Ankara

Ankara was very different from Istanbul. It looked new and sterile, rows on rows of similar office towers and apartment buildings stretching as far as I could see. Many of the tall buildings were draped with banners of Ataturk and Turkish flags that were easily five stories high, if not more. Smaller flags were everywhere, hanging off balconies and waving from some of the biggest flag poles I have ever seen. I wondered if all these flags and banners were normal, at least for Ankara, but someone eventually told me that August 30 was something like Independence Day in Turkey (Victory Day actually, commemorating the end of the Greco-Turkish war in 1922).

We took one of the smaller buses that look like oversized milk trucks downtown to do some shopping during Ramadan. A couple of cranky-looking, skimpily dressed old ladies got on at the stop after us, and sat down right behind us. As they got on, I was thinking they looked like the sort of people who used to scream at me in the street in Canada to go back to my country.

My friend Kubra leaned over and told me in Arabic, "These two might cause a problem. They remind me of people who used to stop me in the street when I was younger and yell at me for wearing hijab, accusing my family of forcing me to wear it. I was only eight or nine, and I wanted to wear it, but I wasn't old enough to argue about it very well."

A hand clamped on to my arm from behind - I looked, and it was one of the old ladies. She shoved a five-lira bill at me, and I asked her in Arabic what she wanted. Whoops, wrong language. She started jabbing my niqab with the bill and berating me in Turkish. Was she trying to give me money, I wondered? I looked at her blankly as she raised her volume and began shouting at me, unable to recall any applicable Turkish words whatsoever.

Kubra spoke to the lady in Turkish, and the lady yelled at her for a while. Kubra's little brother took the lady's money forward to the driver and brought her change back. I realized what she had wanted.

Kubra eventually translated for me. The lady had assumed I was Turkish and was sassing her, despite the fact that I was wearing Arab clothes and speaking Arabic. She wasn't hard of hearing, and said she heard us speaking Arabic, so I couldn't give her that excuse.

On the smaller Ankara buses, people take a seat, find their money, and pass it to the person in front of them, telling them how many people they want to pay for. The money and the instructions are passed along the bus by the passengers to the driver, and then the change is passed back. I had only ever taken the big Istanbul buses, where you pay when you get on, and Kubra's brother had paid for us when we got on this bus because it was nearly empty, so I didn't know how it worked. It was probably a good thing I understood very little Turkish, because the lady behind me complained very loudly to her friend the whole trip.

There are areas in Ankara where almost everyone wears hijab, but it's rare to see hijabis downtown. Most people I saw there were wearing revealing Western fashions. It was interesting to watch people walk by in outfits that seemed more suited for an Italian catwalk than a Turkish street. People stare at me, and they were watching me far more closely than I was looking at them. Several people turned their heads all the way around as they passed me, and collided with others. One man walked into a lamppost. That must have hurt, I felt a bit bad for him.

Turkey Again

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted here. My college and its dormitory are closed for two months, so I came to Turkey with the Turkish students. The trip was definitely not boring, but bus trips through Syria never are; we took about five different buses, the first of which was at least eight hours late, most of them were far too small, and one of them wouldn't start and had to be pushed. The Syrian police love hassling people, but we eventually managed to get through the borders. It has gotten harder since the niqab was banned in Syrian schools. The police are always extremely suspicious of me, wearing Arab clothes and carrying a Canadian passport; they think my passport is fake and tell me I'll have to spend days in the police station waiting for permission to travel through Syria.  But they let us all in eventually. As usual, none of us used a bathroom the whole trip, bus station bathrooms are that bad.

We saw two of the Syrian border officers get into a fistfight in the border station as we were crossing into Syria from Jordan in the wee hours of the morning. They had to be separated several times by another border officer; every time he moved away from them they would start punching each other again.  There were many bus loads of travellers lined up in the border station waiting, and they had been waiting for a long time, but the police mostly stood around smoking and ignoring them.  And then the fight happened.  I don't know what was going on.

I spent a week and a half in Ankara, and have been in Istanbul for about a week. I love Istanbul and wish I could spend more time here.

At Least They Aren't Cockroaches

I opened a cupboard in the kitchen a few days ago, and a brown insect about the size of my thumb-nail skittered across the cupboard and dived for cover behind the dishes. There was no way I would eat off the dishes without washing them, but when I went to put the clean dishes on the drying rack, I saw another brown insect scurrying around under the rack. The kitchen has to be emptied out and fumigated at least once a semester, preferably before the little cockroach-like bugs infiltrate the bedrooms, and it was definitely time to fumigate again. If people didn’t leave dirty dishes lying around and let the garbage overflow it wouldn’t be such a problem, but they do. Well, I thought, at least it isn’t actual cockroaches, or more of the two-inch-long flying insect I captured in our room a while ago.

