David Beckham in Salzburg

This is a travel blog, and I definitely think of myself as a traveller. However, now that I'm back to life in America, there has been no travelling and therefore not much to blog about. Every day, I dream about leaving as soon as I can (next fall at the latest), and my current fantasies are Svalbard, Norway; Irkutsk and the Sakha Republic, Russia; Cape Town, South Africa; and anywhere outside of the US with indigenous languages that need preserving.

However, blogging about my future travel plans is probably not very interesting to anyone. Last night I had a very vivid travel dream, so I guess if I can't travel in real life and blog about it, I can dream about travelling and blog about it. So here it is.

It was a beautiful sunny day in Salzburg (that's how I knew it was a dream), and I was shopping in the Linzergasse and looking at the cheap Central Asian bazaar clothes on display with my parents and my brother. We headed towards Theatergasse and were standing on a grassy median between the lanes of traffic. David Beckham (when he was still young and good at football) was standing there and doing some sort of demonstration, and I caught a fly baseball that he had thrown. He congratulated me: "Great catch! As a reward, you get to make the first kick at the season opening Galaxy game next year. What do you want to rename the team? Anna's Galaxy? The NHL Galaxy? (that's what all Americans call us!) The USA Galaxy?"

Then my alarm woke me up from this very realistic scenario of discussing a football/baseball/hockey sport with David Beckham in Salzburg and I was back to real life in Minneapolis, where snow and apathy reign supreme.

Tattoo ideas

I have been dreaming of a new tattoo for ages, and spent last night searching for pictures. These are some options, but I'm still so undecided! I just want them all...

Looks Are What Really Matter

Now that the World Cup is again upon us and I am for the first time very interested in football, I decided to blog about the only aspect of the game I feel comfortable commenting on - good looks! Using this handy dandy website with all the athletes' pictures, I looked at all the competitors and chose the 10 cutest in my opinion, based solely on these photos. (Cristiano Ronaldo, Frank Lampard, Nadir Belhadj and Nani, to name a few, are good looking in real life but didn't make the list because their World Cup pictures are less-than-attractive.)


1. Samara
2. Boateng
3. Afellay
4. Ljubijankic
5. Ziani


I don't even want to say the rest of the top 10 guys belong on the same list since they are much less attractive than the top 5, but when it comes to footballers I'm sorry to say but there are pretty slim pickings! Besides, leaving this as a Top 10 rather than a Top 5 will better showcase popular opinion which says that my taste in men is terrible. 


6. Muslera
7. Beto
8. Silva
9. Jedinak
10. Vela


Who would be in your top 10?

You Know You're in America When...

You hear this sentence uttered in all seriousness:

"He's the most dudiest dude douche of a bro."

Happy Marriage!

 My AFS friend Nick visited Istanbul for a week. He studied TESL at the University of Minnesota like I did and has a teaching internship in Berlin for the summer, so when he asked if he could shadow me one day at work of course I let him. In my last week of a long year at a private Turkish primary school, I figured he should see really naughty kids in action before he decides to be a teacher for the long haul.

I introduced him to my coworkers and my first class as "my friend Nick from America." The students immediately took this to mean that he was my lover/boyfriend/husband and spent the entire lesson writing us notes congratulating us on our wedding. Google Translate didn't give me anything useful (the horrible "I just learned how to write" penmanship didn't help)  but they say things along the lines of "Happy Wedding" and "I wish you a happy life together."  (The one ending with Hehhh... is especially intriguing!) I also broke the news to them that Friday is my last day of teaching, so they assumed that Nick had come to Istanbul to pick me up. They were sad to hear I was leaving and told Nick that he could go home but I had to stay. :)

In order to avoid the chaos of that first class, I told all subsequent classes that he was my brother. It was easily believed since we both are pale, skinny and blue-eyed (not to mention gorgeous and extremely fashionable) but I only realized afterwards that if the classes gossip about the stranger at school and find out that he is my brother AND my boyfriend, they will have a very skewed idea of what is socially acceptable in America. Let's hope their class teachers cleared things up before the went home and told their parents that Anna Teacher was marrying her brother! (Although, I might score some expensive wedding gifts before I leave...)

Luuuurve

One of my friends had this as her facebook status update:


why i am happy with my boyfriend (is this a lame status update?):

because he laughs at my hairy legs when others are disgusted.
then waxes them when my own attempts fail.

Could just be my mood of late, but the cuteness made me cry. What better way is there to describe love in 30 words?

Good Advice

I have been trying for a few weeks to write a blog about my current living situation (titled 8 Simple Rules For Living With Your Ex) but I am still much too close emotionally to it all to be able to express myself clearly. I often read the photocomic Surviving the World and came across this one today. This basically sums up a lot of what I wanted to say in my blog but in a much more succinct, less boring and definitely less bitchy way.

