My Arrival!

I have finally arrived in Turkey! My flights all went very smoothly, and Lufthansa was a nice airline. I met a pretty elderly woman on the plane to Ankara who spoke with a heavy Kentucky accent, but it turned out the she was not only fluent in Turkish, but had a Turkish husband and a son living in Ankara. She was very sweet and gave me good advice.

I was met at the airport by my host father and brother, as well as the local Rotary Club president and his wife. Everyone was very sweet, and we visited shortly before I was driven to my current home by my brother, Kivanç (pronounced Kee-VANCH). I met my very darling host mother. She gave me fresh fruit while she and the neighbor chatted, and my brother and I tried to work out my wi-fi situation. She also gave me these incredible, flaky, savory sesame cookies that she had made, and just now, she fed me a delicious lady-finger/lemon bar sort of thing. She asked me to mention the lemon bar thing, because I told her how much I loved it and that is was Çok lezzetli, or very delicious!

I took a shower before going to the local Rotary Club's weekly dinner/meeting. It was held in a really nice hotel close to the center of the city, and we ate poolside on the rooftop surrounded by beautiful lanterns elaborate place settings. There, I met my Youth Exchange Officer, Çiğdem (pronounced Chi-DEM), and she sort of took me under her wing, showing me around, introducing me, and giving me live translations. She was very kind. Like may of the woman I have met so far in Turkey, she wore a lot of makeup and had long manicured nails and smoked a lot of cigarettes. Also, more than half of our table smoked three cigareetes or more during the meal. Wild. But still, she was really helpful, and I'm grateful. I think that she is taking me to get a manicure next week? They're only about ten dollars in Turkey...

I gave a short speech during the formal meeting part of the dinner, and everyone was very, very nice. As usual.

So, at this hotel, I was practically having a conniption over the amount of incredible food. It was like the Greek festival on crack. I counted, and on this open square of long tables that they have, probably only about twenty feet long on each side, they had out over 60 different dishes and appetizers. Two types of olives, four types of white cheese, four kinds of yogurt, all different meats and spreads and so much dried fruit! Fresh fruit and at least twenty other sweets and cakes made up the incredible dessert table, including candied pears, fruit pudding, and kiwi and sesame cookies. There was a whole separate juice and tea table as well, and I drank at least five cups of Turkish tea that meal. Because it's Ramazan, the Muslim 30 days of fasting, they have out specific high sugar foods that help raise low blood sugars after people have fasted from sunrise to sunset. For instance, they have about ten types of jams, fig, raspberry, etc, to just spoon into little bowls and eat. OH, and every meal always begins with a soup, with was AMAZING. The service/waitstaff was so good as to almost be overbearing, and the decadence in terms of amount of food and options was incredible. And all of it was SO DELICIOUS and SO Turkish. They had this pomegranate extract stuff to pour over salad to make it a little sour, and best of all, was this stuff called kaymak (pronounced kai-MAK). It is very, very thick, thicker than mayonnaise, and is just pure cream and butter. I think it must be some kind of clotted cream. And they served it besides a huge platter of raw honey, with the wax hives still in it. It was incredible. My dad said we are going to go to the store and get some for me to have for breakfast. Ahhhh.

My parents live one of the nice, tenement-style little apartment buildings just outside the city center. There are literally hundreds of these all over and around the city. The city itself is sprawled out, hot, crazy, and dry. There are so many signs in Turkish, it looks like the faces of the concrete buildings have been spammed with advertisements.

I have an amazing view of the city/surrounding valley from my room. The city looks like a long strip extending out from the center when your driving along it, but suddenly you round the corner and see that it just drops off on both sides by hundreds of feet into these huge, sprawling valleys filled with apartments and buildings glittering against the barren, summer-dried hills. I have never seen a landscape like this. The hills go on as far as you can possibly see. The trees are few and go straight up, like shaggy green popsicles stuck all over a sandbox. At night, the view is incredible from my room. I can see for miles and miles. Just the look of the land seems so foreign, but the incredible hospitality of all of the people I have met really soften this city's still-foreign edge.

Turkey is hosting the world basketball championships this week/today, and so there are all these funny basketball statues all over town. We watched on live TV while Turkey beat Greece! It is really funny watching the Turkish news and ads, especially when they voice-over clips of American senators. I am noticing while I write this, by the way, that after only a few hours of trying to think and spell and write and speak in Turkish, my English spelling attempts have been silly and abysmal.

My mom, Fatma, and I just spent the last three hours teaching each other words and looking things up in my many dictionaries. They bought me a bunch of guide books about Turkey and Ankara! So sweet. Fatma and I are already really close, it feels like, and we laughed a lot while I tried to teach her Ingiliz (pronounced EEN-gill-eez) and she tried to teach me Turkce (pronounced TURK-cheh).

I hope this isn't too long!

In love and excitement,

Natalya