today a scorpion ran out from under my bed and i screamed and hit it with a shirt. then emre and baran came in to caulk up the holes in my room even though it probably didn’t come from in there. baran said it was just a baby scorpion and that they can get to be as big as his forearm at which point i decided that i’m never going outside again. apparently i will not be leaving my windows open either because they think it crawled in from there. argrhhhgh i don’t want to live with scorpions. they’re so scary when they run around! they look like evil incarnate.

after we crossed the euphrates we made our way to diyarbakir. even though we had been awake for basically two days at this point we decided to keep going and explore all of diyabakir in the remaining hours of that day. 

lonely planet fact: the basalt walls of diyarbakir, created in the 4th century, are some of the oldest medieval fortifications around today. they are second only to the great wall of china in length. 

a view of the walls from inside them.

famous gate on the walls.

another cool thing about diyarbakir was that the mosques look completely different from mosques elsewhere in turkey. they tend to have square minarets, black and white stripes, and we went to one that looked greco-roman.

square minarets. 

greco-roman looking mosque.

we also fit in some armenian churches that were pretty old and deserted. 

armenian church from the inside.

finally before leaving we also ran into a famous poets house but nobody took any pictures of that because there were a bunch of teenagers hanging out there and we didn’t want to look uncool. more importantly we sampled the baklava to see if it would match up to the supposedly great gaziantep baklava. it didn’t!

not as fresh.

the biggest impression that i got from diyarbakir was that it was so modern and trendy. i was expecting everyone to be headscarfed (in the east a lot of men wear them too…) but instead i thought that i was more conservatively dressed than many of the other girls there. this was especially true at the mall we stopped at to go to the bathroom. they had a gap. that’s another great thing i learned on this trip, if you can find a mall then you can find western toilets. there are malls everywhere! 

i’m in the middle of doing a research paper about the palace of sargon (700ish bce) and while doing the research i stumbled on these winged bull gates. then i remembered that this is the louvre and i’ve walked through there and touched them. it’s pretty exciting to have seen what i now realize is an important piece of history, but it’s lame that they’re in paris. i can definitely see why countries want their stolen artifacts back where people can really appreciate the history of the land that they’re in. that was one of the coolest things about eastern turkey. everywhere you went there were just ancient monuments and so on. it’s nice in a museum but it’s much more powerful in it’s original location. 

after we left gaziantep we intended on bookin’ it to mt. nemrut to see the sunset there. of course because we waited forever for memik we were too late. so we stopped in adiyaman to get dinner and regroup. i had already given up on being vegetarian in the southeast so we picked up these huge chicken pitas and feasted like kings. our original plan abandoned, we decided to check out these roman ruins at perra. they ended up being really cool and we still saw the sunset so everyone was happy. right on the ruins there were people grazing their sheep and goats. they just lived everyday hanging out on temples and houses etc. for them we must have seemed silly. 

then we tried to get up the mountain to the camping grounds on mt. nemrut. of course memik asked every single person we passed for directions and this ended up confusing him even more and we drove around forever. on our way we passed a group of kids who asked memik if he was a terrorist because he was wearing one of those stupid scarves which threw him into a panic and was hilarious for the rest of us. at this point sophia decided to give them our stash of cookies. this was not cool with me. 

anyway we get to the top and its snowing and freezing but we brought enough blankets and pillows to stay warm in the car. the only one that got any sleep was memik and he snored for hours. 

we woke up at 4 to make our assent to the summit in an attempt to see the sunrise. i bet the sunrise there is really amazing and i hope to someday go back and see it because this time we were in the middle of a snow storm and visibility was though. we really had no idea that we would actually be climbing a mountain. we thought it would be a nice little hike and not a tiny steep footpath on the side of a cliff. i actually enjoyed this more than anyone else because it was an adventure. 

on the mountain we met a few tour groups. i had mixed feelings about this because they were annoying and detracted from the actual site, but on the other hand their sherpa led us down the mountain and we didn’t die. 