Funny

I have been looking for a while for a non-souveniry Istanbul t-shirt, and luckily for me, many of the Turkish clothing companies have had Turkey/Istanbul-themed shirts this season. Many were ugly, some were too glittery, and they were all too expensive. Until I found this one today:

5TL, flattering cut, beautiful Galata Tower, good colour, random words "Child dreams Istanbul" and, best of all, a cartoon PIG on the left! All in all a very good birthday present to myself.

Viva la Revolución!

Not to toot my own horn (toot toot!), but thanks to me, most of you know more than the average person does about Kyrgyzstan (for starters, you know it IS a country, it's not Kurdistan, and you know more or less where it is). Now, thanks to the recent revolution and worldwide news coverage, you know even more than before and your ears probably perked up when you heard the reporter stumbling over all those consonants.

During my time in Kyrgyzstan, there was a lot of talk about a possible revolution. We waited and secretly hoped it would happen to throw some excitement into our lives, but nothing ever happened. The day it was supposed to happen was rainy and people just couldn't be arsed. I was quite surprised when I heard that on April 7th (probably a sunny day) the Kyrgyz men were up out of their Asian squats and ready for political change. Gas and electric prices had skyrocketed, corruption was getting out of control and people were sick of it. It started out as a mostly peaceful demonstration outside the White House. Things got out of hand as they often do when vodka and policemen in riot gear with automatic weapons are involved, and tragically 85 people were killed. It's been said that the president's brother gave the police the command to start shooting protestors. In the end, Bakiev was ousted, the interim government is being led by a woman (!) Roza Otunbaeva and millions of dollars were lost by businesses as a result of horrible looting. Roza must come a shock to many of my Kyrgyz students who said that a woman's only place is at home raising children.

I was worried about my friends there and sad to see what had happened to the already poor country, so I was disappointed to see reports like this:

Kyrgyzstan’s capital is under siege in a brutal riot that appears to have ousted Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the brutal leader who himself came to power in the Tulip Revolution.

Oh, and if your reaction is, “Who the hell cares about Kyrgyzstan?” recall that Manus Air Base is the key transit point for US and NATO resupply in Afghanistan.
(from here)

First of all, it's the Manas airbase. Secondly, why is something only newsworthy when the US is involved? The world does not revolve around the US, contrary to what some people seem to think. People losing their lives while standing up for something they believe in is something to care about, regardless of how small or 'insignificant' the country is.

On this site is a video of the state that Vefa Centre was in following the revolution and looting. Vefa Centre was the big Turkish shopping mall just down the road from where I lived and I visited it more than once a day for groceries, dinner, phone credit, or money changing. Sad.

And to me, this poignant picture sums up the entire revolution: Kyrgyz men, police, death and kalpaks.

( Vyacheslav Oseledko / AFP/Getty Images / April 7, 2010 )

Bakiev was put in power as the result of the peaceful Tulip Revolution of 2005 that ousted Askar Akaev, the leader since the fall of the Soviet Union. (Akaev is happily in exile working as a physics professor in Moscow. Bakiev dreams of opening a toy store in his post-presidential exile-life. He'll no doubt find a way to steal money from the store and the children who shop there.) Bakiev had promised to develop the country and avoid corruption but clearly forgot that even before the looted buildings had been cleaned up. I hope that Roza Otunbaeva and the interim government stay true to their promises and avoid the path of corruption. Long-suffering Kyrgyzstan finally needs to be given a break.

Genocide?

I am really not a political-minded person, but living in Turkey one is surrounded by controversial and interesting political news. I hope I don't offend anyone with the following post... (and when I say 'Turks' I, of course, don't mean 'all Turks,' but rather 'many Turks')

Everyone knows the saying, 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' Life in Turkey has shown me that a word can be worth a lot too. April 24th, 2010 marked the 95th anniversary of the killing of hundreds of Armenians by Ottomans following World War I. Most people would call it a genocide but Turks refuse to acknowledge it as such. Instead, they see it an unfortunate after-effect of WWI where both Turks and Armenians slaughtered each other. Since 1915, there have been strained relations between Turkey and Armenia because of this, and other countries tread on eggshells about the issue unless they want to lose allies. The US House is currently trying to pass a non-binding resolution declaring the deaths in the post-WWI Ottoman Empire and genocide, but both Obama and Hilary Clinton have spoken against the resolution, saying it will just work to damage peace talks between the countries. Turkey has, of course, spoken out against this resolution saying it will weaken the close allegiance between the US and Turkey. The US can't afford to lose Turkey's friendship as its strategic location in the Middle East is very beneficial to the US.

I always turn to wikipedia first for all information and it was interesting to find that while the English headline for the page on this topic is Armenian Genocide, the Turkish title for the same page is Crimean Armenians. The Turkish page mentions that some historians view it as a deliberate government order calling for genocide of intellectual Armenians, but the Turkish official policy states that  the cause of death was war conditions, diseases, climate, local gangs and tribal attacks rather than a systematic state policy. They also make sure to draw attention to the fact that the Christian Armenians also massacred the Muslim Ottomans/Turks. The English page states that it was the first modern genocide and that it's the second most studied genocide after the Holocaust. There's an entire page about Turkey's denial of the genocide (unsurprisingly, this page does not have a Turkish language equivalent).

