I (sort of) Speak Turkish!

I figured I should finally start contributing to this blog, although (as A said) I doubt I will ever be able to post as regularly as he does.

I'm still a little shocked by how smoothly everything has gone so far. Both of our flights were on time, security and customs were a breeze, both our taxis took us straight to our destinations, and (despite the fact that the person working at security barely spoke any English) we were able to get our apartment key and move in with no problems. We even had four fellow exchange students help us move in! By the way, I completely agree with A - this place is breathtaking. I absolutely love living somewhere with real hills.

The only real negative so far is that the water in Germany seems to have made me sick. I'm getting better, but it's made for a draining (no pun intended) 24 hours and it's kept me from doing much exploring so far. Luckily, we have 10 months, so I'm willing to be patient for a few more days! I do find it amusing, though, that nothing I ate or drank during my two months in Morocco bothered me nearly as much as the German water. Guess I picked the right part of the world to concentrate on...

Speaking of Morocco, it's been interesting to compare our time there with what we've experienced here in Turkey so far. One thing I can say for sure is that Morocco made us both much braver, calmer travelers.

Take taxis, for example. In Morocco, it is essential to negotiate the fare BEFORE getting in the taxi and/or to insist that the driver uses the meter (often, drivers would insist that theirs were broken.) You must pay the driver BEFORE getting out of the car and insist on your change, and the driver would often try to claim that we owed him a much higher fare than what was initially agreed. Once we learned to hold our ground, we never had a problem paying and receiving the correct amount in the end, but it was definitely intimidating at first. Here, both taxi drivers used their meters and gave us exact change without our having to ask - it was amazing!

In Morocco, if you ride in a taxi with luggage, they will typically put it on the top of the car (WITHOUT strapping it down.) During the taxi ride to our apartment, the driver put all our luggage in the trunk, but then he couldn't close it. Before last summer that would have been very stressful. Now, we were delighted with how secure our belongings were!

In Morocco, the driving was terrifying at first(we quickly adjusted.) Traffic signs and signals, lane markers, and other such minutiae were routinely ignored. Turkish drivers definitely move more quickly and switch lanes more freely than U.S. drivers, but honestly I barely even noticed.

Most cabs in Morocco had seat belts, but they were typically completely unusable. It was much more common to see the seat belts used to hold up decorations or wooden boards (I never could figure out what those were for) than to actually see them as functional safety devices. In Turkey, I was actually able to use my seat belt! Twice!

Oddly enough, I'm even finding it easier to communicate in Turkey with my limited Turkish than I was able to communicate in Morocco with my multiple years spent studying Arabic. Briefly, that's because the Arabic we learned in school is essentially an artificial language that is written but rarely spoken outside of academic contexts. "Moroccan Arabic" is as different from "Modern Standard Arabic" (what we learned in school) as Latin is from French. So, even though I know very little Turkish, what I do know is actually useful. As soon as we left the airport, I was able to find a taxi, ask (in Turkish) whether the driver knew English (he didn't), apologize for how little Turkish I knew, give him our address, ask and learn how much the fare would be, and head out.

When I first begin learning a language, I always feel as though I'm just repeating nonsense noises. It's hard to remember that they actually have real meaning to millions of people, and it's always a huge rush to realize that I can actually communicate with those people by using those noises. I can't wait to see what we can do by the end of our year here, and for now it's certainly exciting to realize that we can at least successfully manage the basics.

The good and bad news is that, at least based on our current, limited experience, English and French were much more widely understood and spoken in Meknes (our city in Morocco) than they are here in Ankara. Obviously that makes things more challenging, but it will also force us to use Turkish more, which is definitely good thing.

You might think that, given everything I just discussed, that I like Ankara better than Morocco. You'd be wrong. I am very excited to be here and expect it to be a fantastic year but, well...it feels a bit too western for me. That's not exactly right, though. I love the modernity and the innovations, but in Morocco we lived in the ville nouvelle ("new city") which felt very much like any big city in Europe or the U.S., while still being only about a 15 or 20 minute walk from the medina ("old city.") The medina was the stereotypically "Middle Eastern" part, complete with narrow, winding streets, a large marketplace where you could haggle to your heart's content, and a large open square that filled up every night with musicians, story tellers, and snake charmers. While I was glad to live in the ville nouvelle, I adored spending my free time in the medina. Ankara seems to be all ville nouvelle and, while wonderful in its own way, it just feels lacking. I guess I'm greedy that way.

And I'll freely admit that it's greediness. Ankara is wonderful for what it offers, and I feel like we could explore just this one city for our entire 10-month stay and only begin to experience it all.