Blogging
From Abroad

I apologize that I haven’t written in a while; I’ve been extremely busy with my Turkish classes and I really haven’t had a whole lot of free time—compounded by the fact that my computer went on the fritz a few days before I left and as such I have no steady access to Firefox, which the blog requires I use.

I spent the last weekend on a group tour run by the program in Canakkale and Edirne. Canakkale is incredibly beautiful and pleasant and is also the site of one of the bloodiest battles in modern history with 150,000 people killed. We visited a few monuments that were interesting but I spent most of my time staring off at the beautiful manzara. I’m not much of a history buff, and I preferred not to spend too much time dwelling on the people that died on the ground I was standing on.

One coolest things about cities like Istanbul is this idea of being able to “feel the history”. It is true that anywhere you go you can’t help but think about all of the people that have walked on the ground you walk on. There are countless door marble thresholds in Istanbul that are significantly worn and contoured by millions or even billions of feet sliding over them for many hundreds of years. Truthfully; that is no exaggeration.

At the same time however, I’m always struck by how timeless cities are. Cities like Istanbul have no memory, and each pair of feet that passes over the marble thresholds is just another set of feet. Istanbul doesn’t care who you are or where you’re from, she has seen it all.

While I was in Canakkale I was struck with the same feeling of timelessness. Save for the gigantic monuments and the endless names of lost brigades and ships you’d never know how much blood was spilled on the land. It simply goes on; the breeze is still the same and the endless fields of sunflowers still grow. At the end of the day, Canakkale is just a beautiful place.

Television in Turkey would send the FCC through the roof. If you think American television is bad, I challenge you to stomach Turkish TV. There are essentially only a few types of shows: the first kind is a kind of music variety show. Usually arabesque singers, in particular one Ibrahim Tatlises (literally “Abraham Sweetvoice”) will sit around a large table, tell jokes, and drink tea. Suddenly someone will stand up and start singing in that Arab sounding, wavering voice, only to be joined in shortly by the rest of the guests. The song becomes a massive ordeal and finally ends in thunderous applause from the crowd.

The next type is the intensely violent Mafioso drama. It is difficult to follow these shows because they have countless subplots, necessitated by the fact that multiple seemingly important characters are killed of each episode. Each episode is guaranteed to have at least one or two brutal beatings, far more graphic than anything that might be allowed by the FCC.

A third type is the yellow news channels. These channels are incredibly overdramatic and like the paper news usually being with some type of sensational and mostly deceptive headline. For example, I read a headline in the news the other day that said something like “Even Ten-Year -Olds Are Getting Gastric Bypass Surgery These Days?”, but when I read the article all it said was that there was a single reported case of a kid getting gastric bypass surgery. These channels usually have a soundtrack of some extremely intense techno music just so you know how important the stories are.

The last kind is the most common and is the extremely silly soap opera. These usually include squealing Turkish girls, demons, magic, crazy ladies, incredulous old men, ect.

Turkish people are notorious gossipers. Turkish language even has a “gossip tense” restricted for knowledge that was obtained through the grapevine. Getting good at using this tense is definitely a goal of mine.