To commemorate the day, there were peaceful protests and counter-protests in multiple locations in Istanbul on Saturday and less-peaceful protests in Yerevan, Armenia. There, flags and pictures of Turkish leaders were burned. In Turkey, police were on hand to keep fights from breaking out.

In the English-language Turkish newspaper I get at work, Today's Zaman, two pages were devoted to articles about the Armenian issue and all four op-ed columnists chose to voice opinions on the issue as well. All clearly agree that it was indeed a genocide but are careful not to focus their piece on labeling the event and rather "let the sides share their stories without a language of accusation, to create empathy, understanding" and "work together toward learning, sharing and reconciling past agonies without categorical accusations of genocide." (İhsan Dağı, 1915 Beyond 'Genocide,' Today's Zaman 26.04.10)

I learned that every year the US president makes a speech on April 24th about the issue. As Obama was campaigning for president, he made it clear that if he were elected, he would call it a genocide. However, in his speech on Saturday this was not mentioned. Instead, he referred to it as 'Meds Yeghern,' Armenian for 'great tragedy.' He said, 

"On this solemn day of remembrance, we pause to recall that ninety-five years ago one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century began. In that dark moment of history, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. Today is a day to reflect upon and draw lessons from these terrible events. I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed. It is in all of our interest to see the achievement a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts. The Meds Yeghern is a devastating chapter in the history of the Armenian people, and we must keep its memory alive in honor of those who were murdered and so that we do not repeat the grave mistakes of the past.”

He also praised those Turks who helped save Armenians in 1915, but his middle-of-the-road approach doesn't appear to have satisfied Turks or Armenians. Armenians wish that he had stayed true to his word during campaign season and called it a genocide, while some Turks feel that his accusations could still be read between the lines and that saying "Meds Yeghern" is no different from calling it a genocide. You can read the whole article here.

It seems so childish to me for one word to have such a strong effect on an entire nation, but it might because I am not very patriotic or nationalistic. Imagine if the American government and its people refused to admit that slavery had happened and rather stubbornly carried on, year after year, stating that it was an unfortunate turn of events where blacks and whites both suffered equally. This is perhaps not the same thing, but the general idea is that nothing bad would come if/when we finally admitted that the facts were actually true. Nothing bad will happen to Turkey if they ever acknowledged the genocide as such. Germany has apologized for the Holocaust and no one thinks less of them.

On the other hand, how short-sighted of the Armenians to still need an apology. The dead are dead, those who killed the dead are now dead too. Armenians should understand that they themselves weren't harmed by anyone and also that the current leaders of Turkey were not the ones who killed their loved ones. Turkey should be willing to admit it to smooth world relationships, but Armenia should also be able to let go and move forward. Admitting it won't bring back the loved ones, while at the same time denying it won't make it go away. Forging forward with peace talks doesn't mean forgetting what happened, but wouldn't it be nice to normalize relations with a neighboring country, open a long-closed border, and stop dwelling on/being defensive about the past?

Wanna smoke a bud?

A few months ago, Turkish TV stations began censoring cigarettes and all smoking. They simply  put a cartoon flower over the cigarette, which is much more noticeable than the cigarette would have been. When multiple people in one scene are smoking, each one's flower is a different style and colour - one has an orange rose, one a string of red roses, etc. I tried to take pictures of this hilarity on Two and a Half Men today, but photographing a TV is never easy. Still, I think you get the idea.

Cute, yes?

New Blog!

What have I become? A girl who spends all her time blogging? Good heavens, I'm turning into Jane!

This blog is really meant to document my travel experiences and the recent knitting posts seem a bit out of place. So I decided to make a separate knitting blog, that many of you probably won't read since really, who cares about knitting except grandmothers! No, I jest. I know many of you seem to enjoy seeing my knitting creations. Anyway. I'm moving knitting-related posts from here to Memories are knit with love. Find them there and check back soon for more!

Maybe Steve Jobs Wants One Too?

My dad is a computer "nerd" and even though his work requires him to use PCs, he has always loved Apple products. He is an iPhone user, has a new iMac desktop, and is already dreaming about reasons he "needs" an iPad. After seeing pictures of the hats I've been making recently, he requested an Apple-themed hat. He originally mentioned the retro, multi-coloured Apple logo:

Making this would have required buying 6 different balls of yarn, only to use just a few inches of each. This didn't seem practical for a thrifty person like me, so I thought of other things I could do with an Apple picture. I came up with the dorky idea of making it an iHat. I then wanted to experiment with writing words in yarn and after seeing a Simpsons episode about a Mapple myPod using the slogan "Think differently," I checked up on Apple slogans and found that "Think different" was a 90s slogan used for various Apple Macintoshes.

It took ages to draw up a pattern that included the words positioned correctly, and it's harder than you think to turn the image from the back of a laptop into a lookalike pattern on graph paper. Sheets of paper later, I had an apple with a bite missing, 'iHat' in a font that looked like the one Apple uses, and the words 'Think different' spaced across the back of the hat on alternating lines so they matched up when knit in the round. 

