Sunny Days and Mondays

The problem with winter here in Adana is not that it is cold. In fact, I'm not sure the temperatures ever even dropped below freezing. The problem is, in fact, that many Turks here are still obsessive over keeping warm, scolding us with yelps of "hasta olursun! hasta olursun!" - "you'll get sick! you'll get sick!" - every time we leave the house (or even go around the house) without appropriate clothing. Appropriate clothing for them is, to say the least, a little excessive for me. Therefore I am glad that the weather is warming up for a premature, though not unexpected, spring here in Adana. The last few days have been gloriously sunny and just warm enough to ward off too many warnings about impending illnesses. Even last night, when rain poured down and I felt sure today would be wet and gross and cold, I woke up to see the sky perfectly clear and a beautiful morning.

Yesterday, Sunday, we went to another village, this time on the far opposite side of town. We crossed through Gazipaşa (the downtown-ish area), past the Küçük Saat and Buyuk Saat (the Little Clock and Big Clock - landmarks here), and through Eski Adana (Old Adana). Old Adana is still an urban area, but it has a completely different feel to it from the newer area where I live and most of the places that I go. The buildings are lower and older. Street vendors pervade, shouting their wares and prices in loud belts. The women are more covered; my grandmother explained to me as we drove through that many of them have come from more conservative cities farther east, like Diyarbakir.

We continued through the outskirts of Old Adana and opened onto wide open fields - the really old Adana, what it was like fifty or one hundred years ago. I went to this village once before only a few weeks after I'd gotten to Turkey. My grandfather's sister lives there with her family in a house nestled in a tiny village surrounded by field after field of farmland. The house is actually built on top of a barn/storage shed where they keep their tractor. I watched my grandfather and my...what do you call your grandfather's sister? great-aunt maybe?...make içli köfte, which is ground up meat and spices surrounded by a bulgur wheat mixture and rolled up into a ball. They rolled up a bunch and then boiled them. We ate the absolutely delicious köfte with homemade ayran, a salty yogurt drink. Usually I don't like ayran very much, but this stuff was good - probably because it was so fresh. The yogurt they had used to make the ayran came from their very own milk from their very own cows.

Back to the city and to reality today, though. Mondays will be Mondays, even in Turkey, although strangely enough I woke up, got dressed, and walked to the bus stop thinking in was Tuesday (am I going crazy? possibly). School passed as usual, and this evening I went to the spor salonu - the gym near my house that I joined last month. It's great to have a place where I can get some exercise that's so near my house, too - I can easily walk there in 5 minutes or so.

I'm looking forward to my family's visit in March! Am doing some planning of places to visit in Istanbul, Adana, and Kapadokya. Even more importantly, I'm trying to plan what foods they must eat before they go! There really are too many...