days after my last post, when I still hadn't heard back from NSLI-Y about spending the summer abroad learning a language, my father scanned me a newspaper article advertising this (THANK YOU, Daddy).  It's the same scholarship, but specifically for Maine residents (oh, God, am I a Maine resident?  I'd much prefer to continue to think of myself as visitor after these .... seven years) to go to China.  I sent in the application, kind of on a whim, thinking it would be nice backup for the primary NSLI-Y, about twelve hours before it was due.  On Tuesday night I had a skype interview with a lovely chinese woman who runs some sort of Maine School of Chinese Language and Culture, who kept telling me to break up with my boyfriend without asking if I had one.  It took a while to get a word in and reassure her.  There was also an American woman helping with admissions, and she used to live near my school and I think she approved of me. 

On Wednesday afternoon (oh, my - play-by-play accounts of the week?  No, this will end badly) I got The Email.  The NSLI-Y email. 

"Thank you for applying to the 2011-2012 National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) programs.  The NSLI-Y team recognizes the time and effort you took to complete your application.  Unfortunately, you were not selected to receive a NSLI-Y Scholarship. "

 None of my friends from Turkey last year were accepted to summer programmes!  It's most unfair, because look at this, which was hidden so sneakily on their FAQ page:

Q: Am I eligible if I have already participated in NSLI-Y?

A:  If you have participated on a summer program and are re-applying for the summer, preference will be given to qualified students who have not previously participated on NSLI-Y. Past summer participants are considered highly competitive for semester- and year-long programs in the same language. If you are accepted and you have been on a NSLI-Y program before, be aware that there is a possibility that you will be placed with a different administering organization and/or in a different country.

Well, whatever, I thought.  We'll all have kickass summers whatever.  I called my dad and let him know, cried a bit, stuff like that.  Then, that evening, my mother rang me up from London and told me that she'd gotten an email from the China scholarship people.  She forwarded said letter (I wish they'd just sent it to me) and... um, well:

 

Congratulations!

We are proud to announce that you have been selected as a finalist to participate in the NSLI-Y  program for study and travel in China during the summer 2011.

So, it's not really necessary to say how excited I am about this - or to be telling you, actually.  I started this blog because I was going to Turkey.  This course is a little different, and I don't know everything about it yet - I didn't actually do much research about the programme before applying, but I think I'll take a couple weeks of intensive Chinese classes here, then hop on a plane and skip around China for six weeks.  The interviewers made it sound like we'd see quite a lot of the country.  I know absolutely no chinese and far too little about the culture - I was sort of Middle East focused - but I'm extremely excited to go there, and I'm taking Chinese at school next year. 

So, Wednesday was a shitty day redeemed to the fullest.  You really should have seen me bounding about the dorms, I was - and am - so excited. 

Um... so, sorry to do this whole chronological thing, but YESTERDAY, guess what happened?  Did I tell you I'm playing softball with the local school's team?  There are three girls playing from my school, and though most of the time I've got no clue what I'm doing, I really enjoy it and the other girls are very nice.  They call me London, and when we pass each other in the hallways they yell it out.  It's very sweet. 

Anyway, yesterday at practice, I kind of took a ball to the head.  We were bunting, and it just bounced off the bat and hit me very neatly in the forehead.  What ensued was, in my opinion, a long and drawn-out chain of overreactions on the part of everyone in authority, because I sat down, started to feel sick and tired and dizzy, and was proclaimed likely to be concussed.  After a while of being incessantly talked to and made to respond (they don't let you fall asleep when things hit your head hard, and that was really all I wanted to do), one of the dorm staff came to insist on taking me to the emergency room.  A very long wait and a long story short, I was extremely mildly concussed, dosed up with a lot of painkillers and anti-anxiety pills the combined effect of which made me feel like I'd been hit on the head again, and sent home almost three hours later.  It was not fun, but sleep was sweet.  I'm not allowed to play any sports for a few days, and I feel so tired still that I might just stay in bed today.  But I hope you'll learn from my mistake.  softball is DEADLY. 