If you made it through that boring and wordy explanation of yet another knitting process, here's your reward! Pictures of the completed hat, that my dad chooses to roll up slightly and as a result looks like just Turkish men with their non-ear-covering headwear.

A Turkish Bath

The hamam, or Turkish bath, has been part of Turkish culture for years. (As always, you can read all about hamams on wikipedia here). Hamams are in every guide book as something that must be done in Turkey, and there are hamams in every neighborhood. Generally they are divided by genders and are visited naked, but to appeal more to tourists, co-ed hamams exist with special cover-ups provided to give modest foreigners the cover they need. Guide books recommend these tourist-friendly hamams over local ones, and these charge upwards of 35 Euros plus a tip for the masseus to visit. Usually a hamam experience includes the bath, a scrub and a massage.

My parents came to visit for a week and a half and my mom was very keen on getting a real Turkish bath experience. We searched online for a co-ed one so my parents could go together, but the one that sounded best, the Süleymaniye Hamam, was closed for renovations to prepare it for unveiling for the 2010 Istanbul Capital of Culture. She decided she'd just go alone since my dad wasn't so eager to go with a group of non-English-speaking men, and I found the closest one to my house, the Büyük Hamam in Kasimpasa, the neighborhood of Istanbul where I live. We had read some reviews online, and one woman wrote that she had a rather negative experience. Here's an excerpt:

I was told that this would be the best scrub ever, that it would be hard and my skin would feel softer and more invigorated than ever. Much to my chagrin, the scrubbing was light, the soap was the cheapest liquid, most obnoxious smelling Proctor & Gamble nastiness. I was reeling from being washed by a topless woman. And, yes, I was worried that I’d be taken advantage of. It was a very sexual thing for me. I was scared. When it was time for me to flip over, she just smacked my thigh. There was one moment when my clit was grazed and it just felt awkward. I wondered if they were going to wash my private parts, which, by the way, were left unrinsed.

My mom isn't swayed by negative reviews so we went anyways. My dad and I planned to wait for her in a cafe, but when we walked in the 6 Gypsy women convinced me that I should go too. We left my dad to wait for us in the nearby park.

The Büyük Hamam was designed in 1533 by Mimar Sinan, probably the busiest architect in Turkish history. It seems like every building in Istanbul was built by him! It was staggering to think of all the naked bodies that had lain on the same marble slab in the more than 500 years' of the hamam's existence. (If you look closely you can almost see butt imprints :) )

My mom and I were shown to a lockable changing room and were given a plaid cotton cloth to use as a cover-up. We disrobed and were led into a hot room, with marble stones and basins and small skylight windows to let natural light in. Here, one of the large Gypsy women filled one of the basins with hot water and gestured for us to sit down. She then tossed water on us using a plastic bowl. She mimed that this was how we were supposed to wet ourselves, and then demonstrated that we were to lie down on a big marble slab in the middle of the room. The slab was somehow heated from below, so it was toasty warm (almost too warm!) She left us to relax for a few minutes and then another Gypsy woman came in, clothed in just a lace pair of briefs and a faded floral headscarf. At first we thought it was just another hamam-goer, but she made it clear that she was the masseuse. Another woman, similarly dressed, soon followed who was to be my masseuse. They first used a Brillo-pad-esque washcloth glove to quite roughly scrape all the dead skin off. By the time she was finished, I looked like I was recovering from a horrible peeling sunburn. She then squeezed a huge dollop of shampoo onto my stomach and began the soap massage. She focused extra well on hands, neck and feet and it was quite funny to be covered in soap suds from head to toe. She then led us back to the marble basin and again tossed hot water on us.

Neither woman spoke any English beyond "very good" and "tip." My Turkish is surprisingly slightly conversational, so we were able to talk about our families- one woman said she needed a tip because she had 3 children, and I explained how I have one brother but he wasn't visiting Turkey because of university. The women brought us nice fluffy towels and the hamam time was finished. We were the only women there the whole time other than the 6 women who either all worked there or just enjoyed hanging out.

We got dressed again and were invited to drink tea with the women. I managed to converse in Turkish about a variety of things including why I'm in Turkey, what we think of Obama, why Turkish tea is better than American tea, and if we could take the masseuse to America to work there. The women were all very interested in chatting and it was great fun to see how much progress my Turkish has made, even against my will. (I haven't taken any Turkish lessons and had been actively trying NOT to learn Turkish because my Russian will suffer as a result. I learn it from my students regardless of what I want, and now I'm starting to grow interested in it. My Russian is fading anyway.)

Even though the idea of a hamam had never really interested me, it was a nice experience and the women were so nice that I'd like to go again. For a total of 37 TL each (including a generous tip for the masseuse), it was half the price of a tourist hamam with much more local flair, even though I thought we were still overcharged. Lying on a hot block of marble while getting my chest soaped up and my thigh smacked by a large naked Gypsy woman while hearing the call to prayer blaring from the mosque next door is an memory that can never be recreated in America.

