An Inauspicious Beginning

I have never, ever had problems with jet lag.  My dad's "Make them walk until they drop" strategy has always proved annoyingly effective, and I was sure that my staying up late the night before would be just as effective.  So when I woke up before my alarm went off and checked my phone to see what time it was, I was not expecting it to be 5:30 A.M.  I was also not expecting to be wide-awake.  I had no idea why my body decided to wake me up at this ungodly hour after how little sleep it had been running on.  Although it was warm in my room, as always, it wasn't unbearable and I wasn't even feeling uncomfortable from the heat.  I was just awake.

I tried to check my phone to see if I could at least check email or FaceBook or be very slightly productive while I was so awake and sleep seemed impossible, but it was then that I discovered that the Wifi only worked while their computer was on.  I officially had nothing to do with myself.  The one bright spot in all this was that I discovered that my phone was still on D.C. time and therefore I had set my alarm wrong.  Setting it to "midnight" (which was 7 A.M. in Turkey), I lay back down and tried to sleep, but my body refused to cooperate. . .until about fifteen minutes before I had set my alarm to wake me up.  Then I suddenly grew exhausted, and when my alarm did go off, I set a new one for fifteen minutes later to try and get some sleep. 

With my host mother knocking at my door, I couldn't put off getting up any longer.  After bidding her good morning, I got dressed and made my way to the kitchen when she said that breakfast was ready.  Breakfast was toast with a large assortment of spreads--butter, Nutella, jelly, and honey.  There were also olives and cheese, which I originally thought were large pats of butter and tried to spread all over my bread.  To drink, I had whole milk.  It was all very good, and with the way she kept giving me slices of bread, more than I was used to eating so early in the morning.  At 8:55 we set off to take me to my first day of school.  I assumed that we were going by bus again and was confused when she began taking me a different way.  That was not good.  My brain cannot handle remembering more than one way to a destination, particularly when the first way is less than firmly set inside.  But I didn't complain and followed after her, trying desperately to remember my surroundings.  To my surprise, she led me (after about fifteen minutes of power-walking) to the ferry.  It seemed that my first idea of taking the ferry to school every day was correct.  She bought me a "Kent Kard," a card that I could use to ride the ferry, Metro, or bus.  I had slight difficulty trying to get through the barrier until she showed me that I just had to lay it down and not swipe it against anything, but after that we were through and on the ferry.  The view from the ferry is absolutely breathtaking--you can see the entire city sprawled out around you, the buildings nestled at the bases of what are either mountains or very large hills.  In the morning, the ferry goes first to Pasaport, then Alsancak, so the entire ride probably lasted between twenty and thirty minutes. We disembarked at Alsancak, and my host mother led me to the TÖMER Institute, where we arrived with several minutes to spare.  I was dropped off in the cafeteria and left to wait with the other students.  Eventually we were split into groups to take our placement exam.  I was sent to the seventh, and highest, floor.

TÖMER has twelve levels of language placement.  The written exam had twelve questions for each level, and you had to answer eight out of the ten correctly to be placed out of the level.  Then there was also a composition that you had to write on the back, with a topic for beginner, intermediate, and advanced student.  When even the beginner question had words I didn't know, I knew this was going to be fun.   However, when I first started the test, I thought I was doing pretty well.  I knew what endings were necessary and was blazing through them...until I got to about question thirty.  That's when I started to get fuzzy on the questions.  By question forty I was starting to skip a bunch of the questions and make "educated guesses" on the others.  By question sixty, I gave up answering at all and moved onto the composition.  I knew it said something about my family, so I ran with that and described my family as best as I could.  I saw the other students were still working on the test and I didn't want to go downstairs by myself to take the oral exam, so I continued to add things to my composition.  Eventually the two hours we had to take the test were up, and we headed downstairs.  I, as usual, was the last person called to take the oral exam.  I entered a room where all the teachers were sitting, my test in front of them as they graded it.  Reassuring.  One of the teachers--a male--began, asking me about my last name.  Of course.  My father's family came from Hungary, and although it's been Anglicized, it still is apparently impossible for Americans to pronounce.  The Turks actually seem to be a bit better at pronouncing it--the Gs are correct, at least, although they like to draw the Es out a bit.  But even though my father's family is Hungarian, the Hungarians we've asked have all said that it isn't a Hungarian name.  As is, it's apparently a Lebanese one or Coptic Egyptian, and the original form is close to some Polish names.  (editor’s note: The original name was spelled Garges, and is a Hungarian name).

