Woke up to the call to prayer last Friday. You can hear it throughout the whole campus, but I made the mistake of leaving my window open. My hangover is pretty rough, and despite downing a good liter of water before leaving on the tour that day, nothing is going to save me from the impending hell I am about to face. We’re doing the tour of Ankara today, and that means cramming into a tiny and scorching bus to wind through the streets to each destination. I barely hold it together and pray for a crash to put me out of my misery. During this torture, I hear someone telling a story about one of their friends, a South Korean expat, visiting his native country for the first time since his childhood and getting forced into completing the mandatory one year military service there. I wonder if this is what is going to happen to Eric in Taiwan. We can only hope.
Our first stop is the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The place is absolutely immense, as one would expect: his picture is EVERYWHERE here. It’s in every office, every shop, every building, on every bill and on every coin. I walked into my dorm room for the first time and it contained a bed, a desk, and a picture of Ataturk. The mausoleum is cool, especially his cane that was secretly a rifle. I want one of those.
We visit the Citadel of Ankara, pictured above, which is nuts. You can get right up on top, with no safety railings or anything, and see the entire city sprawling out in all directions. This is followed by a trip to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, which is not nearly as cool as I had hoped. Eventually the tour finishes up, we head home and meet up with our friend Cihan, who was a host student last year. Cihan is a heavy drinker, which is surprisingly common here. What’s less common is that he actually understands just about every English saying or idiom, which is nice. We revisit Le Man, which he describes as “the best restaurant in Ankara”, and after my meal, I believe him. I had something called kozalak, which consists of chicken stuffed with mushrooms and cheese and probably ecstasy or something, because this was one of the best meals I have ever eaten. We head over to a pub and I fight through a couple pints over a game of Never Have I Ever. Cihan drinks nearly every time. I decide he is awesome.
The next morning, we wake up early to head to Kapadokya, the land of fairy chimneys and underground cities. On the four-hour bus ride there, we get embroiled in a debate on education. Me and Clint join forces when I cite Malcolm Gladwell for one of my points and it turns out he has read more Gladwell than I have. Good to see. We visit the massive Salt Lake in central Anatolia, which is a hundred miles wide but only two feet deep. We also stop at the Ihlara Canyon, which is packed with Byzantine-era rock-hewn churches, and then one of the underground cities in the area, which goes down a couple hundred feet. The idea of a hot air balloon at dawn is debated, but upon discovering that the post-dinner entertainment includes an open bar for ten percent of the price, the latter option quickly becomes much more popular. Dinner includes watermelon for the fifth consecutive meal. I have no idea why it’s so popular here, but I’m certainly not complaining. I talk to Esra, our advisor who has joined us for the trip, and discover that her thesis for her master’s degree in international relations was on Russian Eurasian politics and policies. I decide she is also awesome.
We are told the night will include free drinks and a show of traditional Turkish dancing in a cave restaurant. I am fully down with this. The waiter immediately plops down a massive bottle of rakı on the table. It is going to be a good night indeed. I crack into that while some whirling dervishes come out and do their thing, but they don’t whirl nearly as fast as I had hoped. I thought that in order to be close to God you had to really give’r on the whirling, but these guys kind of mailed it in. Eventually the show turns out as most touristy events like this do and they pull us all up and form us into some kind of Turkish conga line. This ends and I decide I am not nearly drunk enough to handle what the rest of the night might have in store, and henceforth my rakı consumption increases steadily. I am soon thankful for my foresight as the Turkish guys doing some sort of wedding dance thing call me into the middle. There is a black girl there and I guess I’m supposed to impress her or something. The Turkish guy who grabbed me gets into pushup stance in front of her and I do the same. We rattle off about fifteen apiece before he has had enough. I ask him “the hell are you stopping for buddy, I can go all day!” to no avail. I then have to flex my bicep, and the ***** in the centre gives me the thumbs down. Insert over-the-line racial joke here.
I return to my seat thinking I am done performing for the day, but I am terribly inaccurate. About half an hour later, a belly dancer comes down from the ceiling. She does her thing for around ten minutes before she begins gathering one male from each table. Cue reprisal of ominous foreshadowing music from the first entry. She eventually reaches ours and the group consensus is that I must return. I am about an eight out of ten drunk at this point, so I am all for it. Along with the other, significantly older men from the other tables, I perform some sort of incoherent twirling action for about fifteen minutes. I become very dizzy, but am rescued before the point of disaster by the dancer, who dismisses me. I return to my table with my arms raised, to raucous cheers. I am Jack’s inflated ego.
We retire to the hotel for the night with our tour guide, who has been quietly annihilating his own bottle of rakı, proclaiming in broken English that he is Mr. Happy. Fin.
The next day, we visit the Göreme Open Air Museum, which proves to be an interesting collection of rock churches and windswept canyon landscapes. We stop at a couple more viewpoints on our way back and climb pretty high into the backcountry at one. At the tourist shop at one, a guy recognizes my University of Alberta shirt. Turns out he graduated from there last year and is traveling the country with his friend. Small world.
We arrive back at the dorms at around 11, and despite the growing desire I have for sleep, I decide I should probably check my email and check up on what’s actually going on in the world. I grab my laptop and charger and head for the lobby, the only reliable place for wireless internet. After a few minutes, Sabrina sits down. She makes a few comments to me that I mostly ignore while I check up on what it would take to get into recent warzones like Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, before telling me at one point that I ‘should hook up with [her] sister’s friends’. Fine. I figure I’ll at least humor her, so I ask to see some Facebook pictures, to which she obliges. I immediately regret my words. These girls are horrendous. I begin to wonder what kinds of atrocities mankind must have perpetrated in order to be punished with the spawning of these hideous beasts, but come up short. During the third set of profile pictures, it becomes readily apparent that my gag reflex cannot physically handle the sight of any more such abominations. I inform Sabrina that I do not hook up with girls who look like something I might scrape off the bottom of my shoe, and return to the al-Jazeera article I was reading.
The rest of the week is pretty pedestrian in comparison. We plan our trip to Istanbul and hit Drunk again on Tuesday, with me and Jill having pretty good showings. Wednesday we go out with Oytun and his friends to a shisha (or nargila, as they call it) bar. We also get a Yemeni-Iraqi and a Montenegrin in our Turkish class. I’m too tired to really write or be funny at this point, though, so I’m gonna nap for a few hours before our bus leaves. Need to be well rested for the Istanbul clubs this weekend.
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