Efendim?

Today in class my students were cutting and gluing toys and playground cut-outs into their books. Mostly left to their own devices, I had hoped that the students would be quiet for the lesson to give my head a much needed 40 minutes of silence. Of course this wasn't the case, and many of the students were talking or singing to their classmates or themselves. A boy, Necmettin, who sits closest to the teachers desk, kept trying to tell me what seemed to be a joke/pun. It went like this:

Telefbir, telefiki, telefüç, telefdört, telefbeş, telefaltı, telefyedi, telefsekiz, telefdokuz, TELEFON!

At first I didn't follow but when I finally got it, it was hilarious to me. Basically they took 'telef' and put all the numbers from 1-10 at the end. The number 10 in Turkish is 'on,' which completes the pun to give you the word telephone. Until that point I had no idea where Necmettin was going with the nonsensical words centred around the word(?) 'telef.'

Çok komik!

It doesn't work in English, but this is it translated:

Telefone, teleftwo, telefthree, teleffour, teleffive, telefsix, telefseven, telefeight, telefnine, teleften.

(Although now that I write it down, telefONE badly pronounced sounds like telephone... so it could work in English too!)


On a side note- after I wrote the above, I google translated "Çok komik!" just to make sure that it was spelled correctly/had the meaning I thought it had based on hearing my students say it all the time. It means 'very funny' but here is what google translate showed as the English translation-- hilarious!



Or should I say Lol!

Say Cheese!

Mike was bored at work today and passed the time creating new smileys. He made one so genius that the world should get to see it!

84))

It's a Turk. With sunglasses, a big nose, a mustache, and a goatee. If you don't see it, I'll explain further. The 8 is the sunglasses. The 4 is the nose and mustache. The 1st parenthesis is a sleazy smile, and the 2nd parenthesis is the goatee. Voila! If you ever thought you were lacking an emoticon to express a Turkish man, here you are! Your life is now significantly better :) (or should I say 84)).... )



(Turkish men, please don't take offense. Just harmless fun!)

Headscarf Politics

Living in Muslim countries for over a year and a half has made me very interested in Islam, especially women in Islam. To me, a scarf is something I wear when I'm cold. However, Islam has given a simple square of fabric magic powers to create controversy. Does the Koran call for women to cover themselves? How much should they cover? Legs? Arms? Hair? Face? What type and colour of fabric do they cover themselves with? At what age do they begin to cover their hair? Whose decision is it that a woman covers her hair? Should a politician be judged, based on whether his wife covers her hair? Should a female in politics be allowed to wear a headscarf? Should the law be able to decide if and when a woman must/should/can't cover her hair? What punishment is just when a woman is inappropriately covered or dressed? None of these questions have easy answers.

At work I get an English newspaper called Today's Zaman. It is a conservative and religious newspaper so it is great fun for me to read as a non-conservative and definitely non-religious person. Most of the time I skip the articles on Turkish politics because it's all pretty boring to me, but since yesterday was International Women's Day, there were lots of articles about the plight of Turkish women. I wanted to share a few to show the current controversy over headscarves in this country. Headscarves are a hot subject in Turkey these days. Read about it on wikipedia, that way I can just sum up. Women are banned from wearing headscarves in educational settings, so this includes teachers, professors and students. Many foreigners who write on this subject applaud Atatürk for banning them and making Turkey more secular. These two articles show the opposite viewpoint, which definitely sounds like a legitimate argument against the ban. Working with a dozen women who have to take their scarves off to teachI've often wanted to broach the subject and hear their opinions, but the language barrier makes that impossible.

Dogs, not covered women, allowed in military housing
What was your fault in being a woman?

Also check out my friend Liz's blog post about the headscarf controversy in Crimean Ukraine, where she is currently doing a Fulbright.



I couldn't find this article on the website but I just found this amusing and it certainly broke up the pages and pages of anti-US articles resulting from the Armenia resolution that the House of Representatives is trying to pass.


Court sentences pop singer to write out lines

A Turkish pop star has been sentenced to write out Turkey's lengthy national anthem along with a five page critique of it after a court found her guilty of casting ethnic slurs at a concert. Seven businessmen from the primarily Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in the impoverished southeast which has been troubled for years by separatist violence, took pop star Demet Akalin to court over comments she said were an attempt to liven up her audience. "What? Are you all from Diyarbakir? Did you come from the mountains? I don't understand where you people can be from all of you sitting there staring like morons," she allegedly said at a concert in the Aegean resort city of Bodrum in 2008. A court found her guilty of breaking a law banning public insults based on regional differences, social class or sexuality. But media said on Sunday that Akalin liked the idea and that she had memorized the national anthem in her school years.
(from Today's Zaman, Tuesday, March 9, 2010)

Happy Birthday, Mohammed!

