Costa Rica

Flag Day!

Louis

…and there you have it. I went to Costa Rica, where I got a kidney infection, learned to surf (kind of) and met some weirdly conservative Canadians. I started and finished A-100 (the fighting 151st!), went to a lot of very happy hours, was pronounced proficient in Turkish, and then got assigned to Panama (go figure). I got a baby french bulldawg, named him Louis (pronounced Louie), and spent a lot of time playing with his giant ears.  It’s been a very eventful few months, and I’m glad to settle into my new routine of full-time Spanish training at FSI.

I’ve written a lot on this blog about my journey into the Foreign Service, and absolutely nothing since I actually started training. Partly because I’ve been busy, partly because I’ve been lazy, and partly because the State Department is generally terrified of blogging and I don’t want to eff up before I even make it to post. I’ll try to be better about it – I am SUPER excited about my two years in Panama and will look forward to returning One Ticket to Adventure to its travel blog roots.

My resolutions are usually of the nebulous “live life to the fullest” sort, which are impossible to quantify at the end of the year and basically leave me feeling like a failure. But for the first time in a long time, I’m actually in the position (emotionally, financially…) to take action on all those things – great and small – that get pushed to the back burner year after year. No more treading water.

After a year of travel, unemployment, study and bureaucracy, I am pleased (more like REALLY REALLY STOKED!) to announce that I have accepted an offer to join the U.S. Foreign Service. My life is going to see some dramatic changes in 2010, beginning with my move back to DC in mid-February to start orientation, known in State Department circles as A-100.

Before you ask, I don’t know yet where I’ll be posted. That will be announced at the big “Flag Day” ceremony at the end of my initial 5-week training course. If my assignment doesn’t require language training, I’ll probably be overseas before July… but if I need to learn a super-hard language like Chinese or Arabic, I won’t get out of town until sometime in 2011.

I decided to only take the standard .17 point boost to my score, instead of the .4 that would included a requirement to serve in a Turkish-designated post twice during my career. Not that I don’t want to go back to Turkey, but this way I can hold out for Istanbul and say, “Thank you very much, but hell no” to Adana. It might mean waiting until February to start, which I think I can handle.

Yay me!

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/we-all-feel-like-that-now-and-then.html

“Proof – as if it were needed – that name-based punnery and mild xenophobia did a roaring trade long before the internet was fired up.”

Cortney and I were admiring some artifact depicting Tutankhamun’s wife when a well-meaning but misinformed tourist lady told us that being “the wife or girlfriend” of a pharaoh wasn’t much fun in the long run, because when he died we would be killed and shut up in the tomb as well, to keep him company in the afterlife. I nodded and smiled, politely sharing in her grisly delight at such barbarity, while Cortney silently mouthed, “THAT’S NOT TRUE!” over her shoulder.

The museum was also notable for its fancy cafe, where we ate chocolate cake and a chicken tangine, its time-sucking gift shop, and the hideously horrible, difficult to look at, migraine-inducing art in the atrium:

Looking at it from closer up just made it worse. My camera probably would have exploded. We decided that such art would be ideal for concealing secret passageways or vaults full of gold, because no one would ever be able to get close enough to locate the handle.

As for yesterday, my main accomplishment was FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY being placed on the Foreign Service’s “list of eligible hires,” also known as The Register. This is a big deal, because after a written exam, an oral exam, medical clearance, background investigation, and final suitability review, the government has finally run out of excuses not to hire me. Or at least that’s how my sister put it, when I told her the news. There may still be many long months of waiting before I get an actual job offer, but the uncertainty is over – with the hiring spree continuing through 2010, I’m basically guaranteed a job. Eventually. Of course, as soon as I landed on the register all of my patience evaporated and I want to start work NOW, RIGHT NOW and can feel myself aging by the minute.

A blacksmith’s apprentice in action:

Giant piles of wool! I didn’t see this at any other market in Turkey:

It was hard to get this picture without looking like idiots, but we dubbed this corridor the Turkish Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms:

A courtyard full of dudes drinking tea and chatting:

I felt very conspicuous in the tea garden and was getting a LOT of stares. Urfa is just over the border from Syria and is culturally much more conservative than the western part of Turkey. One girl about my age stopped in her tracks and practically turned her head upside down in attempt to look at me from head to toe, and Carl says I got a few disapproving headshakes from older women. For the record, I was not wearing hot pants and tube top. Far from it:

I suppose the jeans were bit snug, but we decided to blame the attention on my slutty long red hair. Tsk tsk!

