Ascent into Personhood

So, it was a good day yesterday for feeling like a real person. Not to say that I have often felt like a fake person, but let me explain to you what I mean.

I have noticed a tendency among perpetual students, a group in which I include myself, to become removed from the rest of world. Academia is a cult. A useful and often necessary cult, but a cult nonetheless. Networking and professionalism are important, but often within the same network of people who are doing precisely the same things as you. That is not to say that academics cannot widen their circles of human interaction or expand their world views, but such action is rarely necessary. I remember a time when I would sit in my cubicle at the library and wonder what it would be like to engage in work that took place outside of my head. Well, now I know.

It wasn't that I did anything grand or important - just a lot of little things that added their way up. Friday morning I got to take an Embassy car to pick up a colleague's coat from a Turkish government agency at which he'd left it the day before. It wasn't my first time in an Embassy car, but it was my first time alone, and there's something supremely fancy feeling about riding alone in the backseat of a well upholstered car with your own personal driver. And then being escorted up to some foreign official's office by a security guard who thinks you're important by virtue of being introduced as "from the US Embassy."

Speaking of introductions, that was a problem I fixed on Friday that led to more personhood, complete with documentation. All these meetings I've been going to inevitably start with an exchange of business cards, as I've gathered most professional meetings do. The problem, then, was that I am not technically a professional. I do not technically work for the State Department, and I therefore do not technically merit a set of State Department business cards. Except not having a set of business cards means I start every meeting feeling like an inexcusably rude non-person. So, step two to personhood: I made my own. I actually went through three versions: one on vistaprint that was too expensive to ship, one that looked like the one that I designed on vistaprint that the office management specialist didn't like because it didn't match everyone else's, and then the final version that looks more or less like the cards the real diplomats give out: pictured below. As a reward once they were all printed and cut out, said office management supervisor even found me an official business card case from the Embassy. See how pretty?

So, looking and feeling like a real professional , I went off to my final personhood event of the day: a talk at the Ambassador's residence. Now, keep in mind, I use the word residence because that is the word in Embassy vernacular. Mansion is really a more accurate term. The place has to be fancy enough to host heads of state, so it comes equipped with fortress like security, doormen, coat takers, those big armchairs you see Obama sitting in across from kings and presidents and prime ministers. The event itself was in the theater, because there's a whole theater, right off a room with a fully stocked bar. So we drank and socialized and networked and were eventually ushered to our seats where we listened to the guest of honor speak in the most engaging of fashions, and then the night ended and I went home.

The going home was also good, because it was Friday, and I was exhausted. I'd planned to get up early today and go exploring. Early turned into what I call a respectable 10:00am. It at least put me at the museums by noon. I saw the Religious Foundations Museum, which is mostly a lot of things they took out of old mosques, and the Art & Sculpture Museum and the Ethnography Museum. I think the art museum was my favorite. I didn't take pictures inside, even though it was allowed, because my Western sensibilities forbid it. Nevertheless, the museums were pretty enough outside to warrant pictures there as well, and the gorgeous weather today definitely permitted it.

Art & Sculpture Museum 

Ethnography Museum

The three museums were plenty to tire me out, and besides, I had quidditch to get home and watch! For those of you who don't know, the IQA Southwest Regionals are today and tomorrow in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They've been running a live stream on one of the fields since 9:00am CST/5:00pm here. While that means I didn't get to see Texas Quidditch play, I did watch a lot of great Austin Quidditch and Lone Star QC matches, including a face off between the two. To be honest, that's what's taken me so long to write this post. Anyway, it's almost brooms up for LSQC's last match of the day, and then it's off to bed for me. They're playing the Sharknados, who haven't really shown up today, so it should be a pretty easy win. If you'd like to watch the bracket games tomorrow, they'll be streaming here in HD from 9:00am CST.