Oh, and this is Day of Silence, isn't it?  I hope blogging doesn't count.  I used to have a big problem with this day - isn't speaking up for gay rights a better way to go about it than remaining voiceless as generations of minorities have?  But I think it's a great way to raise awareness, so I'm participating to the best of my ability, ie, not in classes.  If I go to classes.  Hell, I might just sleep today.  We're going home tomorrow for a lovely long week.  And this week was So un-lovely.  Two tests, two quizzes, an English paper and a GMM (Group Math Major - it's evil, don't ask).  I am unbelievably glad it's almost over. 

Well, that's about all.  I'm going back to sleep, and you should, too.

New Amsterdam, It's Become Much Too Much

So... yeah... I haven't written anything in forever.  It's because I don't love you. 

Yesterday the weather was a proper April fools bitch and ruined our weeks-long run of achingly-almost-spring-ness by dumping eleven inches of snow on our heads.  Thanks, babe, much appreciated.  This was a nice short week, though, and now there are only two more until break.  It's almost as if there's a god.  However, today ruined all my (slim) chances of believing such a thing.  This place is a public school, which means we have to have a certain number of school days in order to, you know, get state funding, etc.  So, instead of operating on a normal high school schedule, we occasionally cram mandatory "school days" into weekends.  This is apparently "theme weekend" though nobody's mentioned the theme.  I guess it must be math and science.  What a lovely change.  So, I sat through two hour-long lectures on meteorology and weather broadcasting.  The first one was actually incredibly fun - the guy was from Alabama, said "I'm jus' sayin'..." about three hundred times throughout a lot of different powerpoint presentations that could really have been consolidated, but were okay because they concerned things like storm chasers, nutcases who drive into hurricanes with their video cameras, and what a bitch the TV weather broadcast industry is.  The second one, after lunch... well.  I was honestly fighting to stay awake.  But not very hard.  It wasn't worth it.  He gave up maps of the United States.  We drew lines around pressure zones and things like that in different coloured pencils.  Or we were meant to.  I drew lots of little purple circles. 

I'm getting nervous.  I still haven't heard back from NSLI-Y, and people are starting to.  One of my friends from Turkey last year is an alternate for this year, and I just want to know so that I can get a job if I don't get in.  But I really want to get in.  I don't care where, though India or Tajikistan would be amazing. 

Groucho Marx.  Goddamn genius.  I've been flipping through a book of his personal correspondence, and the man was just so rude to everybody, and so funny!  Observe this excerpt from a letter to some friend of his:

"Years ago I used to have a girl friend who made a pretty good living addressing envelopes for a mail order firm in Hollywood. She used to get five dollars a night for a thousand envelopes and she would knock them off by midnight. The most of the night she spent in the sack with various men friends. She averaged about a hundred dollars a night, five dollars from the mail order business and ninety-five from the female order business. Well, that's about all there is to the story, it was only a brief romance, but I did salvage some of the envelopes for myself. Ah, youth, that it should be wasted on addressing envelopes."

I mean... people just don't write like that any more.  It's crazy. 

I want new headphones, and I can't decide whether I should get some okay earbuds or go all out for a proper headset.  Advice? 

Well, it's Saturday night, which means pretending to do homework.  Chem test on Monday, and so much English.  I finished Great Expectations, but that bitch of a book isn't done with me... there's still an essay, and So Many Notes.  And I liked Estella, which nobody is supposed to do.  So I feel like if I write an essay happily equating feminism with lovelessness... I'll get in trouble.  Gah.  Whatever.  Night.

Men Go Crazy In Congregations, They Only Get Better One By One

I do adore Sting.  My dad would always play a few CDs at home when I was very, very small, whenever he was in a good mood or... something.  The Beatles #1 hits, a Nanci Griffith album, some Simon and Garfunkel, and Sting.  

So she took her love for to gaze a while, upon the fields of barley/ in his arms she fell as her hair came down, among the fields of gold. 

There are just a few things I don't think I will ever, ever get tired of.  That album, Fields of Gold.  The Lion King.  Salmon roe.  Russian dolls, Andy Warhol, marble notebooks, the mechanical pencils with the thick, thick leads that always lived on my daddy's drafting table (I'm fairly certain he's the only architect left in the world who has never heard of Google Sketchup), waffle weave shirts.  A couple people (you should know who you are).  

He who hesitates is last.