We made up for the previous night’s disappointing dinner with what turned out to be the best snack EVER. We had lahmacun all over the country, but the stuff at this little hole-in-the-wall in the bazaar was dripping with spicy orange grease and was by far the most fantastically delicious. I usually think that people who take pictures of their food at restuarants are weird and embarrassing, but I couldn’t resist:

We also hit the main tourist attractions (see previous post for photos), which was super-easy because of the minibuses that come along about every 30 seconds. Urfa really has the public transporation concept down to a science, if you don’t mind all the exhaust fumes. We managed to find a basement cafe catering to students in the university area, which had a pleasantly counter-cultural feel, as if it was where young dissidents would go to drink tea, chain-smoke and discuss banned books. It also had the first wi-fi connection we’d found in days, which gave it the distinction of being the place where I got the email telling me I’d passed the Foreign Service exam. Yay!

In the evening, Carl and I hiked up to the citadel to enjoy the view and smoke some nargile. We had a perfect vantage point to hear the call to prayer emanating from the big mosque complex below us, with echos coming from smaller minarets all over the city. Click to see and hear the video:

The absurdly beautiful mosque complex and pond of over-enthusastic fish (there was a video of this, but it makes me feel slightly ill to watch):

Carl on top of the citadel, overlooking the city and the alleged birthplace of Abraham:

Urfa ended up being one of my favorite cities in Turkey, even though our first day was beyond miserable. We arrived hungry, grumpy about our epic  failure to see Mount Nemrut, and very much looking forward to the pansiyon we had chosen to stay in, advertised as cozy, friendly and with delicious home cooking by its Kurdish owners. The dolmuş naturally dropped us off somewhere not on our map, and we spend a fruitless few hours searching for it (this would become a recurring theme in Urfa) hiking around, jumping on and off minibuses, and slip-sliding on the white polished stone sidewalks that had become treacherous in the intermittent rain. My mysterious foot pain got worse and worse, and only Carl’s relentlessly upbeat attitude kept me from sitting down on the curb and bursting into tears of defeat. It didn’t keep me from limping ostentatiously, though. I’m not being melodramatic – it really was that horrible. It was also my 26th birthday.

We walked into a fancy hotel at one point and were on the verge of shelling out for a bit of well-deserved luxury, especially after reading the brochure about their private pool and hamam… until the woman at the desk informed us that it was only open to women on Saturdays, for one hour. Bitch, please.  I don’t care how comfy that bed looked; have fun serving your all-Syrian clientele while I stay somewhere that doesn’t treat me like a second-class citizen.

We finally gave up when it got dark and took a room in a nice, cheap hotel that we had passed half a dozen times earlier in the day. The manager said that he’d seen us walking around and consulting our map, and couldn’t understand why we hadn’t come to his perfectly good hotel in the first place. He seemed glad that we’d come to our senses.

There is nothing – I repeat, NOTHING – to do in Urfa at night. On our first day there Carl and I were determined to get out on the town to celebrate my birthday, but the “strip of beer halls” promised by my Rough Guide turned out to be absolutely deserted, even though Urfa has a big university district, and even the restaurants were empty. We spent at least an hour looking for a historic inn that supposedly has amazing, authentic Ottoman food, but when we found the place it had clearly all but shut down in the off season. They ushered us into a gorgeously decorated private dining room, with (innapropriately) romantic lighting and cushions on the floor, and then left us there long enough that we started to get really uncomfortable. A non-English-speaking waiter finally appeared and listed off several kinds of kebabs, which was apparently all they had to offer. Paying top dollar for yet another kebab while shut up in a windowless room in a creepily deserted old mansion house was not our idea of a good time, so when my mother called to wish me a happy birthday we jumped at the opportunity to leave while pretending that it was a terribly important phone call. I walked briskly out with the phone to my ear, avoiding all eye contact, while Carl followed in my wake and shrugged helplessly at the confused staff.

We settled for what I have come to consider a typical Turkish dining experience if you dare leave Istanbul off-season: A passable meal as the only guests in a huge, overstaffed restaurant. The waiters are always so desperate to earn their keep that they loiter about five feet away for the duration of the meal, whisking dishes around and refilling water glasses every time you take a sip. Not very relaxing. We ended the night in our hotel room with half a liter of rakı, apricot candy we’d picked up in Malatya and Turkish music videos. There was also Turkish version of Deal or No Deal to which I became kind of addicted during this trip. It was called Var Mısın, Yok Musun and instead of the usual airbrushed models, it had other contestants open the boxes – but not before they went on long monologues about how much the person deserved to win, said “inşallah” about a million times, and occasionally sang or recited poetry. A few men literally broke down and cried when they opened a box containing a large amount, as if they felt personally responsible for the contestant’s bad luck.

The next day was much better, I promise!