Ankara Does Not Like Mondays

So, Macbeth was lovely. I left at intermission, because the buses stop running at ten or so and I still get nervous about taking taxis alone at night, but if timing had been different I certainly would have enjoyed staying. The upside of all that is that it means I have sort-of kind-of almost mastered the bus system! Or... at least the Buradan Oraya bus app on my smartphone... which is almost the same thing. It is a relief to me at any rate, because there was definitely a point last week where I tried to take the bus and was shamed because I didn't have a bus card. I use the term shamed loosely, but I can say for certain that without the kindness of strangers I would not have been riding that bus.

There are two different types of buses on the Ankara bus route, and no one seems to be able to tell me the technical difference. The effective difference is that one of them takes cards and the other one takes cash and the cash bus is 25 kurush (like Turkish cents) more expensive. Regardless, since that mishap I asked around and procured myself a card, and have still only used it once since. Go figure.

Anyway, back tracking to the beginning of my day, I got on a cash bus early this afternoon intending to head in to the city and explore a few museums before the opera this evening. The Opera House is in the direct vicinity of three museums that are on my list--the Religious Foundations Museum, the Art and Sculpture Museum, and the Ethnography Museum--and we had the day off for President's Day. (Fun Fact: The Embassy closes on all American and Turkish holidays, so yay for double vacation!)  Now, I hadn't any trouble finding the museums, and I can tell you they were all very pretty from the outside, but Ankara, it turns out, doesn't much like Mondays.

"Pazartesi hachi hergun."

That was the sign I saw, well, everywhere. It means, "every day except Monday." So, I've learned my lesson. Museums are closed on Mondays. Don't go sightseeing on Mondays. But then what was I to do with the rest of my Monday afternoon?

Well, despite all the things that were closed, the central park just behind the Opera House was still open, as was the theme park inside it. I did not go to the theme park, but I did circle the public park around it, taking in the lay of the land. It's about as touristy a place as I've seen in Ankara; lots of little cafe restaurants blaring Turkish pop music and serving local food with a side of overpriced nargile/hookah/shisha/whatever-term-you-know-it-by. I had planned to have dinner downtown, so I picked one out for later and camped myself out with my Kindle for a couple hours. It got cold pretty quickly sitting still like that, but it was still an unusually sunny day for Ankara, so I took what I could get, eventually packing up to head back to the cafe I'd chosen for another round Turko-charades.

The hostess out front complimented my outfit, I understood that much! But she was just trying to get me inside. And once in, well, it became pretty obvious that I was not a Turk. Which is okay, because waiters are usually way too nice to girls who don't speak the language anyway. I ordered a local dish called kumpir, which amounts to a vegetarian loaded baked potato that came with carrots, peas, corn, olives, pickles, cheese, and of all things mayonnaise, and sat there reading while each successive waiter who brought me something or cleared my plate proceeded to guess my nationality. English? German? Italian? No, no, I told them. American. And then it started.

The waiter I'd told got those disbelieving wide eyes before he caught himself, gave a nervous smile, and ran off to tell his waiter friend. And then another friend, and then another, until they were all whispering about the American in the cafe, and hiding it badly if they were even trying. I'm kind of used that kind of attention by now, and I don't mind it so much anymore, but it's still amusing. At any rate, I was still offered tea afterwards, as is customary, and I still accepted because I had at least another hour to kill. The tea only bought me half an hour, but the sun was down and it was getting colder, so I went to wait in the lobby of the Opera House anyway.

As far as Opera Houses go it was nice, but possibly on par with the cheaper tickets, dress code was a bit more lax. I had hoped that would be the case, because I'd worn sneakers with my dress for the walking. They still had a coat check though, and a number of fancy chandeliers, and ushers in tuxes and so on and so forth.

It was truly a lot of fun, and I can't wait for Carmen in April. I don't care how late that one goes. I'm staying for the whole thing and no one can stop me. On the other hand, I have enough warning that I can probably manage more than one ticket for that.

