left my heart in... istanbul!

Luke discovers the joy of simit.

I recently had the distinct pleasure of enjoying Istanbul (for a third time - it's always best the third time) with lovely, fabulous visitors!!! Mom and Luke made it out here for some delightful delights, and we ripped it up in the big city before heading to Alanya.
Some highlights include impressing a budding Byzantinist with the amazing mosaics of the Hagia Sofia and St. Savior in Chora (Fetiye Muzesi), walking amongst the incredible tulip blossoms, eating simit and roasted chestnuts in front of the Sultanahmet Cami (Blue Mosque), exploring the public bus system, walking up and down Istiklal St with the hep kats in Taksim Square, constant shouts of "yes, please?" from shop vendors, being hit on in front of (and perhaps alongside) my mother by a half-Spanish, half-Turkish/Kurdish rug salesman named Carlos (he had a talent for making napkin flowers), getting lost in the Egyptian Spice Bazaar, a sunny tour up the banks of the mighty Bosphorus and subsequent castle-climbing adventure (+ delectable sandwiches - "yes please, fish sandwich?"), and, finally, unknowingly eating a dessert that's prepared with chicken (both of us veggies tried it accidentally!).
It was pretty fun to play tour guide... although I think I exhausted my guests. And talked too much.

lukey reads up on the sultanahmet mosque. at the sultanahmet mosque. (proof that you can ask him anything!)

shrubbery in the shape of crescent and star- nationalism at its most decorative.

awed inside the ornate + melodramatic sultanahmet cami (blue mosque)

hagia sofia from the outside. one of us was photo-shy

istanbul in spring = plenty of tulips!

hmm should we be touching these? remains from the 2nd hagia sofia (the current standing is the third edition - both the first and second burned down)

mom loved the iron screen on the hagia sofia's library (from its ottoman days as the aya sofya mosque)

a view from inside the cistern that provided water to the hagia sofia complex in byzantine times.

wandering around near istanbul university.

view from the süleymaniye mosque complex. looking across the golden horn to the north section of the european side.

süleymaniye cami at nightfall.

jet lag is rough in the am. (@ hotel turkish breakfast)

pre-wandering geography lesson at the hotel.

ferry ride along the bosphorus, the strait that separates europe from asia and connects the black sea (to the north) to the sea of marmara (which leads, through the dardanelles, to the aegean sea and then to the mediterranean!). (these incredible houses are in bebek, a fancy shmancy old istanbul suburb)

i thought this mosque was pretty rad. looks like someone stuck two minarets on a box-basilica.

"yes please, fish sandwich?" (anadolu kavağı)

luke giving the camera some sass at yoros castle, our rad bosphorus tour destination.

we made it to the castle! (yoros castle)

another make-shift group shot, with the kale.

chillin'

huggin'

climbin' the walls

real group shot at yoros castle, overlooking the bosphorus!

egyptian spice bazaar, by which i mean stampede.

remarking upon the architectural grandeur of st savior in chora. (Edirnekapı)

this is what we were looking at. (st. savior in chora)

a fresco on the ceiling of st. savior in chora's funerary wing, depicting the judgement of souls (the red on the bottom right is the river of damned souls to hell... the living grovel on the right)- christ at the center, surrounded by mary + john the baptist + a cadre of important halo-clad judges. this scene was meant to depict the benefactor of the church's (theodore metochites') own judgement after death...for some reason, i'm not convinced that he expected to get into the kingdom of heaven.

apparently, spongebob sells sugar cubes in turkey

mmmmmm, turkkahve! (she later spilled out all the grinds to get her fortune...i don't think our waiter enjoyed the gooey mess.)

crazily enough, mom said this door resembles the one on her grandmother's old house in boston (un-dilapidated, of course). weird part? she was also #56. (Edirnekapı)

okay, i'm ready to move in here. please note and enjoy the general bodaciousness. and the poster on the door.

make-shift three person shot by the land walls

no idea. attribute it to our silliness. but check out the reconstructed land-wall tower, complete with turkish flag in the background. istanbul's "world heritage site" status is actually in jeopardy because of its many poor disneyworld-esque reconstructions that don't abide by the UNESCO rules..

he's so handsome! (topkapı palace, the seat of the ottoman empire for centuries. looking over the bosphorus.)

luke spent a long time in the armor/weaponry room. (topkapı)

awww. standing by one of the libraries in the third courtyard of the palace. (topkapı)

sultan luke and sultana hazel, ruling over the fountain. (topkapı palace)

this is me in the circumcision room, source of pain for many an ottoman prince.

mom n' luke pose at topkapı palace.