A few days later, I heard women screaming in the hallway for an unusually long time, and went out to see what the problem was. Usually it’s just Najah telling someone that something halaal is haraam, resulting in a shouting match, but not this time. Najah had discovered one of the two-inch-long flying cockroach-like bugs in a box of books, and every girl in the dorm was standing around it screaming. My Indonesian roommate killed it, and hid it behind a fake potted plant so they would calm down.

I almost never feel the ancient instinct to run screaming from insects, but I did when I found a huge cockroach-like bug with inch-long antennae flying around my room a few weeks ago. I told the girls in bad Arabic, with a lot of gestures, how I had opened the windows and left the room, hoping it would leave by itself and I wouldn’t have to deal with it. An hour later, it was still there, and I wanted to go to sleep. There was no way I could sleep with a bug out of a low-budget horror movie flying around the room, so I grabbed the only thing I could find, a water glass, and tried to capture the insect. It crawled down the back of the mini fridge, and I pulled the fridge away from the wall and stalked it with my glass. I finally captured it – but it was longer than the glass was wide, and I partially crushed the insect. I felt kind of bad for it, and quickly scooped it into the glass and disposed of it down the squatter loo.

The girls all had a good laugh at me, except for Najah, who was horrified and wanted to throw out all the water glasses. One of them could contain traces of crushed bug, no matter how well I bleached, washed, and rinsed it, and the bug was not a locust (the only insect that is halaal for Muslims to consume). I suspect she won’t be drinking out of the school water glasses anymore.

After the kitchen was fumigated, I was re-washing dishes, and I saw a little brown bug run across the counter. I think whoever said that cockroaches will be the last creatures on earth after a nuclear holocaust was right, and their little brown cousins will be there with them.

(Edit: actually, they were cockroaches, just younger ones than I'd seen before.  Oops).

More from Eyup Sultan

An Ottoman-style military band plays in front of Eyup Sultan Masjid on Friday mornings before prayers.

Waiting in line to see what is supposed to be a footprint of the Prophet Mohammed (salallahu alayhe wa sallam) pressed into a polished stone, and the supposed tomb of the companion of the Prophet, Khalid ibn Zayd (radiallahu anhu). He died so long ago, it’s hard to say exactly where his grave actually lies. We saw another reputed footprint of the Prophet at Topkepi Palace, also in Istanbul.

You can see some of the famous Ottoman ceramic tiles on the walls, and Rukiye telling me to hurry up and quit taking pictures of everything. The Thuhr athan had been called, and we thought we were going to pray in the masjid, but we had to wait for the men to finish.

We wandered around looking at tombs for quite a while, and then wandered around the markets near the masjid, and had a look at the beautifully restored old row houses nearby. Some of the women were standing in a circle praying around a deep spring or well of some sort, flush with the paving stones outside a tomb.

By this point we had been waiting for several hours, and Thuhr prayer was almost over. The masjid and the courtyards around it were still packed with men praying on straw mats.

Here we are waiting outside a tomb, just down the path from the men praying. I admit I look a little freaky in that outfit, and my niqab was misbehaving, but that lady on the left blatantly stared at me all afternoon. You would think the novelty would wear off after a few hours.

I voted to find a private spot and pray by ourselves, rather than miss the prayer entirely, but I was overruled. It's not appropriate for ladies to pray outside.

Thuhr wasn’t quite over, so I waited, and we eventually made our way into the masjid and up the tiniest spiral staircase I have ever seen (I wish I had a picture of that), to the women’s balcony – except that there were still men sitting around up there, damnit. There was plenty of room downstairs by that point, I really think the men should have moved down so the women could pray in privacy, while there was still time. I have to take my niqab off to pray, and I didn’t want the men sitting around staring at me, so I stood behind a group of women.

The men file back out of the masjid after prayers. That gold and white bay window on the right is the tomb of Khalid ibn Zayd (radiallahu anhu), and just to the left of it, under the red Turkish flag, is the footprint of the Prophet (salallahu alaye wa sallam).

Cities of the Dead

At Eyup Sultan Masjid in Istanbul (built by the Ottomans in 1458 AD), the tomb of Sokullu Mehmet Pasa, a sixteenth century AD Ottoman vizier, whose last known descendant passed away a few months ago. The masjid is located near the supposed grave of Khalid ibn Zaid ibn Kulayb, a companion of the Prophet (sallalahu alayhe wa sallam) who participated in the seventh century AD Muslim conquest of Istanbul. Many Ottoman officials are buried near the masjid.