Tower Tops, Roof Tops, and so on and so forth

So, I am tired, and not in a writing and detaily mood. Suffice it to say the other new intern and I had a fun day wandering the city. We went to the roman baths, no great pictures, then missed a few small things we weren't looking very hard for on our way to the Ankara Citadel. It's just an old walled up part of the city with narrow winding roads and a tower on each end. Behold the tower!

Or, well, pictures from the tower anyway. That last one is Mark, with the second tower across the way. He's the other intern. After the tower, we got lunch and walked home. Nothing fancy. The waiter at the restaurant was nice, and it was another of those awkward, "I don't speak much English," "What a coincidence, I don't speak much Turkish!" moments that always ends in lots of amicable awkwardness all around. So... also fun.

Oh! And when we got home we decided to investigate this rumor I heard that our building had a terrace. And it does! It's lovely and covered in that fake green stuff that isn't quite astro-turf, and there's several barbecues, a bunch of chairs, and a little kitchenette. It will be perfect for parties when the weather warms up. Until then, more pictures of the view from there.

I also got an email from Rebecca tonight inviting me to go skiing with her and Eva tomorrow. I would like to go, but it's late, and I do have the opera tomorrow night. I'm thinking I'll bow out this time because they're leaving pretty early, and the ski lodge is pretty far away, and I don't want to be the one keeping them on a tight schedule, but it's nice to know that skiing is an option in the future. Other news from tonight, most of my weekend trips are all planned out. That includes:

Safranbolu - Turkey's best preserved Ottoman town
Konya - home of the Whirling Dervishes
Cappadocia - Turkey's top tourism destination outside Istanbul for... reasons

I might add Eskisehir to that list, but I don't really know what's out there yet. Either way, there's a high speed train (as there is to Konya), and high speed trains are lovely. Fingers crossed they'll be opening the one to Istanbul in the next month or two!

Small World

So, it was a long first week, but a good one. I am very much enjoying my job, and as of yesterday I think I'm making progress on the social drawbacks as well!

One of my coworkers had already mentioned there were a few single women closer to my age working in the Embassy and suggested I seek them out. Friday afternoon, however, they came to me before I got the chance. Turns out, there was something of a Lonely Hearts club getting together at someone's apartment for Valentine's Day, and Rebecca, one of the girls, had thought to invite me along. I accepted immediately of course, and I'm quite glad I did.

It was a low key party, just four of us girls, chocolate, wine, and a bit of painting, but that's just my type of scene. Also, the girls were wonderful. I suppose I should have expected to have a lot in common with young, female members of the Foreign Service, but even I was surprised by how well we got along. And how small the world really is. Rebecca, it turns out, is the sister of a friend of mine from Egypt. And not just any friend, but the one with whom I traveled through Uganda and Tanzania. Go figure, right? The family resemblance is a bit uncanny.

In other social news, the new PolMil intern had his first day yesterday. I only met him for a minute on my way into the office, but he lives in my building, and having been through the ringer of jet lag and disorientation no more than a week ago myself, I figured a little hospitality was in order. It was raining pretty steadily today, but we have plans to explore Ankara's old city tomorrow - the palace and Ataturk's tomb and what not. So keep an eye out for that.

We also have Monday off for President's day, so I bought myself a ticket to Verdi's Macbeth at the Opera House that night. At $6 for a front row balcony seat, I may be going to the Opera pretty often. At the very least, Carmen is coming in April, and that is something I refuse to miss.

Who needs play when the work is so much fun?

So, my father asked me about my job today, and while I have refrained from talking about it too much because 'sensitivity,' I figured most of you would like a basic run down of what I'm doing in Turkey in the first place.