...and off to Alanya we went!

tales of the east... (belated)

so last month we took our mid-semester field excursion to.... not syria (georgetown political bs!)... but southeastern turkey. which was equally (i'm sure) interesting, exciting, beautiful, and a long ride. we drove far east to mardin first, then back-tracked to urfa, gaziantep, antakya, and mersin.
antakya was my fave, despite being horribly ripped off by a syrian cab driver who drove me around the city at an ungodly hour, searching for a pharmacy and some decongestants - including backwards up a[n entire] one-way street. (he must have learned to drive with my dad.) i was pretty proud to find the right drugs in the end, though. sans english.

some photo highlights:

this is us crossing the euphrates. hello, mesopotamia.

fields and fields and fields in the çukorova plains.

self-shot in mardin, upon waking at the hotel. sabahat, leslie, me - so ready to tour the city.

our hotel, an old stone mansion (characteristic mardin stone-cut architecture), and the citadel in the background above.

the dome of an old madrassa (religious school) and beautiful weather.

Hello, my name is Hazel. Yes, Heyzıl.

betül, imren, gülseda, and zehra posing for the camera. note their excellent blue uniforms (with the added sweater and collar touch for individuality). welcome to turkish elementary school!

As a component to one of our classes, we have been teaching English to a class of fifth graders at Kestel Elementary, just 15 minutes outside Alanya, in a much less urban part of town. When we began, I was surprised to find myself relaxed, not nervous, as I thought I might be, and completely excited. I spent the past two years at Georgetown as a site coordinator for the DC Reads program, which offers literacy tutoring to children in grades 1-3 in low-income areas of DC. Having been a part of DC Reads so consistently, seeing my Thomas Elementary students twice a week regularly, they became a component of my life that I have, in being away from them and DC, missed a lot. So you can imagine my excitement at meeting the kids at Kestel.
At Georgetown, we use a structured curriculum full of organization and training, employing the “Reading Recovery” method, a system made up of leveled books and a lesson plan that includes varied components of literacy teaching. With the lesson plan, we engage children in reading familiar books, write sentences, and re-enforce new teaching using hands-on methods, and, finally, begin new books. We trained our tutors in the lesson plan, giving them the tools they would need to create their own lessons and use our on-site materials, like word games, art supplies, and other teaching tools, creatively and effectively.
I knew from the beginning that teaching here would differ completely from my DC Reads experience. The program here isn’t structured from outside, there's no literacy expert to guide us – we create it. We don’t have fancy teaching tools and pre-made games to choose from and, in fact, I’m not sure that the school itself uses many “props” in its general teaching method. I have never officially taught language classes; I have never been trained in it, and especially not in teaching English as a Second Language. I wasn’t sure how to go about it and, with the other women, began with a trail and error approach.

sitting in the classroom. we always walk in on math section, and are ultimately harrassed to go up to the board and show off our skills - competing with the students (and completely embarrassing ourselves)

We decided that the best way to make the most of our resources was to split the class into groups, thus increasing the one-on-one attention the students would receive. The first day of lessons, we had three stations and aimed to get a better grasp of what the children already know and need help with. They take English class in school, so, expecting that they would probably be comfortable with the lessons they have covered in their book (which is completely terrible, by the way, reinforcing age-old stereotypes of English-speakers while making no practical sense - but that's another story), we picked words and topics from there – adjectives, months and seasons, feelings. These were all very simplistic things to us, and we worried if they would be too easy for the children.
We quickly found that we had no need to worry; their English-speaking comfort zone was much smaller than we had anticipated. Despite previous school lessons and last year’s American teachers (from our program), few students knew more than blanket statements like, “My name is Arzu,” and questions like “Hello, how are you?” and had no context for these set phrases. Although this was a great start in my eyes, their lack of knowledge made even communicating how to do exercises and what I wanted students to do difficult. It has, however, been a great impetus for me to work harder in Turkish class.

one day, we planted a carob tree outside the school. here, hakan shows hilary how it's done.