then! the adventure continued after we left the actual heads when we drove down a crazy winding path in our attempt to get off the mountain. by the way mt. nemrut is a site created by some crazy king who made these huge statues of himself and the gods. the heads of all the statues have fallen off so it’s pretty neat. anyway on our way to diyabakir we actually saw the coolest stuff without it being planned. first we hit some ruins around a few caves and got breakfast. we saw yeni kale aka another castle from pre-roman times also pre-greek times and that was ok. while we were there we met a guy in a tiny village that used to live in san fransisco and he brewed us up some of the regions pistachio coffee. 

next we stopped at a roman bridge where i made friends with a wolf-dog and we lounged for a bit before heading to this burial mound for a roman emperor’s mother. it had columns and when you got to the top you could see the euphrates winding through the mountains, my favorite part. then we headed to the ferry to get across the euphrates on our way to diyabakir!

cool architecture in adiyaman.

eating 2 ft. of chicken with some sheep in perra.

the ruins!

kids eating my cookies.

vikram getting comfy in preparation for sleeping in the car. 

a head!

us after successfully climbing a mountain.

yeni kale. 

pistachio coffee, like normal coffee except weird. 

cave on a mountain surrounded by roman ruins with greek writing on them. 

my dog friend on a roman bridge.

burial mound in the mountains!

spring break road trip to southeastern turkey, first stop Gaziantep. 

we flew into Gaziantep early enough to spend the day visiting memik’s ancient grandparents, pick up a car, go to a fancy hookah spot, and figure out that the apartment we planned to spend three total nights in didn’t have water so the toilet didn’t flush.

a view of gaziantep from the castle. 

the next day we explored the old district of the city, which is like actually ancient. everywhere we went was ancient though so i’ll stop mentioning that after this. we went to the bazaar and wandered around and went to the most famous baklava place in the world.

gaziantep pistachio baklava. 

then we climbed up to the castle in the center of the city. it was a pretty average castle and i had flashback to being dragged through forts as a kid. the first time you see a castle you’re like oh cool we should go see that! everywhere we went had a  castle though, and sometimes there were some just out in the middle of nowhere that we checked out. at that point they get kind of boring. 

day three in gaziantep: sophia and i demand to be taken to the hamam because we haven’t showered in two days (again no water at the apartment) and that was a blast. eastern turkey is more conservative so everyone else was wearing bathing suits, so they were all surprised by sophia and i, who are used to the no clothes allowed situation in istanbul. 

memik picked us up when we were done and we went to the men’s club his uncle owns to await our rental car. it was pretty early in the morning so we were allowed in and his uncle gave us an amazing turkish breakfast:

said uncle and memik with some food. 

another highlight of the stop-off was that i beat memik in pool in front of all the men who then taunted him for being beaten by a girl:

and then finally after waiting around for memik for hours we got in our rental car and hit the road!

it’s really exciting being here with national elections coming up in just a month. my turkish politics class has caused me to read a lot about the evolution of the major parties involved and the current issues that will determine the outcome. right now the conservative islamist AKP is in power. it’s an offshoot of earlier more radical islamist parties that were shut down by the constitutional court in the 1990’s. since taking over the government in 2002 they have had to take a more centralist position on many issues in order to get the things done in parliament that would allow them to keep winning elections and appeal to a broad range of constituents. they’re a really interesting party because they love to go on and on about the evil west and how they will move turkey away from ataturk’s misguided secularism, but in reality they have done more to get turkey into the EU than any centralist or leftist party in the past. additionally they have increased trade and military relations with the US and EU members. obviously these actions will help them gain popularity with voters across the board because they have caused the economy to bounce back from its dire condition in 2002. they are also uncharacteristic for a right wing party because they provide way more welfare and social security benefits to the poor than the more socialist parties that proceeded them in power. however, the AKP is really despised among the adults in my english classes because of their unpopular domestic policies. these apply more on a local level and includes things like: allowing women to wear headscarves in public buildings (there is technically still a ban on this), and the prohibition of alcohol at the local level in some eastern towns. another issue that seems to haunt middle developer countries, including turkey, is the dependence on paternalism. the only way for any area or group of people to receive resources from the state is to take them basically in the form of bribes from a person in power. in 2002 the AKP promised to curb this corruption and bring about a more honest system, but of course the secular cronies were just replaced with conservative ones. 