-Mae West

No shit, darling.  I adore Mae West.  So sexy, so clever, so unashamed of her body and unafraid to shock people.  I want to be Mae West when I grow up.  If I have to grow up.  Though sometimes that sounds pretty attractive, because surely grownups don't deal with the shit I deal with in high school?  Surely.  Okay, I'm done being silly now.

Oh, hello, again, darlings.  I'm so glad to know you're here.  And proving it, too!  You can tell I'm three years old and just met the internet, because I get really, really excited every time a single comment shows up on here.  So, thank you for making a sixteen-year-old geek who was born in the wrong decade (am I too young to say "at least the 90s are over"?) so very, very happy.  I don't mind being a bit of a cliché.

In other news: Ugh, Monday.  I have actually been quite productive this structured study period, so I'm taking the last half hour to write to you.  I begged off of swim team today, feeling quite genuinely sick.  We all are.  My hands and lips are cracked and bleeding, all I want to do is snuggle into my blankets, but my room is freezing and too full of foods I don't really have an appetite for but will eat anyway and then feel sick because of.  I want to bathe in warm olive oil.  I want to see the sun.  I want to eat fresh fish and ripe fruit and cake baked by someone other than me... I guess I want it to be summer, and I want this place not  to be Aroostook County.  Because the combination of winter and snow and wind and a tiny dorm full of a hundred-odd teenagers, many of whom kiss at least one other person rather a lot, and a crazy stressful school schedule turns out to be quite conducive to illness.  Who knew?  I want to lock myself in my room, but I'm too social and can't afford to miss maths.  I'm going to be all right (You hear that, you bloody bastard?!  I AM going to be all right!  I am!).  I have to be.  Because there's a swim meet on Wednesday.  

The meet on Saturday went quite well, considering that I hadn't been to one since seventh grade.  I made a 33-second 50 yard freestyle, and we did all right in the relays as well.  But it was    such    a    long    way.  Longer than it takes me to get home, and that's a couple hundred miles.  So, we left at about 9 am and got back well after midnight.  I kicked my shoes off, took out my contacts and fell into bed without even brushing out my oh-so-chlorinated hair.  

Woke up nice and late yesterday, had breakfast and proceeded to Do Nothing the rest of the day.  I really kind of hate Sundays here, because everybody else is working and I don't have the ethic, and it was too cold to go down to the shop and I couldn't have used the kitchen anyway, because there were people in it - in MY kitchen!  What the hell?  Anyway, I just sort of felt sorry for my lonely little self like a lonely little loser yesterday, and then wasted structured talking with friends.  Which is SO much more worth my time than stupid maths homework.  Honestly.  

Oh, but one fabulously hilarious thing did happen.  I don't know if you'll appreciate it, not knowing the girl who said this, but anyway... the instrumental ensemble class met for a few minutes on Sunday afternoon to distribute music, etc, and as we were all coming out of the school, I, in my grip-less flats, slipped on the compacted snow and fell flat on my face.  I've got this big bruise on my hip now.  But I must have been swearing a bit as I got up - my usual routine is something like "Oh, shit, fuck, what the fucking hell, JESUS!" - and after I'd brushed myself off, this girl said to me "I thought Jewish people swore to Moses."  I felt so much better after that.  Falling on your ass, then laughing it off, is wonderful.

And God I love food studies.  We sit.  In a room.  And talk about food.  And food in modern culture.  And food in history.  And non-food... read this article and be outraged, okay?  It is, as my teacher put it, a food hookah (makes me miss Turkey, actually) and the most completely stupid idea ever.  People don't just crave flavours.  If you're not full, you're still hungry, fool.  And you will eat.  

Oh, but speaking of Turkey-ish things!  Interview tomorrow.  Wish me luck, my dears.  Send some good vibes north at about 6:30 Eastern time, would you?  Tajikistan/ Egypt/ India, here I might come!  

Okay, this is a stupid post, because I have nothing very exciting to tell you about that I can tell you about - yeah, you thought you knew everything.  SORRY, babes.  Anyway, I'm nearly done with my DC video and have a ukulele one in the making, too.  