Over the past few weeks, I have learned how to rely primarily on simple, clear English when speaking to the students, even when they don’t understand exactly what I mean. I repeat myself slowly and often, while occasionally translating in the bits of Turkish that I know, sandwiched between the English phrases. “Where is your eye?” I will ask a student during our face and body parts lesson, crouching to the level of their desk, “Where is your eye?” Then, if they look back completely bewildered, I’ll say, “Gözün nerede? Where is your eye?” hoping that, in repeating and using the English, they will become accustomed to the sounds of the language. I think that patience and repetition are key elements to teaching, regardless of the subject, and it has been working, however slowly, at Kestel. With review over this past week, the students have been finding the components of their English faces – eyes, eyebrows, noses, mouths, teeth, cheeks, lips, necks, hair – quite well, and claiming them as their own. “My face, my nose, my eye, my ear,” they exclaim, pointing. They love "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" as well as "The Hokey Pokey" (talk about making no sense! what a silly song! but the kids like it).

more planting. everyone's pretty enthralled. the teacher, ergin bey, is also the local head of TEMA, a prominent turkish environmental group. ah, the joy of trees.

We have found that overall, large lessons, like demonstrating and labeling parts of the body, are best introduced in the large group with one of us leading and the others milling around, engaging individual students. Some students I have engaged have even, through brief one-on-one encounters, learned unexpected grammatical lessons of plurality or possession. The student, for example, will have erroneously pointed in my direction, saying “My nose,” leading into a demonstration of “my” and “your” between the student and me until she or he understands.
Some students are more comfortable in English than others, for whatever reason, which makes it hard sometimes to keep everyone on the same page.
Many students are much less comfortable reading than others, and it seems that we need to help them realize that the Turkish and English alphabets and letter sounds aren’t very far apart.
These kids are afraid to be wrong. Many times, they fear taking chances to avoid makeing mistakes. Mistakes are okay. I'm still alive, and I make tons of 'em.
The language barrier makes this difficult to explain. It usually ends with me flailing my arms wildly, over-eggagerating words, and making tons of strange noises. I get lots of skrewed-up, laughing faces, but the students understand high-fives perfectly.

hakan and imren. probably laughing at me.

I guess there’s no simple formula for us here, no set lesson plan or structured trainings to attend – we just have to rely on our communal creativity and the ability to think on our feet.

Linger on your pale blue eyes...

The evil eye is basically an age-old stigma and superstition in this region (it's actually a fairly prolific element found globally in many religions and popular cultures). Here, if people complement a person too much, or are jealous of them, the common perception is that some evil will befall that person. So, prosperous and beautiful people keep the eye close by in order to deflect the negative energy.
This is the same reason why you'll see elderly Greek, Arab, Turk, and other ladies spitting, or pretending to spit, at babies (since they get so much attention and cooing, grandmas may spit to deflect all the positivity, in case any bad spirits [djinns, in Islam] are nearby, or the evil eye has been transmitted). It's one of those things that has carried over for years and years and, now, is just completely assimilated. It's also a pretty neat (and colorful) tourist trap.
The blue, glass eye (note that it's a blue eye - often associated with Europeans and colonialism, an even thicker dynamic..) is often a big deal in Turkish families. Turkish bus drivers, who just about push their luck with their insane driving tactics (on tiny mountain roads), have also adapted it as a sort of good luck charm

(the seat of a bus driver whose bus we had the lucky chance to ride all the way from Ephasus to Cappadoccia - look closely, those are little pins with blue eyes on 'em!)

(some more excellent good luck charms, ever so popular with Turkish bus drivers...the little clown dolls and hearts with "i love you" in various languages are really common for some reason)

Also, during the severe inflation of the early 2000s, people started giving little blue eye beads as small change, since the coins were so worthless anyway.

(scenic look-out in Cappadoccia.. kneeling at the good-luck tree! tourists dig the eye.)

It's a symbol to ward off the "eye," but applied to anyone fortunate with anything to be jealous of. For example, a Turkish friend of mine told me a story about his experience with it. Apparently, he's admired by much of his town because he's this smart guy who got to go to high school in Istanbul and then study in America, and he has brooding long hair, etc, and everybody complements him and asks for him, but whenever he's home, he says he's so bored that it always puts him in a slump (I mean people would be convinced that I had the eye when I came home from school vacations, too, as I'm basically sleepy and useless the whole time). So his Mom, being very afraid that her son "had the eye," decided to put it to the test by hiring a reader who can read whether or not people have this unfortunate affliction. So she read some specific Koranic verses, and if he had the eye, it would make her yawn while she read. Poor guy, he apparently had it so bad that the reader barfed right there!!

Hope I have convinced you to invest in one of these purdy window-hangers....