First things first, I am an intern in the ECON Section of the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. Since my father wanted to know what an even embassy does, I'll start by telling you that all an embassy does is basically represent the US abroad. The Ambassador is considered a proxy for the President in whichever country he or she resides. The sections around him then stand in for the various departments that support the President in Washington. So part one, we collect information on what's happening in Turkey through newspapers and talking to people and things, summarize it, analyze it, and send it to Washington. Then part two, Washington tells us what the official US position is on xyz and we relay that to whoever in Turkey cares to know. I spent the first few days settling in and doing a lot of reading to get caught up on the intricate details of local events, but I got tasked with my first cable assignment today. A cable is just a fancy term for a blunt research paper, in which I go out and collect all the information I can find, summarize and analyze it, and then it will pass through an editing process of a billion people who will tear it to shreds before it might go on to Washington. I'm actually pretty excited.

Other than that, we go to a lot of meetings: with Turks, to suss out what's going on in the country, with Americans to tell them what we've sussed out, and with other government employees to make sure we're all on the same page. It's a little different from section to section. For instance Public Affairs talks to the press more, Management and Consular probably work less with policy. I'll learn more about those as I go. But it all goes back to that idea of being a mini Washington in a foreign country. It was a little intimidating the first day or two, but I think I'm really going to like it, even if it is economics. =p

There should be a few other interns coming in soon too. One is confirmed for next week, and there might be a second one coming in the week after. I only mention that because as much as I enjoy the people I work with, as career officers most of them have families and all the responsibilities that go with that. So working with them is great, but at the end of the day they have to go home to the wives and kids, who don't get enough of their time anyway. It's a stressful job with long hours. I'm only three days in and I'm already exhausted. Still, it would be nice to have someone with whom to watch a movie after hours, explore the city, etc. And since the new interns will be living in my building, that is thing that I hope will happen easily.

Anyway, that's what I do. Oh, and today I cleaned/repaired a coffee pot. Nobody asked me to, but I figured: hey, coffee should be a part of every interns job at some point, right?

Walking the City

I went exploring today!

Well... I went exploring this evening. I went sleeping today. By which I mean I didn't really 'went' anywhere. I had every intention of getting up early. I went to bed early and everything. Then I woke up. And didn't want to get up. And woke up again, and still didn't want to. And woke up and went to the restroom, stared at my toothbrush for a good minute, and decided going back to bed was a better idea. I blame jet lag.

So anyway, I finally left the house around four and found out that it takes between 45 minutes and an hour to walk from my apartment to work. So that is probably going to become a thing that I do, because I can't imagine a better way to start the day than a couple mile walk through what I must admit is a beautiful city. There are parks everywhere. I thought about continuing to explore, but the sun goes down around 5:30 and I didn't want to get caught out too late. In the end, that was a good decision, because several hours later I was hopelessly lost.

I had decided when I came upon the far end of the big park near my house that it would be a nice place to walk through. I was headed to the other end anyway, and why not walk through the park with all the trees and water features instead of through the streets with all the houses that look the same? Well, because there are wild dogs, that's why. Don't worry, I didn't run into the wild dogs. For the first little while I was starting to think they had left the park for the winter. My boss had told me about them when I mentioned wanting to run there, but I hadn't seen hide nor hair of them. And I still didn't see them, but someone must have, because a little ways into the park I started to hear a bunch of raucous, angry barking. So I walked a bit faster and eventually it stopped.

It was actually a really big park. Like, I knew it was big, but this thing was gigantic. I must have been walking through it for an hour. On the upside, soooo many stairs! Because the park, like most parks in Ankara, is at the bottom of a valley. It's difficult to build in valleys, so instead the Turks planted parks. Brilliant, right? At around the hour mark, the path I was on started to turn, and I started hearing dogs in front of me instead of behind. And the sun was down, and I didn't really fancy meeting wild dogs in a nearly empty park at night.  So I took one of those staircases back up to street level. Or... a street level. I had already learned that Ankara is just a series of one giant hill after the other. It's a great workout!