Okay, Jew question: there are lots of things I don't get about the Jesus Concept, but I think I'm fairly certain that people are always saying that he "died for everyone's sins" and stuff.  If he died to atone for everybody's sins, why can't Christians just go around doing whatever the hell they like?  If they've got to keep being sexually oppressive and intolerant and trying to convert people and stuff, what was the point of the Messiah dying?  Hell, now I'm going to get a lot of angry comments from the religious right.  Do you have any idea how many Christian family blogs there are out there?  Sick.

We Are Stardust; Billion Year Old Carbon

So.  Library of Congress.  Pretty damn sexy.  I'm gathering material for another video, but so far all I've got are some artless pictures of the capitol, and a few subway shots.  The D.C. stations have curved ceilings, and it really feels as if you're walking inside a big tube... I've been imagining myself in the veins of a whale, but I'm just a geek.  Anyway, to keep the wolves at bay:

 

(Okay, also of the LOC's Jefferson Building.  And my Christmas tights)

 

I've been transcribing lots and lots of interviews with master violin makers, many of whom have impossibly thick German accents.  As a non-violin playing, part time classical music-listener, I'm learning a lot, but it sometimes gets a little dry.  Far more exciting for me is the two-disc "primer" of international jazz that the Library's jazz curator (they have a curator of jazz.  A full time specialist curator of jazz.  This man... I will meet him next week.  He unearthed all these John Coltrane/Thelonious Monk recordings nobody knew existed.  And these discs, especially the Brazilian stuff... he has amazing taste).  But this weekend should be fun.  Tomorrow I'm planning to meet up with a couple friends from Turkey!  Americans who were on that programme with me.  One lives a little outside D.C, and another's at college in New York but in town for the weekend... so glad I picked up on his facebook feed.  And on Sunday, my godfather's taking me to Thomas Jefferson's old house, Monticello.  By all accounts it's an architectural marvel with beautiful grounds, and of course the history is fascinating, so I'm very glad about that.

So, I know I'm throwing lots of videos at you lately, but I guess it's just how I'm relaxing these days.  You get my leftovers, but I think today's is pretty damn fantastic.  

 

Video - Call To Prayer

This is from one of my favourite web comics, Cat and Girl.  I thought, given the way I've indulged in the belowmentioned sweet this summer, I might post it to see if anyone else thinks it's funny. 

And, now that I'm back in the states where there's no national YouTube block, I can give you videos!  Here is the call to prayer, finally.

Home Again - Temporarily

Ah, well.  I suppose this is just a time to catch my breath between Turkey and School.  It's all so impossibly short.  But hey.  I am back on my laptop, and the funny thing is that I'm having trouble adjusting back to US keyboards!  I keep reaching up to the 1 key to type an apostrophe, and I'm almost nostalgic for all those ı characters now.

Home is a funny place to be now.  The last six weeks were full of a lot of food, music and new friends - people I feel incredibly fortunate to have met.  I have been conscious in the last few days of just smiling at one memory or another, and having to snap out of it quickly before somebody decides I'm in love or up to no good.

I miss Turkey, and everything is still so fresh in my mind that I can't quite convince myself in the mornings that instead of going to school to see Arzu Hanım and wander Ankara with my friends, I am going to go downstairs, see the granola in production, and leave to babysit my darling five month-old friend from New York , and prepare for school, something I'd completely put off thinking about while in Turkey.  It's not that I'm not happy to be home.  I am.  But when I get on my computer, all I want to do is look at photos from this summer, and all I want to speak to people about is Turkey, in turkish.  Part of my head thinks I'm still there, but Im slowly catching on.  Today I will eat no simit from street stalls, catch no sweaty buses, and I probably won't even sweat. 

After my host family went to America, I moved in with my grandparents.  They and my eight-year-old cousin from İstanbul, who was also staying with them, don't speak much English, which was great for me.  I caught a dolmuş home in the afternoons instead of the bus, which was a little different and fun for the three days I had to do it, and, despite my host mother's fears that I would be fed to death, it was all great.  

Last Friday (I can't believe I was so far away a week ago) we had a party at school, with cake and certificates and many hugs with our teachers and waiter and a lot of photos.  The previous day we'd given Arzu Hanım a present - a lovely vase, flowers and a framed picture of the class and her, from my camera, and everything was pretty fantastic.

