So I boarded Turkish Airlines flight 662 in Istanbul, a little nervous only a few weeks after the THY crash in Amsterdam. But things seemed fine, even a little surreal as I was completely surrounded by the National Kosovo Ski Team, all zipped up in their matching sky-blue wind-breakers. The flight was uneventful, and I was really pleased that I was served a yummy cheese sandwich and raspberry yogurt for what was a one-and-a-half hour flight. On Delta, on a flight for the same amount of time you would be lucky if the stewardess threw peanuts at your head! About halfway into the flight, I had an embarrassing moment when I opened my pen to do a crossword puzzle, only to have it explode all over my hands and my laptop, which I suppose can happen sometimes because of the different air pressure. I tried to play it cool, but when the stewardess walked by and noticed me casually dabbing my fluorescent blue hands with gel sanitizer and a tissue, as my seat-mate looked on in abject horror, she ran away and returned with a fistful of wet naps. For the following three days or so it looked like I had killed a smurf with my bare hands. The airport is so small in Erzurum that you have to walk the tarmac to get to the terminal, making me feel like some kind of rock star. My fellow Fulbrighter Ben, who teaches English at the university, picked me up and we took a walk around the city.
Erzurum's most famous monument, and my favorite as
well, is the Twin Minarets Madrasa. A lot of monuments in the region are not Ottoman but from the earlier Seljuk period. The Seljuks were a Muslim dynasty originating from Iran. After visiting Miniaturk, I have been really excited to go further east and discover more Seljuk architecture, as they tend to favor the blue tiles and fancy stone carving more than their Ottoman counterparts. I took the picture to the left from the old city walls. I thought you could get a good feel for the snowy peaks that completely surround the city in this shot.
Ben and I also had a chance to experience the Erzurum House Restaurant, which is an enormous restaurant composed of several restored Ottoman houses whose interior walls have been selectively demolished in order to create this huge and weird complex of nooks and crannies. The inside is over-the-top, decorated with Ottoman antiques, as well as some "modern" paintings, one of which I have pictured here. An exceptionally talented artist depicted here an Ottoman noble on his horse, accompanied by his
groom, dropped into a psychedelic checkered vortex. Groovy, man. You should also be happy to know that I discovered this painting was part of a series once I turned the corner.
The talk itself went pretty well. It was hosted in this very large lecture hall, much bigger than I was expecting. And in the end about 100 people showed up for the lecture, which I was also not really expecting. Things got a little hairy when I was informed that during the talk I would have to say two or three sentences, and then pause for a translator to repeat whatever I had just said into Turkish. I panicked, because this would instantly double the time of my presentation, which I had originally planned to be about 40 minutes. The lecture's organizer seemed not too phased by this development, but as I was giving the talk I realized that if I went through with the whole thing as planned it would have taken more than two hours, and during the talk I skipped a few parts just to make it shorter. I knew that if I would get bored giving a presentation for two hours, it would surely feel like slow torture for the audience. So, in the end I clocked in around an hour and fifteen minutes. All in all, it went pretty well!
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