Follow Me As I Discover Land, Language and Self...
Can I do it? Can I reach up and take the piping hot bowl of vegetables that my Turkish colleagues are helping themselves to? And then can I sit down and eat them? The last time I ate a cooked vegetable was back when I was living at home with my parents during college summers. It would have been Libby’s peas or green beans (or possibly asparagus), poured straight from…
I have been watching Project Runway every day ever since I returned from Minnesota in late August. First, it was Season Three. Then Season Two, and yesterday I finished watching Season One (I watched Seasons Four through Eight when they aired). At the same time, I am keeping up with Season Nine, broadcast in the States every Thursday night. Sankar and I watch it on Saturdays (he actually likes it,…
When I got sick last week in Turkey, I did what any educated person in the twenty-first century would do. I went on the Internet and scared myself silly. It started with trying to take care of myself. Last Tuesday I had a long work day followed by an hour and a half Turkish conversation class. I love my teacher. We finished at 6:30 pm and I knew it would…
A few months ago Sankar and I signed up for a tour to southeastern Turkey with the American Research Institute in Turkey. Although it wasn’t the ideal weekend (I am teaching a new course and needed to spend at least part of the weekend preparing), we went. We are trying to follow the middle-age-appropriate dictum, “accept all invitations. Early Saturday morning we landed at the sparkling little airport in Sanliurfa,…
Minnesota State Fair ingenuity: beer on a stick A month-long visit to Minnesota has ended. It was a whirlwind of self-indulgent fun. Friends and family invited me home and took me out for lunches and coffee. I saw a hilarious comedy show called Obama Mia, and four summer movies, the best of them Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. With Angela, I walked the streets of the Minnesota State Fair and…
I have Fridays off this summer, at least when I’m not grading midterms and finals, so I had imagined a number of weekend getaways. So far, only one has materialized. Last Friday, Sankar and I flew east for an hour and a half toward former Soviet Georgia, stopping just short in Turkey’s Black Sea port of Trabzon. Trabzon, formerly Trebizond, was the place in which the last Roman loyalists took…
An interesting visitor came to Istanbul last week, Al Smith, the St. Paul restauranteur. Al was a 3M vice president back in 1980, when Sankar started at the company, and he was approachable enough that a young engineer became acquainted with him. Sankar and Al have kept in touch over the past thirty years, and during our dinner here in Istanbul, I learned more of Al’s story. “Fifty years ago,”…
–> Apricots and mulberries — in season right now Sankar left this morning for nine days in Minnesota and, with my lightened summer work schedule, I am wondering how to fill a lot of free hours. I had a plan for today (Saturday), which I am executing. In the morning I headed downhill to the Bosphorus and jumped on a bus heading south along the sea road. Weekend mornings are…
I am the old lady in an office full of young, Turkish teachers (pictured here at a recent henna–engagement–party). It’s full summer here in Istanbul. On the magnolia tree outside our apartment waxy white flowers open like beckoning hands. Rose-ringed parakeets flutter in the treetops. Plump stray dogs nap on sidewalks, and cats curl up in tiny patches of shade. The air is perfumed, but heavier by the day, presaging…
In June 1934, in the midst of strenuous efforts to create a new history and a new language, Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] made surnames compulsory for all Turkish citizens. The usefulness of the measure was hard to dispute. A few families had acquired surnames; some individuals had nickames. But the majority of Muslim Turks were known only by their forenames. To help identify them, documents specified their parents’ names. In military…