Actually, though, it was what happend after school on Friday that made the day a little special.  I walked a different route to Kızılay with two classmates, and we found ourselves looking at the magnificent Kocatepe Mosque, perhaps Ankara's only beautiful building.  A man came up to us on the street and somehow we ended up following him inside this mosque, which was perhaps even as stunning as the Aya Sofia and Sultan Ahmet ones in İstanbul.  We left our shoes at the door and I and my friend - the other was (and still is, I suppose) a boy - were brought headscarves, and god.  That place was beautiful in a way that made me understand religion a little bit.  If there was a faith centred on building places like that, I would be a crazed believer.

We are Americans.  This means that every experience, every day, no matter how authentic, fascinating or ethnically correct, must include Starbucks.  We walked to the one on Kızılay.  It was there that this gorgeous baby girl who was just learning to walk stumbled up to us and started to play with me.  Maybe I was still high on that mosque, but she made me so happy just by putting her snacks in my lap and letting me feed them to her, and after a few minutes, her mother called me 'abla'.  Big sister.  Lovely.

(I'm making it sound as if I really adore babies, aren't I?  Actually, I don't... they're here, and I'm here, and we get along all right, but don't pull my hair too hard or it's back to Mama.)

It was there that the goodness stopped, though.  I walked from Starbucks with a friend to his apartment to pick up his power adaptor so that I could charge my camera before going to İstanbul the next day, and on my way back to catch the dolmuş I saw a kid get hit by a car.

Turks drive like maniacs, and I heard a scream on the other side of the street and saw this little girl - she must have been about six - on the asphalt with the wheel of a taxi almost on top of her.  A huge crowd gathered as her mother grabbed her and dragged her to the pavement.  They were both screaming, which was a relief - at least the poor thing was alive.  I didn't realize until later that i understood what her mother was screaming at the taxi driver, as I watched people check this child over, pour water on her, pull out their mobile phones to call an ambulance.  I was thoroughly shocked, but there were at least fifty people there and I couldn't be of any help.  I carried on getting home, but was really shaky the rest of the afternoon.

That night, or the next morning really, at 1:30 am, we all met up at the bus station to catch our otobus to İstanbul.  I said goodbye to my grandparents and got on, and we all drifted in and out of consciousness for seven hours.  Then we got to İstanbul and I wished I'd slept solidly,  because what followed was a half hour of lugging overpacked bags through that crazy city, which, at eight in the morning, was just beginning to spill its hungover soul back into the streets and start to party again.

What followed was a day of sickness, reunitation with the İstanbul NSLI-Y crowd (we were a lucky group - they fought the whole six weeks and there was some t e n s i o n), more Starbucks, a gorgeous nighttime boat tour of the Bosphorus, and crazed hanging out in hotel rooms until five in the morning.

I was not destined to sleep the next day, either, for flights are delayed and shit happens.  And the strangest thing happened after we had 'de-planed'.  What a word.  Anyway, a turkish woman heard me talking to one of the other AFSers about my school, and she interrupted to say she knew it!  Turned out, she was a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology and had a student who went to MSSM a few years ago!  The world just keeps getting smaller...

Anyway, I'm home now and have far too much to do.  I have to go now, so I'll put a thousand pictures on this post later.

Oh, and isn't this just the Summer of Gay Rights?  Argentina, Mexico, now California again?  Keep it coming!

Hoş çakal!

Leaving

Well, this may be the last opportunity I have to post until I get back to the States.  We fly on Sunday, but my host family is actually off to America for a holiday tomorrow, so I'm staying with my host-grandparents until Friday night.  Our bus to İstanbul leaves Ankara at 1:30 am Saturday.  I am stunned by this information and have no comprehension of why anyone let alone (or even?  Some of them are pretty nuts) AFS would schedule such a thing.  No matter, we shall reach İstanbul early and spend an exhausting day basking in its glory before flying home Sunday.  I'm excited to see the İstanbul NSLI-Y group, and the other AFS Turkey summer people who weren't on this scholarship, and the 12 days I have at home are something I'm looking forward to

(Things I am going to eat: blueberries, rare meat, spelt bread, lobster, Maine mussels, greens from my family's garden, pork, distinct from bacon, and a lot of fruit desserts)

And I'm half-scared, half-excited for this nutty school I'm going to.  But, guys, I've just spent my summer in Türkiye.  I am just beginning to feel confident with this language, as if I could really do well if I could study it more.  The heat doesn't bother me as much as it used to - at the beginning of this trip, every day on the bus I would feel this slick of sweat on my back just slide hotly and roll down the backs of my legs, and now I can actually make it through the day conscious of something other than 'God, what did this part of the world do to deserve this?' - and I adore the food like nothing else.  The people are friendly and, for the most part, not too creepy, and I love my family and my teacher and my new friends. 