At the top of the stairs however, I was distracted by yet another set of stairs. I like stairs, so sue me. And I took it, and started wandering in what I thought was the right direction towards my house. I had already memorized the major streets in my area, so I figured I had to run in to one of them eventually. Well, I didn't. So after an hour of wandering through residential streets without a single major roadway insight, I finally pulled out my phone. My phone is a lifesaver. It has this nifty little GPS button in google maps that I can press and it tells me exactly where I am. I could have told it exactly where I wanted to go too, and it would have told me how to get there, but I still had some pride left. So armed with GPS, I quickly realized that I had not come out of the park where I thought I had come out of the park, and was, in fact, in an entirely different part of town than I had thought. Thank goodness Ankara is so safe, eh?

So my map reading skills led me back to, you guessed it, that distracting set of stairs at the spot where I exited the park. Turns out, had I looked in a direction that was not the stairs, I would have seen the bridge over the park in the direction I wanted to go in the first place but couldn't find a street in which to take me. Alas, at least I burned a ton of calories! And now I know which way not to go if I ever do go running in that park. Once over the bridge it was an easy walk home. I even stopped at the grocery store to pick up some essentials like soap and chocolate and things. And they had salep!!

Salep, for those of you who followed my travels to Jordan, is the same thing as sahleb, just in Turkish. And here, rather than having to get it from a street vendor, or making it from a disgusting boxed mix like they had in Egypt, it just comes in a carton, like milk. And you pour it out, and stick it in the microwave, and oh my goodness it's so delicious and I am going to drink it for three months straight and no one can stop me.

The only items I wanted but did not get were contact solution and fabric softener. I was surprised to find upon moving in that I actually have a dryer, which I didn't think existed in the Middle East? Well, I mean, I knew it existed, it's just super uncommon. They're even rare in a lot of Europe. Anyway, I have one, and the store, true to form, had liquid fabric softener, but none of those fluffy dryer sheets I like. I'll keep an eye out, and if worse comes to worse I'll just buy the liquid.

That's it for today I think. I made my first omelette in my big, fancy kitchen for dinner. I forgot the onions and garlic though, so it wasn't quite as delicious as I would have liked. I don't have any pictures really from my walk. Like I said, I don't like looking like a tourist. The one picture I have can be found at this blog, which I will also be updating, though I don't know how frequently. It will be solely pictures of Lil' Squish in places that make me smile though, so it might not be of great interest to anyone.

Until my next post, iyi akshamlar! (Note: That is spelled incorrectly, but this blog doesn't seem to like the Turkish alphabet, so whatever.)

Settling In

So. It's that time again. Where I run away from home to go have random adventures in who knows where because experience. Well, that's not entirely true. We do know where. I'm in Turkey, in case you haven't heard. And I'm exhausted, because I just got in yesterday. And will probably get more exhausted, because I'm working 45 hours a week. Buuuut, some people are upset I haven't posted pictures yet.

Please realize I literally:
a) got off a plane
b) got in a car
c) spent the night in my apartment
d) got in a car
e) went to work
f) went home.

And now it's now. Where do you expect all those pictures to come from? Besides, I don't speak the language, so I will have no luck convincing anyone I'm not a tourist if I walk around with a camera stuck to my face. And I don't do well being treated like a tourist.

Anyway, because people were so insistent, the following are a series of pictures of my apartment. It's gigantic. Like... really gigantic. There is more than enough space for a family of five, and I am living here alone. So.

The entryway:

Random empty room that's too big to be a closet and too small to be a bedroom. Do I have my own coat check?

The living room, with a balcony off the back corner:

The dining room, complete with dimmer switch:

Front (guest?) bedroom:

The humongous kitchen. Two tea pots, a coffee pot... I even have a dish rack.

 Another guest bedroom that I have decided is my office because look at that gorgeous desk:

The half bath:

The full bath:

The laundry room + another balcony:

My Sex & the City closet. (There's another full bath through that door, but the shower has leakage issues, so it smells, so I'm just not going to use it, so I didn't take a picture.)

My bedroom:

And that's it. It's too dark out for outside pictures. The sun goes down before I even get out of work. So I hope you're satisfied, and now I'm going to bed.