An iris flowering on another grave in downtown Istanbul.

One of the things that struck me about Istanbul was the sheer number of people who have died in the city. Many of the graves I saw dated from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but even still everywhere I went there were vast graveyards, or old graves squeezed in next to the street.

I was on a bus to Eyup, and I saw a small mountain on the Golden Horn, overlooking the sea. It appeared to be covered with square white limestone rock formations, interspersed with trees, but when I got closer I realized that the whole mountain was covered in white stone tombs about the size of coffins, all jumbled together. Families bearing flowers picked paths among the tombs, winding their way up the mountain to tend the graves of their loved ones.

Most of the monuments at Eyup Sultan dated from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, which puzzled me for a while, because they were in the Ottoman style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the carvings were mostly perfectly legible. Had the Ottomans built new monuments for ancient graves? If so, why were they all so close in age? It took me far longer than it should have to realize that they were using the hijri calendar. The current hijri year is 1431.

Just the number of people who died and merited monuments in this one city in the past two centuries is hard to grasp; I can’t imagine how many people will rise up on Judgement Day.

Little Flying Brains

It's hamlah season in Jordan. Hamlah are raw, green chickpeas each in their own little pod. I think the name is related to the word for "pregnant." After the hamlat are shelled and roasted in the oven, they're called hemmas.

To eat them, you pinch the top of the pod, and it splits open along the seam.

They look like perfect little brains with wings to me. You can't see much detail in my crappy webcam photos, but hamlah look just like brains.

Mmmmmmm, braaaiiiins. Nom nom nom.

Springtime in Istanbul

Artifacts from the ruins of an ancient church dating to the fifth century AD, found under the edge of the Hagia Sophia. It became a masjid after the Ottoman conquest in 1453, but before that it was the site of a series of churches beginning in the fourth century AD. These ruins were not fully excavated, to avoid damaging the Hagia Sophia.

Turkey, and Istanbul especially, have been famous for their tulips for centuries. We were fortunate to be in Istanbul during their brief season, and saw pretty much every sort of tulip imaginable. I photographed these pink ones in a park along the outside of the old city walls, the same walls that Fatih Sultan Mehmet led the Ottoman forces through over six hundred years ago. A little further along, people were growing vegetables under the wall, and it looked like some people were squatting in the trees between the wall and the road, and in some of the disintegrating towers as well. I spotted a young couple necking inside a tower that had crumbled down to only about a storey high.

I was fascinated by the city walls, and took a ton of pictures of them, one of the great things about being allowed to use Rukiye’s digital camera. I can take twenty pictures of something without worrying about wasting a whole roll of film; some of them will turn out, and some of them won’t, but that’s okay. Using a film camera is very expensive here, especially since mine uses unusual film and batteries, it's hard for me to communicate what I want at the studios, and the studios often mess up the prints. I took about half a dozen pictures of Rukiye’s lace curtains, and Rukiye decided I was officially nuts. In a week and a half, we took over six hundred pictures.

Rapunzel growing in the warmth and shelter of the stone wall.

Halloween in Istanbul

Rukiye, my host in Istanbul, has her last university exam today, just a half hour on Arabic grammar. She's almost done a two year program in Islamic studies. Hijab is forbidden in government schools in Turkey, so she's going to wear a wig.

She tried it on this morning, and it was hard not to laugh.  It was a cheap wig and didn't look real at all. We spent quite a while attempting to comb and style the wig, but it didn't help much.

We're leaving Istanbul the day after tomorrow. I can't believe how quickly the time has gone, it doesn't seem like enough.

Turkey!

I'm so excited! I am leaving in two days for Turkey with one of my Turkish roommates. There are several reasons for this trip:

1. My roommate asked me if I wanted to go with her to Istanbul for a few weeks.

2. Of course I want to!

3. My visa expired a few weeks ago, so I have to leave the country and come back in anyhow.

4. The tickets are less than two hundred dollars round trip.

Adding together my roommate's small amount of Arabic and my better Arabic but nearly nonexistent Turkish, this should be interesting. We gesture a lot when we talk and carry around dictionaries, but we do manage to say quite a bit.

She told me yesterday that we would get to Syria by bus in the middle of the night, and asked if I was willing to wander around Syria in the dark with her (or something like that, in a combination of Arabic, Turkish, facial expressions, and gestures). Would I be too tired, or in too much pain? I told her, no, it's fine, I'll just load up on coffee and chocolate and more sugar and painkillers, and I'll be okay. It'll be fun!