Oh, I dıdn't realıse I was leavıng NOW. 
Bye.

İstanbul, The Drug (Alternatively, Give Me A Bag Of Hot Chestnuts And I'm Yours Forever)

It was not a weekend you'd want to get in a fight with.  Thankfully, we got on quite well, and the only blow it dealt was to whatever energy reserves I had left after four weeks here.  And, don't mısunderstand me, that was a blow I'm stıll recovering from now, on Thursday, but, god, ıt was worth it.  İstanbul... imagine whatever you've heard about that heady, glorious, ancient, modern, ridiculous, exquisite city, and then think of your most recent sauna experience.  İstanbul never sleeps.  hiç.

Kapadokia, with notes on How To Deal With Bus-Stop Creeps

Ah, so much that's gone on.... sorry ıt's been so long sınce I posted.  My host sıster and father were away thıs week, but my host mother and I stıll were very busy and I couldn't seem to get to thıs.  Last week I was approached twice ın a really uncool, not-flatterıng way at the Kızılay bus stop by turkish guys... the first saw me snapping pictures while waiting for the bus, which is how I got this one of him, and he wanted to know my phone number and, I think, where I lived.  The second time I didn't let it get that far and just looked at the ground when he came up to me and started to ask me if I spoke English... It's not as if my clothes are particularly revealing, the way I dress is downright conservative when you compare my clothes to those of some of the turkish women on the street.  And I don't generally engage with people, except to ask for the occasional photo or, you know, buy something to eat.  But when I'm alone (sometimes one of the NSLI-Y guys catches the bus at the same time, and nobody comes near girls when they're with boys or men) and tall and kind of fluorescent compared with everyone around me, I guess I just stıck way out. 

(Actually, a lot of people here try to speak to me ın German...especıally when I'm sunburned!)

In better news, Kapadokia!  I went on Saturday with a neighbor's brother who's in the State department here.  We left ankara at seven in the morning, and drove for three hours, with a quick detour to Turkey's enormous Salt Lake (no mormons there, though).  For some reason (halophilic bacteria, maybe?) it looks reddish from a distance, but when you get your feet wet ıt's clear and sparkly, and the salt beach has only the faintest tinge of pink.  Yes, I dıd taste ıt and it ıs ridiculously, burnıngly salty, and the lake bottom was sharp!  This enormous lake, so big you can't see across it, is about a metre deep at ıts deepest poınt.  Great thing to see. 

İf you don't know about Kapadokia (sometimes also spelled wıth 'c', but that makes a /j/ sound in turkısh so I'm using the native spelling), ıt's all these incredible volcanically-formed cones of rock with caves and cathedrals carved into them and, less famously but equally importantly, underground cities honeycombed into the mountains.  It wsa mostly christians who lived in these caves, a couple thousand years ago, and some of these mountain-churches still have paintings intact.  I was shocked by how un-touristy some of the places were.  We went to one absolutely spectacular spot with caves and paintings and saw two turkish famılıes.  On a summer Saturday afternoon with beautiful weather and barely any charge at all to get in.  Honestly, it was about 5 Lira.

                       

Brief sentence in which I am happy that the BP oil mess has been capped, that Argentina has legalized gay marriage and adoption, and that the Obamas visited Bar Harbor, ME, about an hour from where I live, all in the last week. 

I taught my host mother to make pie-crust spiral cookies - just the type made out of leftover dough and cinnamon sugar - and she took some to her office last week.  One of the people who work under hre, who graduated from the Cordon Bleu cooking school, asked for the recipe!  I was so delighted to hear that, because I really like my pie crust and I've worked on the recipe a lot. 

We of NSLI fame have also discovered a new place to have drinks after school.  It's sort of faux-hawaiian, but ıt doesn't matter because the smoothies are so good, and ıt's at the top of a very steep hill, so they're actually heaven after the climb.  Lots of fun, and now I must go to bed. 

