The moment I stepped out of the shuttle, in downtown Ankara, I knew I was alone. The organized chaos that spread in front of my eyes, was surely just the beginning, and although I had been to Turkey already and was familiar with it, the sheer amount of people and cars on their seemingly random paths impressed me.
The truth was, there was no way back. It was time to face the responsibility of the choice I had made, and the point of no return had already flown at a very high speed past my inert eyes. The truth was, I was going to be alone for the next 8 months, and I should start, from this moment, gathering the confidence to find a compromise between being in control, and letting the flow of life take care of me, for the first time in my life. The backpack was as heavy as my heart, but I would soon learn to lighten both up. I took a deep breath, opened my eyes to the beautiful chaos in front of me, and tried my first contact, with some young turkish kids. As I asked for directions to the bus stop I needed to find, I promptly realized that it would be hard to find an english speaker here – to my surprise – and after several attempts, finally, someone pointed me out to the place I needed to be at. This information came together with the warning that buses in Ankara would not have any information on which bus stop we would be, so I’d better savvy up and ask the driver for information.
I had sent Couchsurfing requests to Ankara, and had obtained a reply very promptly. A young medicine student would receive me in his house for one night. I had also received an invitation from an engineer, professor at the Middle-East Technical University, and puzzle designer, as a hobby. As much as the second character seemed very interesting to meet, I had already accepted the offer from the first reply, and thus decided to meet the second one, the next day, before my train would leave. With the sparse directions I had been given, I tried to get the bus driver and ticket controller to help me find my stop, to which they didn’t manifest much interest, busy with their intense work – a bus in the capital of Turkey at the end of a workday can be very crowded – so I tried to keep my eyes open and find the reference points I had been given : after the big slope, the bus will follow a sharp curve, where you should get out. Well, with the anxiety of missing the stop, I descended after the first upward slope, and found myself far away from the place I should’ve been. As the sun went down, I tried to approach some shopkeepers amidst the chaos of people and although their English and my Turkish didn’t really find a common ground, I managed to get shoved inside another bus, and after a while drifting through the maze of roads in the last purple light of the day, there was no doubt, the big slope and the curve were here. As I found the house of my host, I was greeted by a young man, with a huge smile and a very warm welcome. As it was exam period at the university and I had to wake up early and leave to the train station, my host, his flatmates and I, spent an incredibly nice evening drinking imported beer, and chatting about many different topics, from the psychedelic experience to the situation in Iran – turns out he was Iranian born and was studying medicine in Turkey, where he felt he had a considerable amount of freedom, compared to his home -, travel and many other things. In my first night alone, I went to bed with a huge grin on my face, as I digested the freshly recent encounter with my first interesting people in the middle-east.
My first bedroom, in Ankara.
The next day, I woke up early, and tried to find my way to the train station, which again, anxiety had made me leave the bus earlier than I should, providing me with a longish walk through the city’s suburbs. Ankara seemed now, in the morning light, as I expected it to be. A wild forest of concrete, with a lot of deteriorated buildings which gave it a urban exploratory charm and an aura of mystery. I arrived to the train station and bought a ticket for the Orient (Dogu) Express, to Erzurum, which would leave at the end of the day. As I had arranged with the puzzle designer to meet up, I found him in the parking lot of the train station, quite agitated because of being badly parked. He was an older man, around his 40’s, with a very Turkish face. Long nose, dark eyebrows, pointy cheekbones and kind eyes.
As we talked he told me about himself and his family, and told me he’d like to take me around to see a bit of Ankara, to what I promptly thanked and accepted without questions. The first stop would be the At-Aturk mausoleum, one of the greatest modern monuments of Turkey. From my previous explorations of Turkey, and the contact with Turkish people, I knew that the Turkish have a very special admiration for At-Aturk, the founder of modern Turkey, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, sometimes giving the feeling of personality cult, or even god-like reverence. My opinion on this was always that no matter as great as a man might be, blind reverence is never a good thing, and a man is still a man, prone to committing errors and making bad decisions. From my analysis of Turkish history, there is no doubt that At-Aturk, like any other politician, made a few of his own, despite all the great things he did for Turkey. The mausoleum was impressive. A beautifully arranged complex of buildings encircling a great open plaza, on top of a hill overlooking the whole of Ankara. On the head-top, the tomb of At-Aturk, magnificent and austere, surrounded by smaller buildings with museums of some of At-Aturk’s possessions. We walked around, and it was truly an impressive monument, with enormous spaces, boulevards of flowerbeds, and German-design egypt-like grandiose structures of contemporary architecture.