Today seemed like a normal day at school until I saw all the classroom teachers putting together gift bags full of candy and dried dates. I asked what it was for and I was told they were gifts to celebrate the prophet Mohammed's birthday, which is/was/would have been today. Nothing special is done to celebrate this day other than to exchange small gifts with friends and to pray at home, but I don't know if it involves more prayer than any other day. From one of my coworkers I got a pen, 4 dried dates, and a 2 chocolates and from another coworker I got a rose with a note attached that said, "Bizi Aldatan, Bizden Değildir." Google Translate says this means "Fooled us who is not us" but my coworker translated it as "He who deceives is not of our religion." (Turkish speakers, do you have another translation?) Basically it means that honesty is very important in Islam, which I can totally see practiced by all the wonderful women I work with. However, it does make me wonder what religion some Turkish taxi drivers and shoe shiners are...

Where else would "camels" be the most frequently-occurring word?

Today I was reading FinnStyle's Marimekko blog and found a link to a website called Wordle, where you can visually see which words are used most in a certain text/article/website. You can choose the number of words that appear, the colours, fonts and the layout. I did it for my blog and had so much fun that I made two:




I think this is just words from the posts that appear on my blog's main page (not archived posts). I can't figure out how to get it to include all the posts going back to 2007. Turkey and Bulgaria (and camels and CouchSurfer names) appear too often for it to be the entire blog. But still very interesting (and pretty!)...

The Best Homework Ever

In Kyrgyzstan it was hard to find students with imagination so many homework assignments about their lives were quite dull. Once I gave a homework assignment to an Upper-Intermediate class to write sentences using new vocabulary we'd learned. This particular class was mostly teenagers but I had one middle-aged Kyrgyz woman whose seriousness always brought about heated debates with other students. She handed in this homework assignment and this successfully helped me convince the office staff that she wasn't really high Upper-Intermediate material. This hung on my wall all year in Bishkek and I also carried her assignment from Kyrgyzstan through Central Asia and Turkey, where it has since been sitting on my bookshelf getting a laugh out of me every time it catches my eye. I can't even figure out if she googled the words and wrote an excerpt of the first sentence she found containing said words or if she used a dictionary and translated from Russian or Kyrgyz or if she did something entirely different- but I can guarantee that these definitions are not her own mind's creation. See for yourself- what level would you place her in?

Click for the larger picture.



(the missing section for 'militia' reads "against a criminal")

Deve Güreşi

Deve Güreşi (Camel Wrestling) is a very popular sport all over Turkey. It is most common in the Western part by the Mediterranean and is "in "season" in winter because its mating season. Wrestlers are specifically bred for the sport and are larger and more aggressive than normal camels. The sport is taken very seriously and owners name their camels after famous Turkish and international celebrities and dress them up in intricate saddles, harnesses, bridles and headscarves.



In the wild, male camels fight to the death over a female, but in the sport there are ropers on hand to separate the camels if things get out of hand. There are ancient rules that govern the fighting styles and judges watch over the matches to make sure camels are using acceptable techniques. Biting isn't allowed and camels must use their necks to either force their opponent from the ring or knock them down.

The biggest camel wrestling festival takes place in Selçuk at the end of January, but it happened the week before my semester holiday so I got over the disappointment and planned my vacation without camel wrestling. Mike and I were in Bodrum having tea with our CouchSurfing host and the topic came up. He called around and found out that there was a festival in Bodrum the same weekend, so Mike and I were overjoyed at getting a chance to see the festival after all.

The day of the festival we found a mini-bus headed to the festival and soon discovered that it was a hugely popular local gathering. Many people wore orange checkered scarves with the name of a specific camel they supported on it, and men were selling similar scarves for 5 lira. Some men had brought instruments and were performing Turkish songs and stands were set up selling camel sausages, sandwiches, raki, beer and drinks. People had brought chairs and were picnicing on the hill around the outdoor arena. I'm not sure the camels enjoyed walking by the racks of their slaughtered brothers, but DAMN do camel sausages taste good.



There were dozens of camels walking around with their owners leading them. There was an open field near the arena and the camels were stationed here waiting for their turn to wrestle. Since everything was in Turkish we didn't follow anything that was going on, but it seemed like the camels were going to the ring one at a time to be checked. Then after many camels had walked back and forth, a match finally began. There were men in green shirts who were Asian-crouching a distance away from the camels but ready to jump in if necessary and separate them with ropes. There was no whistle or anything to begin the match, the camels were simply brought close to each other and began fighting. They each used their neck to try to pin the other camel's head to the ground and then used their body weight to try to flip them over. A lot of the time it looked more like dancing than wrestling, but I caught a bit of this exciting match on video.



Camels foam at the mouth like rabid dogs. They also drool everywhere and we saw one unfortunate man catch a giant gob of camel saliva right in the face.



When camels are stood in place they use a strange-looking stance that always looks like they're going to pee (imagine a bunch of men lined up at the urinals). I don't know if this is a natural camel stance or the way wrestling camels are trained to stand.




Mike and I were the only tourists there and it was a really lively local atmosphere. Camel wrestling is an exciting spectacle to see as a tourist and is what Kyrgyzstan should turn its eagle festival into (see my blog post for more about that).

