First contact

Those of you who know me well know that no news means one of two things: I’m either having a great time or dead. Well, this update means that you can forget the latter. The Zimmers fall in the “no news is good news” camp. However, having been here for four days (really?), I think I’m officially derelict in my duties.

I’m pleased to inform you that the trip was about as painless as these things go. Northwest allayed my unease about traveling via US carrier by providing a meal every four hours and a private LCD screen that actually let me choose between a couple dozen movies (no animal comedies on this flight) and the option to play virtual poker other passengers on the plane (“Excuse me, flight attendant, the man in seat 13F owes me his tie.”).

The Amsterdam sunrise was a riot of pink and the last leg to Istanbul short. My new German roommate was there to greet me at the airport and my luggage survived intact. The only real catch was that I slept three hours the night before leaving in order to sleep better on the plane. When deciding to do this, I never considered that I might, by some cruel miracle, not manage to sleep on the plain. I scraped out a grand total of some six hours of sleep in two days. The bright side of completely shattering my biorhythm is that I was able to piece it back together in time with Turkey. After a night-and-a-half’s sleep I woke up in the right time zone.

My flatmates are a nice pair. The German’s name is Phillip Brulez (no relation to Crème Brûlée, he assured me (I wish I was lacking enough in dignity to actually ask that)). He was kind enough to show me around campus, hook me up with a bus pass, and not break my legs for not being able to pay rent (owing to a low cap on my debit card withdrawals). He is taller than me and a bit on the dour teuton end of the spectrum, but is affable and has been immensely helpful in getting me settled here. He also happens to be mastering in something computer-related, which makes him an especially good person to have at arm’s reach. He has a Turkish girlfriend of several years who’s staying with us until the dorms open next week.

My other flatmate is a fellow name Gürkan, who recently graduated from Boğaziçi and now audits banks, which is good work in these parts because not only are there ten in a hundred meter radius, but they each belong to a different company. Last night I joined him to watch Turkey tie Belgium on his big flat screen TV. He kindly clarified some of the Turkish used in the match.

I was particularly interested by the banner that the station kept super imposing over everything. It read simply, “PAVAşLI ET”. Using my fledgling Turkish, I was able to puzzle out et as the imperative form of the verb to do or to make. The suffix lı means with. Dying to know what it was they were commanding me to make things with, Gürkan explained to me that pavaş is a special type of Turkish pants. This of course begged the question: What exactly are you supposed to make with pants (aside from more money (joke (but statistically true)))? Well, it turns out that et in this case was not derived from the verb etmek but instead the monosyllabic word for meat. The phrase actually means, “meat with Turkish pants,” which apparently is some sort of brand in these parts. Go figure.