On the visa front...the official at my college in charge of visas has been telling me tomorrow, tomorrow, insha'Allah for a good month now, and I don't think my visa application has ever left his desk; he wasn't even aware it was in there, until he asked me for something I'd given him weeks ago. He told me yesterday that if I pay a special tax the police will extend my visitor's visa my another three months, but I'm not supposed to be studying on that. I suspect he will just pocket my sixteen dinar 'tax' (about twenty five bucks) and continue to do nothing, but it's worth a try. At least then I would have a visa to show the Syrian police, who are well known for refusing people entry, or dropping them off at the nearest border, whether it's the most convenient or not.

Sometimes I wonder if I worry too much, or not enough.

Visa trouble

Once again, I’m in this country illegally; my visa expired four days ago. This has happened twice before, despite my attempts to avoid it. Bureaucracy in the Middle East is rightfully famous for being labyrinthine and slow.

During one visa-less period, my roommate’s mother was told by her neighbour that the police would come to our building and arrest me, and bring shame upon the whole family. My roommate’s mother was extremely unhappy with me, and I worked for her and lived in the apartment two floors below her, so I was also very paranoid and worried that I would ruin the reputation of the family that had been so kind to me; reputation is everything here, and people talk.

When the time came to go to the police station and find out if the intelligence service had decided to renew my visa, I packed a carryon and got in a cab, fully expecting to be jailed and deported. I checked in at the women’s guard post, went in through the women’s entrance, and waited a long time in line at various windows, so worried and nervous and hot that I thought I would vomit right there in the middle of the police station. I was one of the few women there, and all the others were waiting in chairs while their husbands crowded in front of the windows trying to shove their wives’ passports at the officials. I eventually realized I would just have to be aggressive and push my way through the crowd of men, or I would be there all day. Much to my surprise, the police made no mention of my being in the country illegally for a week and a half, and didn’t ask to see any of my supposedly required documents. They stamped my passport with the new visa, and taxed me two dinar. I asked one of the female police officers, “Is that all? Can I go?” and she confirmed that yes, they were finished. I was so surprised, I walked out through the men’s entrance in a fog, startling a lot of men. Never having known any foreigners, our neighbour had no idea how the visa process worked.

This is the third or fourth time in six months I have had to get a new visa, and I decided that this time I would make sure everything was ready well in advance to avoid being here illegally again. A month before my visa was due to expire, I plunged into a maze of bureaucracy, trundling back and forth to different offices to get the documents I needed. The official at my college was constantly telling me I would have my visa soon – tomorrow, even, but he never did anything with my application. Every time I went to see him, he told me something different and required another document; everyone I talked to told me to go see someone else. A month passed, and I felt like I had been dropped into a Kafka story.

On the day my visa expired, the school finally issued the certificate I needed for a student visa, confirming that I was enrolled with them. I tracked down the person who had it, and gave the certificate to Ustath Abdullah, the school official, who said I would have a visa the next day. Four days later, still no visa.

I was told to go get new passport photos taken, because my Canadian ones weren’t quite right (why did it take a month for him to decide that?). I squeezed onto a public bus and rushed to the souq one hot afternoon after class, and found a studio that would have the photos ready in an hour. I had to walk by a police building near the souq, and the guard fiddling with his gun and staring at me from two feet away as I passed was unsettling.

I submitted my stack of papers and photos just before the school closed for the day. Ustath Abdullah finally confirmed that I had all the paperwork in order, and asked me why I was in such a hurry to renew my (very expired) visa. I told him I was afraid of the police and leaving for Turkey very soon, and both he and the head of the school burst out laughing. The Ustath told me, “there is nothing to be afraid of, you can go anywhere you like and the police will not do anything. We have many students here who do not have visas.” It seems they also have many students walking around without passports either, judging by the bundle in his desk. He wanted to keep my passport again, but I wouldn’t give it to him.

Hopefully, I will have a new visa in a week, but in the meantime I am still nervous. It is illegal to be here without a visa, but it is hard to know which laws will be enforced. Jordanians can go to jail if they are caught without their government ID cards, but as a Canadian I have a certain amount of privilege.

I am going to Turkey in a week and a half, insha’Allah, and the person I am going with (Rukiye) is concerned we will have problems crossing the Syrian and Turkish borders if I’m an illegal alien. Syria is notorious for not letting people in, and I have a ticket for a bus going through it. Insha’Allah, Ustath Abdullah will do his job for once (if I pressure him enough); everyone I have talked to constantly has problems with their visas, because of him.

I’m looking forward to spending a week and a half in Istanbul, insha’Allah. It will be nice to get out of the dorm, and not to be so darned hot all the time. Rukiye speaks Turkish, a little Arabic and no English, and I speak some Arabic and a little Turkish, but somehow we understand each other. This should be interesting.