Another Poşt Fröm Thış Weırd Keyboard

Merhaba...good news! I was checkıng to see ıf I could access blogger from this computer (the one in my room) and, for some reason, I now can log in, which I wasn't able to do before. This is great. I don't have to borrow my anne's laptop now and email myself every picture I want to put up... slow file exchanges are never fun, so to celebrate this marvelous event I have decided to put up a short video. It's rather unprofessional - I took it on my Lumix* after a walk one night... but I want you to hear what the call to prayer sounds like. There are loads of mosques in this city, and it sounds slıghtly different from each one - they use loudspeakers with different recordings, I think.

Aaah, ıt's not working...I'll keep trying, though!

 Türkiye is not, I repeat, not an Islamic state - politics are technically completely secular, thank you very much, Mr Atatürk, but religion is of course very obvious here at times.  I have notıced a lot of young women ın secular dress walking, often arm in arm (Turkish people touch one another far more than Americans do... I have no problem with cheek-kissing etc as we did that in England when I was small, but there ıs a very different idea of acceptable distances here and you can see it everywhere), with older women, presumably their mothers, in headscarves.  I think this is really interesting... A sign of a changing society? 

Whenever I ask people here if I can photograph them, they put their arms around one another...another way Turks are more openly affectionate, I suppose. Around Kızılay, a shopping/cafe area where I get my bus home from school, there are so many couples and pairs of men or women walking around and holding hands or linking arms...

 I just wısh I'd gotten their shoes in this shot. 

Other than the computer's epiphany - it wants to help me! - things are going on as before.  I can't call any of it normal, because it's so special, but it's great.  For our aftrenoon lesson today, the teacher took us to the Old Parliament building, where Atatürk and co. dıd a lot of figuring out.  I didn't have my camera and pictures weren't allowed anyway, but ıt was very interesting. 

I feel so great here.  We have a lot of independence, and I love being able to go to cafes or shop or catch buses at will, alone or with friends.  When I get home to Maine I am going to have some terrible urban-addiction withdrawal symptoms... and just a week or two after I get home, I start at my new school, MSSM.  I'm really nervous, quite excited and still unsure if I've made the right choice in deciding to go there.  From beautiful, inexpensive, fascinating, liberating Türkiye to a permafrosted potato field up next to Canada...oh, well.  I suppose I ought to get off the computer and enjoy this while it lasts...actually, I should get off the computer and do my homework.  We're finally getting into verbs, and I have so many to learn.

Not quite sure what my family's plans are for this weekend...I have lots of homework to do, but I'll post if I'm able to.

I hope that your day is as interesting and less hot than mine.

İyi günler!

A Post With A Ridiculous Number Of Pictures

Selam, everyone.  It's the end of a beautiful hot day, and I'm packing right now.

AFS has very strict rules about what you can bring, and I have to keep my luggage under 44 pounds.  I'm culling my clothing selections to make room for the America and Maine-themed things I'm bringing my family.

On Saturday night, I went with my family to dinner with some friends who used to live in Turkey.  They put on a wonderful evening, and we watched a slideshow of photographs projected on a sail outside.  It kept billowing back and forth in the wind, and we made a lot of jokes about all the earthquakes in Turkey.  We ate the most delicious turkish food - grilled meat, aubergine, and feta cheese wrapped in phyllo and deep fried.  I made baklava for the first time, and was very pleased with the way it came out.

I spent yesterday with two lovely friends from the AFS orientation.  One of them, Silvia, is from Indonesia and going home next weekend after a whole year in Augusta.  The other, Danielle, lives here in Maine and is going to Turkey on NSLI-Y as well, for a semester.

We cooked Indonesian fried rice, which was absolutely delicious, and a lovely syrupy middle-eastern dessert.  Silvia stayed the night, and only just left.  I went to work babysitting for a couple hours while she hung out with my mum and some other mothers and kids at my house, and when I got back we went to the beach.  We waded, caught hermit crabs, and drew maps in the sand of the US, Indonesia and Turkey.

We also wrote our names in the sand.  She did hers in Arabic, and I wrote my hebrew name, לאה (Leah).  I think Arabic is far more güzel than Hebrew.

