Turkish Conversation Club

I am continuing my efforts to catch up on the blog because I have arrived at the airport and my gate way earlier than expected (this will be explained in a later post).

Following my big weekend in çanakkale, I returned back to the hustle and bustle of the big city. Now that I have been here for about a month I have started making some new Turkish friends of my own (rather than just the ones my roommate introduced me to).

I don’t participate in many extracurricular activities here, which is actually in some ways kind of nice. Instead of getting home at 6, 7, or 8pm, I usually get home by 5 o’clock (though depending on the day sometimes earlier). One extracurricular activity that I do end up doing is Turkish Conversation Club. I like Turkish conversation club for several reasons. Firstly, my actual Turkish class is worthless. I literally learn more in the one hour of Turkish conversation club than the four hours a week I have of Turkish class. It’s actually pretty ridiculous. Secondly, it is a good chance for me to meet the exchange students. Because I don’t live in the dorm, I have limited exposure to the Americans (pretty much only seeing them in Turkish class or Turkish Conversation Club). The third reason is because it also is an extra outlet for meeting new Turkish students. Usually the Turkish students who come to the conversation club actually want to meet Americans and speak English. Many other Turkish people around campus do not like speaking English and find doing so to be a burden. For them, the fact that Boğaziçi is conducted in English is a burden and they are only there because it is the best university in Turkey. For this reason, they only speak English in the class and avoid speaking English outside of class at all costs. It’s really interesting to me. Personally, I would want to speak the language outside of class to learn it more.

So three weeks ago now, on March 24 I ended up with Öğüz. It seems that his name has as many Turkish letters as possible, making it especially difficult for me to write it in this blog. Öğüz is from Adana, which is a town in Eastern Anatolia near the Mediterranean Sea and Syrian border. After conversation club, we went to dinner at the on campus cafeteria. The cafeteria is open for lunch and dinner daily and serves Ayran (a type of liquid yogurt drink), soup, a side, a meat of some type, and a piece of fruit. The cost of one pass through the cafeteria line is only 2.75 Lira (about $1.70 now but when the US Dollar was doing better it was as low as $1.53). The variation in price also is good to show how much value the dollar has lost in the last month. It’s quite remarkable! At any rate, we went to the cafeteria and talked for a while and then decided to go to Bu Café.

The Bu Café is a popular hangout place for Boğaziçi öğrenler (students). One of my favorite aspects of Turkish culture (as I have probably explained before) is how they go to cafés and play board games. So of course when in Turkey do as the Turks do. We decided to play tavla (backgammon). Öğüz beat me pretty handily. I think the ending score was 5 games to 1 game. Clearly, I need a lot more practice to improve those tavla skills. During the game, we had and interesting conversation. I asked him what came to his mind when he thought of Americans. He seemed to think that all we did was party all of the time (because the Hollywood movies are so pervasive here). He also told me that he got the impression that there were a lot of stupid people in American (an assessment that I don’t think is too far off the actual mark). I also asked him about his hometown and about Turkey in general. He was actually the first one to inform me about the Ergenekon scandal, which has been so pervasive in the news over the past few weeks (especially during the elections). The Ergenekon Scandal basically refers to the illegal existence of Ergenekon, a secret anti-AKP government organization that included high-ranking members of the military and was pervasive in many places in Turkish politic. One of the discoveries of the Ergenekon Scandal was that high ranking military officers were planning a military coup against the AKP. Interestingly, Ergenekon even penetrated North Cypriot politics! I am not that great at explaining it because I am still trying to learn about it myself. If you’re interested, I suggested looking up the Wikipedia article. They have a good article detailing exactly what it was and which actors were involved. After tavla I went home to slave away at my Political Econ readings. A good evening was had by all.