the other major party in this election, pictured above, is the CHP. the CHP is ironically the first real political party turkey ever had and in its beginnings was authoritarian and very conservative. throughout the 20th century it has evolved into a leftist party somehow, and is the only real hope of turkey’s liberal elites. it is very hard for them to compete with the AKP because of the real results that have come from their time in power. turkey is currently in a very strong position not only foreign policy wise (strong alliances with its eastern neighbors, the US uses it as a military ally, and their EU bid will likely come through), it’s economy is doing better than ever, and they have managed to put an end to the major problems with ethnic violence (the leader of the kurdish resistance movement is in custody, and the current party has established many new laws and regulations that require kurds to have the same rights to express their identity as turks do ie. learning kurdish in schools, having their own political parties, t.v. channels and newspapers). at this point the best bet for the CHP is to play on the fears of many that turkey’s secular traditions are being challenged. despite the fact that the AKP cannot abandon turkey’s secular democracy because of the strong presence of the secularized military, many people would rather see headscarves disappear from public life and prefer to keep religious preferences completely separated from the state. 

even though turkey has a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one, i see many similarities between turkish and american politics. here just as in the US, people respond the most to economic results and the AKP has really been lucky in that the party in power before them (the motherland party) laid the groundwork for an economic upturn. this is just like the how the democratic party in the US is suffering from the economic downturn that is related to the economic mismanagement under the republican government before them. i also think that it’s really interesting that many people think turkey is a muslim nation. just like the majority of americans are christian, the majority of turks are muslim. however, i would argue that the turkish government is actually less religious than the american government. in the turkish parliament there are christians and jews while in the US even catholics come under scrutiny if they enter the political arena. thirty percent of the prime ministers in turkey have been kurdish (the equivilent of an american president, there is a presidential office in turkey but it is less powerful) which many people would find surprising i think. this is interesting because that directly corresponds to the percent of the population that is kurdish. 

may first in turkey is the dedicated political demonstration day and this year in taksim, which is a huge square in the center of istanbul, the two main parties and the many other less significant parties all came out and did their thing. it was amazing to see because in turkey everyone is obsessed with politics and everyone was down there supporting their preferred party. it’s going to be a little depressing to return to the US where people are so uninvolved, especially in my age group. 

above picture: vikram trying to get a refund for our tickets. unsuccessful!

we tried to go to this thing tonight, but obviously it didn’t work out. this is the second time we’ve attempted it and every time istanbul traffic has prevented it from happening. this time we figured we would buy tickets in advance so that we wouldn’t have to worry about waiting in line. on the way over though the traffic was the worst i’ve ever seen it. there were about one hundred people stuffed onto our bus. it probably shouldn’t hold more than fifty at the most. 

as it turns out the turks are very uptight about being on time for movies! this is surprising because in every other instance i’ve found that nobody feels the least bit guilty about being late. i’m continuously amazed that anything gets done here because of the crazy high level of inefficiency in every department, except apparently the cinema. still, i want to go back because it’s a very fancy movie theatre. it seems like everyone dresses up to go and the whole inside was all marble and columns. for the equivalent of six bucks you can see a movie! and not just a matinee either! 

i met with my group for the huge project in one of my classes. my job? outline five articles. this place is crazy! to top it off in my history of islamic civ. class our only paper assignment is to review an article. there’s no research involved! this means that in my time here i will only have to write one real paper that is actually going to take some effort. 

it’s really strange though because i’m the only native english speaker in my group. I would think that the most strategic way to divide out the work would be to have me do most of the writing. i should go to grad school here. 

even the animals are too skinny here!