Some guys from my school showed up at the beach, and I introduced her, and when we left we put flowers on their various cars (identifiable by the college bumper stickers they sport.  Notable is the Harvard convertible) for them to find.  Then we went kayaking, which Silvia had never tried before.  She got quite good at it, and we were very happy and tired by the end.

I am SO excited about going to Turkey.  I fly to New York the day after tomorrow for the orientation, and on Friday to İstanbul!  I've found my host mother and sister, Didem and Alkım, on facebook and we've added each another as family.  They seem so nice, I just can't wait to meet them.  My host father is a chemical engineer, my anne studied psychology and works as a sales manager, and Alkım loves rock and plays the piano.  They've been to London, too, which is really great since I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

These rocks are just some pictures I took at the beach, but I am so enamored of the sharpness achieved by the Lumix that I couldn't help it - even if I kind of am echoing Ian's posts.  Whatever, he does it better.  In any case, I implore you to click on these to enlarge them and marvel.

And with that, my dears (sevgilim in Türkçe), I must away to my suitcase and figure out how to make it all weigh something that I am capable of lugging around Türkiye on my own (I'll have you know that I lugged some pretty damn heavy kayaks today, through the stickiest mud thusfar traversed by womankind).  I'll try to fit in another post before I leave, and then I'll be writing from Ankara!  I imagine that I'll be quite a mess when I first get there, so you must bear with me.  And just because this is a post with a ridiculous number of pictures, I'll throw in just one more:

İyi geceler.

Illustrated News

Merhaba again, everyone. This is utterly shameful. You are going to think I have absolutely nothing to do, no friends, no life in general, which isn't really true. But I am thoroughly in love with my camera and want to show you everything, and, this being another ridiculously hot day for Maine (it was 90° Fahrenheit yesterday!), I have opted to stay inside and edit photographs just for you. Above are two pictures from the farmers market, my first attempts at food photography. Black and white in Türkçe is siyah ve beyaz.

Below, I demonstrate to you the inconceivably amazing powers of the Lumix. The two cropped shots are just that - little zoom-ins from the original pictures, and look how sharp they still are! I am totally in awe of this. I also like the smaller shot of the arm and hand because, if you don't see the original and don't know these two friends of mine, it's hard to figure out whether the hand and arm belong to the same person.

News: only 4 days until I leave! I didn't receive a reply about my host family, but the old information has appeared back on the site, so I'm guessing there was just some kind of glitch on the AFS web site. I've also gotten an email from my host mother! It's just a short note, in slightly broken english, but very sweet... I can't wait to meet them. My sister in Ankara is 13, just like my sister here, my father is 39 and my mother isn't telling her age - in a goodnatured and humourous sort of way. She says "we look forward you to be a member of our familiy" Well, me too. I am çok excited.

I'm not babysitting today, so maybe I'll go to the beach. I kind of feel like finding a butterfly to photograph, too. And I must do some RosettaStone... If you know how to download video files from cameras, please do leave a comment. I can't figure it out. Teşekkurler!











Tamam (that means OK, I just learned it), Güle güle!

Some More Pictures

So, evet. More photos. I don't know anything about editing, I'm really just messing about, but it's so much fun! Observe original chintzy --> overexposed trippy flower arrangement. I really want to get into food photography, too. I think my camera has settings for it, but I ought to just get good at making things look right. There's a massive number of excellent food photos at SmittenKitchen, if anybody's interested.

I'll soon show you the amazing sharpness that the Lumix manages by giving you a couple cropped shots, along with their originals. The focus is so perfect, despite the fact that the cropped ones are magnified a million times over...a shot of somebody's hand, taken from a photo of a whole kitchen, and there's no discernible difference in quality. I guess that's what 12.1 megapixels get you. I just have to get the permission of the friends in the photos...

But for now, here's something which is, in my totally unqualified opinion, a lovely piece of food photography. I didn't take it, but I made the cake.

One point that's actually related to the theme of this blog (though, really, who am I fooling?): I had my host family, as you know, and I was really excited. But I've checked my AFS account again, and they seem to have taken the info down. I don't know if this is a mistake, or means that I'm not with that family any longer, so I've sent an email to the NSLI-Y people. I'll let you know what goes down.

Hoşçakal