It started pouring so we left the camel festival after just a few hours but we were happy with what we'd seen. If you're ever in Turkey in winter, make deve güreşi top of your list of things to see!

Baby It's Cold Outside

After nearly 4 months of work, I finally got a much-needed 2-week holiday for the semester break. Mike had another week of work, so I decided to make the most of my time off and go to Bulgaria. I've seen many places in Bulgaria, but Veliko Tarnovo, said to be one of the best towns in the country, was a place I'd never made it to. I didn't think I could visit Bulgaria without also visiting Sofia, so I managed to fit both of them into a 4-day visit. A 10-hour night bus to Sofia and back plus a 3-hour bus to and from Veliko Tarnovo means I spent almost a whole day unterwegs, but it was worth it.

My ex-boyfriend is Bulgarian and I wrote to his parents, whose company I always enjoyed, asking if they wanted to meet up. They were more than happy to and they picked me up at the bus station when I arrived. Geri had prepared a great meal and we ate and caught up (I hadn't seen them for over 2 years). At that point I had been studying Bulgarian in the States so I was pretty good, but since learning Russian my Bulgarian moved to the back burner. They had to learn Russian during Soviet times, so we were able to communicate easily with each other using a mix of Russian, Bulgarian and a little English. In 2007 Efrem's brother Vilislav spent 5 months in Colorado doing Work and Travel, so his English had greatly improved and he was happy to talk to me. We spent the day together and they offered to let me stay the weekend, but I'd already found couchsurfers so they picked me up in the evening.



The couchsurfers, Ganka and Andrey, were a couple who lived together with a roommate and a beagle. They were very hands-on hosts who spent their whole weekend with me. They spent a whole afternoon with me shopping for a pair of purple boots. When I was in Sofia last time I bought the perfect pair of boots, but wore them out and left them in Kyrgyzstan. I searched in vain for a replacement pair but couldn't find one, so Sofia was my last hope. I ended up finding a great pair in the very last shop we visited, so I'm glad they put up with me the whole time! They took me bowling and out to dinner in a great Bulgarian restaurant, and it was a really great couchsurfing experience. Mike and I are more hands-off hosts who let our surfers do their own thing, so it was a bit strange to be chaperoned.

At the bowling alley there was a Land Rover with a mini Land Rover on the dashboard, which was just too funny to not photograph.



I caught a bus from Sofia to Veliko Tarnovo, a journey that had been impossible just a few days before due to snow in the mountains. Luckily it had stopped snowing and I had no problems on the way. I was met in VT by my couchsurfer Iva-Simona, an art student. It was the coldest day/night of the winter in VT (about -20 Celsius) so I really hadn't chosen the best time to visit. However, I dressed warmly and we sucked it up. Iva-Simona and I walked to her friends' house where there was a gathering of her classmates. They were playing Belot, a popular Bulgarian card game that no matter how many times I watch I can't for the life of me figure out the rules. I watched for a while and her friends were friendly and willing to speak English with me even though they hadn't practiced since high school English class. We switched to Parcheesi and I won once. It was freezing when we left around midnight and caught a cab home. Iva-Simona had a two-bedroom apartment but only heated her bedroom, so the room I stayed in was freezing. She had a tiny space heater that made it a bit warmer, but I spent the night fully dressed in my Pamiri socks, lined jeans, sweater and hat.

The next time I met Iva-Simona at her university and got a tour from her and her friends of the art faculty. I'm not usually into art, but it was fun to see "art in action" and have her friends explain to me how different types of printmaking are done. Iva-Simona had to work but her friend took me out to lunch at a Bulgarian restaurant which happened to be Lonely Planet's "pick" and definitely lived up to the hype. I had sach, which is a mix of meat and veggies baked on an iron board and is just delicious (and sach in Turkish means hair, which made it slightly unappetizing to imagine what it would be before it arrived). The girls then gave me a quick tour of the Old Town but it's hard to enjoy sightseeing when it's -20 degrees. VT's best known landmark is Tsarevets Fortress but it was so cold and icy that I didn't even feel safe walking up the hill to get inside. All the real sightseeing stuff will have to wait for another time. It was just a taste of what the town has to offer.



Veliko Tarnovo is located on both sides of a river and the Old Town and the newer Soviet part are separated by a peninsula with an art museum and my favorite statue in the world. I don't know what it is about this statue but ever since I first saw pictures of it a few years ago I felt like it was something that should be in Lord of the Rings.



The Old Town has a lot of churches and a cathedral that dot the skyline with their crosses and steeples.





Iva-Simona and her friends Ani and Tsvetelin took me out to dinner right before I had to catch my bus and I got to enjoy Bulgarian pizza which is usually eaten with mayonnaise. I thought this was strange but Mike tells me it's a common thing. The last thing we did before I caught my bus back to Sofia and then to Istanbul was take our picture a free tourist computer.



I had really great couchsurfing experiences in Bulgaria, I got to eat wonderful food, practiced my Bulgarian (which by the end of my stay had started to come back) and toughened myself up in the cold. I had such a good time that I'm now thinking of making Bulgaria my next work destination if I can get a work visa somehow.

