En route to Istanbul - Critical Languages Scholarship

Welcome everybody to the newest rebirth of Buxoro Wonderland: as the blog and point-of-contact between myself and the motherland while I am in Istanbul for the next two months!

I'm going to Turkey on a US government-sponsored intensive language learning scholarship. (Important: Any views expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent the views of the United States Department or States or any other organization I am affiliated with.) The program's details and application can be found here for any student out there aspiring to learn any of the less commonly taught and critical need languages it supports: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish and Urdu.

Yildiz Technical University will be hosting my intermediate Turkish class, and I will be staying in the Ortaköy neighborhood of Beşiktaş district (of famous football/soccer fame) of Istanbul. This is located on the European side of Istanbul, right near the water's edge of the Bosphorus River.

So, what will Turkey be like? I don't know! Probably not how it's portrayed in the Tiny Toons cartoon featuring the famous 'Istanbul' song by They Might Be Giants which, if anything, is far more evocative of Arabian peninsula-type imagery than anything identifiably Turkish.

Of course, the conflation of Turks with Arabs seems pretty common in Western media stuffs, especially in this Youtube gem: a 1984 advertisement for 'Fry's Turkish Delight', full of 'Eastern promise'. The comments are particularly telling - "thats arabic not turkish" per canberkuysal, "OMG! WE'RE NOT ARAB!!!" per ewalesier, and "there is no desert in turkey we're not arab!" per togan86... etc. I definitely hope to learn more about Turkish cultural identity!

Check back for more posts soon - unlike previous attempts, this blog will be updated regularly on location for the regularly updated. Thanks!

+ Firuze (my 'Turkish' name from my intensive beginning course at Georgetown University... derived from the Persian word for turquoise. Let's see if I use it in Turkey!)

A Return to Form?

Well, uh, needless to say, I got so busy with the Uzbek class that I never got around to updating my newly established blog about it ever again. It was a fantastic class and I highly recommend the Critical Languages Institute for anyone interested in learning one of the less-commonly-taught Eurasian languages taught there.

I am now back at my home institution, Georgetown University, and studying Turkish. I'm also in a Central Asian History and Politics course, so it's a double whammy of the Silk Road. I'll try and be more dutiful about updating, especially all of the Uzbek materials I've amassed. I'll also post about Turkish and about the Turkic cultures of Central Asia in general, though I think I'll shy away from politics and current events editorializing here...

I'd like to give a (tiny) shout out to the best Blogger blog out there, in my opinion, on Central Asia: the fabulous Chirayliq by Tinet and Ainur, dedicated to the "handsomeness of Central Asian men".