The At-Aturk Mausoleum
When we were done with the mausoleum, my host explained that Ankara had been designed to be the administrative center of Turkey, and that apart from the mausoleum, there was not really a big deal to see in the city. He suggested we could visit the Middle-East Technical University, as he knew it very well, being a professor. When we arrived, I was surprised with the sheer size of the campus, as we drove some kilometers deep inside to arrive to his department – I would discover throughout my trip, that most universities in the countries I visited had enormous campuses. The department was nicely arranged and quiet, as he showed me around. There were some fantastic items in their open-air museum, like an old steam locomotive, a bunch of fighter jets (including a slick turkish made jet), old classic cars, and a bunch of other mechanical paraphernalia spread around the exterior of the campus. One of the most interesting items was a boat, made of concrete, which he swore was designed to actually float on water, despite the incredibly heavy weight of tons. As we strolled through the campus, we arrived to the sports complex, where I saw, on the stands, the words DEVRIM written in big white letters. The story of those letters goes that back in the 70’s, the chemistry students of the TUA, were involved in student riots, in a turbulent time in Turkey, and they painted DEVRIM (REVOLUTION) on the stands of the university stadium, with a special paint, that no matter how hard the university tried to remove it, it never had come out. Maybe the solution would be to repaint the whole thing, but no one ever did, so the echoes of revolution were constantly floating around the TUA – an ironic story, given the authoritative tone of Reyep Erdogan, Turkey’s ex-PM and current President.
After the campus tour, we went to have lunch, and I tried my first eastern delicacy on the trip, a traditional baked potato from Ankara, filled with a wide range of tasty bits, like corn, onion, sausage, cheese, and others. My host then suggested we’d go for a drive out of the city, where Ankara natives go to escape the bustling chaos of the city, and do a very traditional Turkish activity, which I had solemnly missed since my last visit : drink Turkish tea in a tea garden. He took me to this gorgeous spread of greenery, just outside the city limits, overlooking a lake, a property which also was part of the METU, but where whole families go for their strolls and tea by the lake. We sat down in a really nice tea garden, with the lake just in front, and my host ordered something which I had never had or seen : a Semavor, this is a traditional way of drinking tea, and consists in a big (almost half a meter tall) tea boiler, with space in the middle to have burning coals inside, which not only boils the water, but keeps it hot at all times. The tea is then prepared in a little kettle on the top of the Semavor, and mixed with hot water from the bottom. Quite an apparatus, to have a cup of tea, but a very interesting ritual and device, obviously originating a great cup’a! – since I came in contact with the Turkish culture, that the Turkish tea has to be one of my favorite dimensions, never giving up a chance to have a nice cup of tea, in a nice garden, especially if it has a nice view!
In our last moments of interaction of what had been a really heartwarming day, my host told me the incredible story of how he had met his wife. In his last year of university, the same day he had received his diploma, and just after having had a terrible heartbreak with a woman he had thought to be the woman of his life, he had come to this exact same place (the green lung of Ankara) with his friends to drink and celebrate, by the lake. Amidst the laughs, good humor and great vibes, they had drank a bit too much, and definitely too much to drive. Of course, under the influence, none of them had the good hindsight to predict that it would be dangerous to drive, and as they were returning home, speedily, on one of the sharp curves, they lost control of the car, which flew over and plummeted into the lake. The accident was very very serious. When the ambulance and firemen arrived, they were rescued, but the consequences had been tragic: one of their friends was in a coma, and others were badly injured, including my host. They were taken to the hospital, where they were taken care of, and in-between broken bones, wounds and blood, the young nurse, who had been working there since little time, caught my host’s eye. Amidst the tragedy of the fateful night, it seems that love had found its way, as it always does. Since his injuries were serious, he was committed and stayed at the hospital for a couple of days, and some months after, he asked her to marry. Today, they are part of a happy family, together with a teenage girl 🙂 As he told me this story with tears in his eyes, he gifted me one of his homemade puzzles. A wooden cube, made of 9 rectangular pieces that fit together, with a hand-painted pattern on each of the sides, which took me quite a long time to re-assemble, the first time I decided to tear it apart and try it out. Little did he know, that throughout my trip, his puzzle would entertain and challenge many many children and adults, throughout 7 different countries! Nowadays, it rests in my bedroom, and I can re-assemble it in less than 5 minutes. Yes, it did have its trick, just like everything in life, including leaving everything to face the unknown in places very few people want to go, as I would soon find out.
He drove me to the train station, just before my train departed, and we hugged sincerely. Apparently I had been his first couch surfer, and beautifully, we had both experienced the best of this marvelous way of meeting people.
My puzzle-designer host!
I went to the train platform and boarded the Orient Express with a little knot in my heart, and a huge smile on my face. The East was expecting me.
A Wandering Poem 