Now, I don't know how to say all of that in Turkish.  Instead, I just said that my dad was Hungarian.  This, of course, led to several other questions--was I born in Hungary, had I been to Hungary, did I speak Hungarian?  No, no, no.  It wasn't what I had been expecting entering that room and it kind of threw me off and made me feel incredibly awkward.  Finally one of the female teachers took over, but the session didn't get any better because I couldn't understand anything she was asking.  Luckily she only asked a few questions (I was in there for a grand total of five minutes, if that), before I was allowed to leave, hoping that at least my composition had saved me. 

After a boring, mandatory safety lecture, we had lunch--stuffed eggplant.  My favorite (insert sarcasm here).  I knew that somewhere in Kansas my parents had to have been laughing, for this to have been my very first lunch in Turkey.  Perhaps they had even written my school and asked for it specifically.  That aside, it wasn't that bad.  I ate a few bites of it to show that I had, at least, hoping that I could pass off not finishing it as simply not being hungry.  Not that they would have cared--the guy next to me didn't touch it, which made me feel better.  I also had noticed last night at dinner that I seemed to be better at eating vegetables than my host brother.  I was feeling pretty proud of myself.  The rice they served with the eggplant was better than the eggplant itself, because Turks like to mix their rice with lots of butter.  As I am a fan of butter, I see no problem with this.  There was also bread to go with the meal (along with every other meal in Turkey), and what I called "tzetziki soup" because that's basically what it was.  After lunch we were served a bowl of fruits, and then herded downstairs to be given the "Earthquake and Fire Safety" talk. 

I was, at this point, absolutely exhausted and struggling to keep my eyes open.  It had already been a long day, I had had very little sleep, and boring lectures about safety were not helping.  After receiving my very own smoke alarm and earthquake bag, and swearing not to speak English for the duration of our stay, we were told that we were going to be meeting our language buddies. . .and go on a scavenger hunt.  For the first day, when we were all jet-lagged and had just had a ton of information thrown at us, I thought this was a bit much.  I just wanted to go home and go to sleep. But, since there was nothing I could do about it, I tried my best to rouse myself and prepare myself for the awkwardness that was to come.  We'd been given a sheet of paper with the names of our buddies, so I already knew that mine was named Efe.  And from the other students, I knew that that was a boy's name.  What I didn't know until we were introduced to our buddies was that I was the only girl with a male language partner.  When my name was called, I went over to meet him, trying not to stumble over anyone's chair or bag, shook his hand and introduced himself.  Then we sat down together and I tried to look as interested in the proceedings as possible to stave off any attempts at conversation.  We were given instructions in Turkish (which I of course didn't understand, but I assumed that our objective was to "find things") and paired up with another American and their language partner.  We were paired with a student named Spencer and his buddy Gökhan, and then off we went. 

What followed was a lot chasing after Efe and Gökhan while not really knowing where I was or what we were looking for, and the occasional awkward attempt at small talk.  We had been given a small slip of paper with what we needed on it, and it appeared that our buddies were determined to win.  We chased after them as they went to a store and got band-aids, went a couple of other places where we just grabbed a slip of paper, and then started just taking pictures of us at different places with Efe's cell phone.  I thought that we had done pretty good time, but we still found that we'd been beaten by another buddy who had apparently run the entire time.  Despite not winning, we still got ice cream, so everything ended well.  Except for the fact that it hadn't ended...we'd finished the scavenger hunt an hour before our host families were supposed to arrive to pick us up, so now we had nothing to do except talk.  And talking was hard and awkward and I was exhausted.

One of the buddies ended up leading us to a cafe, where we all sat around and talked.  I didn't get a drink and didn't do much in the way of talking, because at that point I was just trying to stay awake...and mostly failing.  We exchanged phone numbers and email addresses before eventually going back, where my host mother was waiting for me.  A mostly uneventful night passed, and I went to bed.