Some Money on the Side?

An advertisement showed up on mylifeisaverage.com, a website I often read when I'm bored. It was an ad for an online shop that looked like it had some cute things, so I went to the site. It had a lot of great (but EXPENSIVE!) trinkets and jewelry that were exactly my style, but the things that caught my eye were these two scarves.






They are pretty cool, right? Crocheted pears, knit watermelon, really unique! They even have real pear and watermelon seeds handsewn on to add to the authenticity. However, you will be amazed when you hear the price- for the pears, $150, for the watermelon, $120. SERIOUSLY? Neither scarf is very intricate and a high beginning knitter or crocheter could make them. I don't know anyone who would pay that much for a scarf, but the pear one is sold out so someone found it reasonably priced! Seeing how much money knitters can make for fairly simple things made me see that I have a money-making skill I hadn't realized before.

There's a website, etsy.com, where crafters sell their homemade items, so my plan for the next months is to figure out how registration and all that works and to start making money knitting too. My speciality for now seems animal-themed hats... your choice of color and animal and you'll get a personal, one-of-a-kind fashion statement! $50, any takers?!?

(Just kidding, that is ridiculous, I would think that $15 or so is reasonable... how much do you think people would pay?)

Anna's Decade of Travels

One of our Polish couchsurfers has a great map posted on facebook showing all his travels of 2009, complete with arrows from Poland color-coded to show whether he travelled by plane, bus, train, or hitch-hiking. I was inspired by his map and decided to make my own version. I documented all the countries I've visited in the 2000-2009 decade and color-coded them by which year I first visited that country. I feel like I've seen a lot of places but looking at all the white staring off the map it proves that I have a long way to go before I can really call myself a world traveller!

(By Mike's request/demand I didn't include any country that I only travelled through (Serbia/Croatia by train in 2006), and country I had a layover in (Budapest Hungary, Paris France) or any country I flew over/saw from the air (Greenland) :)



(click on the map to see it bigger in all its glory)

Silvester

New Year's last year was spent in Turkestan, a tiny desert Kazakh village near the Uzbek border known for its camels and preserved moque/medressa. Mike and I were sent back to our hotel before 00:00 by police who feared for our safety, so it was very low-key celebration. We decided to do the opposite this year and flew to Berlin to ring in the new year by the Brandenburg Gate with a million other people.

The time to get a new Turkish visa coincidentally fell just at New Year's, so we made the most of a day off from work and searched for the cheapest international destination we could fly to. We were almost set on Riga when I found tickets at half the price to Berlin. I immediately wrote to my friend Caroline, a fellow exchange student with me in Finland, whose parents live near Berlin and asked if she'd be home for the holidays. She said we could stay with her so we set off on another adventure.

Istanbul winter is mild so we packed all the warm things we could find since we'd read that it was below zero Celsius and snowy. We arrived in the middle of the night but found our way via public transport and a path through the forest to Caroline's house, where she met us before we even had to ring the bell and awaken her parents.

We took a short nap to recover from our trip and then, after a wonderfully filling German breakfast, Caroline took us into Berlin to give me the grand tour. We went to Alexanderplatz first, where we found that the world clock had Central Asian countries listed that are generally missing from any world summary like a weather forecast or a currency converter.



It was cold and snowy, but we managed to visit most of the sites worth seeing- the cathedral, Reichstag, Unter den Linden, the Brandenburg Gate and of course H&M! We hung out in various train stations trying to get warm and had a great dinner at an Asian fast food place at the Hauptbahnhof. Then we sucked it up and walked over to Brandenburg Gate to start the party.




The slightly snowy paths and roads turned to awful brown slush due to all the people walking to and fro, but since we are geniuses and put thick plastic bags on our feet before putting our shoes on, we managed to stay dry and warmish until almost midnight. It definitely made the night better! We wandered around stopping off at times for food from some outdoor stands and drinks, which considering it was New Year's in Berlin, were fairly reasonably priced. There were 2 heated tents that we visited whenever it got too cold outside. There was dancing and drinking in the packed tents and it was a fun way to pass the time and beat the weather.

Around 11:30 it was time to leave the warmth of the tent and stand in the slush on the street with all the other people. Caroline had stashed a bottle of sparkling wine in her bag so we drank that and hopped around trying to stay warm. We were too far from the stage to hear anything but a handy dandy countdown clock appeared on the giant TV screens so we were sure not to miss the arrival of the new decade. People celebrated, kissed, drank, shouted, and a fireworks show started.





We documented our New Year's on a silly machine that printed out a Berlin New Year's souvenir postcard:



The rest of our time we did some more sightseeing and stopped at the beautiful Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Checkpoint Charlie, the East Side Gallery (the stretch of the Berlin Wall remaining) and did some shopping at H&M. We also saw Avatar in 3D, which was a super end to our quick Berlin trip. I'm sure that 2010 will be even better than 2009, even though 2009 was pretty darn awesome.