The first day of class was not much better than the first day of orientation.  I was placed in level "Temel Üç," or Advanced Beginner.  I and five other students were sent to the top floor once more, where we met our teacher, Esra.  She seemed very nice--very fashionably dressed and personable, trying to get us all to participate.  But that didn't stop the fact that the class was being taught in Turkish, that I know very little Turkish, and I didn't understand what was going on.  Even when I stopped her and tried to get her to explain something differently, either I couldn't get my questions across in a way that she was answering the right question, or if she was answering the right question, I just didn't understand the explanation.  It was a very difficult way to learn and I felt that I was the dumbest one in the class, who even if they didn't understand anything, at least acted like they did.  Thoroughly discouraged, I went home with my host mother straight after class.  Luckily, spending time with her was much better than spending time in class.  She took me down a different street than usual and showed me where I could exchange my dollars for Turkish lira, so I finally had money, which was one stress gone.  She then bought me a little trinket to go with my keys before showing me how to put more money on my Kent Kard, which was something else that had been worrying me. 

That day also happened to be my host sister's birthday, so later on I went out with her.  We met up with two of her friends, whose names I promptly forgot, then took a taxi to a different neighborhood and went to a restaurant.  They kept trying to give me an English menu, but with thinks like "Meksiken wrap" on the menu, I told them that I didn't need it.  I ended up just asking for whatever they got anyway, which turned out to be chicken fingers and fries.  The food was alright, but nothing special.  I had a Coke, but it was soon gone, while we stayed a considerably longer time.  Two more of her friends arrived, one of whom spoke some English and was eager to practice it with me.  We worked out that he would speak English and I would answer with Turkish, and being able to talk to at least one person made the evening a bit easier on me. 

This was, however, the first time that I was faced with a cultural difference that really shocked me.  At one point during the evening, he leaned over and asked me if there were any "[n word]s" in Kansas.  I had read in one of the cultural packets that the word didn't have the same connotations as in the US, but hearing it spoken, and so casually, still made my jaw drop.  After recovering my ability to talk, I said that there were.  He proceeded to say that he "loved [n word]s" and got out his phone to show me a picture of Snoop Dog and T-Pack, who were his "favorite singers."  I then proceeded to try to explain to him that he should never, ever say that word in America.  Although I thought that what I said made sense, I'm not quite sure that I was able to effectively communicate my point. 

Arda and one of his friends arrived, we ate some really delicious cake, talked for an extremely long time (I was on the verge of falling asleep again), and finally left.  But, of course, the night was not over.  We had guests over to celebrate Füme's birthday, and once again I went to bed late. 

After my not-so-great first day of classes, I spent the next morning trying to mentally pump myself up.  Living in another country for two months was going to be hard enough without dreading going to class each day.  The mental prep-talk was somewhat effective--classes were much easier, but that's because they were shortened because we had another safety briefing to go to.  Pretty much all we did was talk about what we had done the previous day before we were loaded onto a bus and taken to an economics university.  We were led to a very nice conference room, where we had a video chat with some officials in Ankara about safety in the event of terrorist attacks and the like.  We actually weren't given all that much information--the man went very briefly through a slideshow that had not been made for us, skipping a lot of things along the way--and the whole thing kind of felt like a waste of time, especially when we were immediately reloaded onto the bus after a not-very-long time. 

Despite the okay second day, the third day was absolutely horrific.  Once more I couldn't understand, once more she couldn't explain, and I just got more and more frustrated.  My brain, when confused, shuts down and refuses to take in any more information.  If more information is forced upon it when it's in "lock-down mode," the next step is to cry.  Not moving on and continuing to try and press the point and force me to understand the issue is a sure-fire way to ensure the tears do come. 

It was not a good day.  Not only were classes hard but I felt very isolated.  The other students, while nice, were almost all older than me and more experienced.  Many had been to Turkey before or spoke other languages; some were even alumni of the CLS program.  I basically floated between groups, with no people that I really gravitated towards.  Even when I could sneak some English, I didn't speak any because I didn't really have anyone to talk to.  I was very depressed, but once more my host family, which had been my greatest fear, was my only source of solace.  Despite hardly being able to talk to them, I enjoyed the time we spent together.  My host mother took me on a very long walk by the waterfront and gave me my first taste of real Turkish dondurma (ice cream), which was delicious.  I thought that screwing up twice in class might be a bit much to fix, but I thought that since I heard we were switching teachers in a month and since I had my awesome host family, that I just might be able to make it.