What am I doing here? Manisa, Turkey

I live in a small Turkish city called Manisa and while it is an interesting place with lots of interesting stories to tell, I don’t really want to be here all the time.
One thing I’ve learned in years of wandering around is that if you don’t take the time to appreciate and enjoy the time when you don’t really have anything to do, you end up looking back on it with some regret. Sure, I’m bored now, but that could change at any time and so I need to just let myself fall into the zen-like state of slack. I have almost done that. And while I still find myself wishing that my life were more exciting, I’m actually enjoying the sensation of boredom.

I had kind of expected that I would have friends here that would be willing to show me around, share insider knowledge, and maybe teach me some things about Turkish life, but that hasn’t really happened. The teachers I work with are either busy teaching or just disinterested. The students are busy with work and classes. And the expats, well, as soon as I arrived the one I was going to share a house with split.
So, here I am. In Manisa and my days are fairly simple. I wake up, try to force myself to do some yoga and go running (about 50% successful) and then I head to work. I teach for a few hours and then I have a few hours during the hot part of the day so I come home, make lunch and study a little Turkish, check my email, and perhaps do some online work. Then I go back to work and at around 10:30 I come back home, make some dinner, watch some TV on the computer, and maybe read a bit before going to bed. I usually talk with Hanane a little bit either in the afternoon or before I go to bed and we sometimes play battleship on Skype. That’s my life, six days a week.
Since I haven’t had a camera and since I sort of want to save most of my sight-seeing for when Hanane gets here, I’ve sort of avoided checking out the old mosques or doing the other sight-seeing kind of things.
But, now, since I got my Samsung Star semi-smart phone, I have a camera and today was my one day a week off. Sunday. So, without further ado…I introduce a new feature here at Vagobond. Each Sunday, I will try to do a little exploring or will just document my rather humdrum day. If I go somewhere else it will be Sunday in…wherever but since I am in Manisa, Turkey, here it is.
Sunday in …. Manisa.
My roommate left the house with no gas for hot water and no light bulbs aside from one or two in the room he was in.
I told the school and they told me they would have gas delivered. They didn’t tell me I would have to pay the toothless boy who brought it. In addition, he couldn’t make the gas water heater work and neither could I. I’ve been with nothing but cold showers for my time here, which isn’t awful since it’s warm and Hanane isn’t here.
When the boy arrived, I didn’t have money but luckily the guys who run the little market across the street loaned me 20 lira. Natural gas here is expensive. 54 lira for a canister. This all happened last week. I told the school about my cold showers but nothing happened, so I told them again and they told me that the landlord would come either Sunday or Monday. They didn’t tell me which.
So, I woke up on my day off not knowing if I really could go and do anything at all or whether I had to stay at the house. I called the school and they told me ‘Oh yeah’ the landlord will come on Monday. It didn’t make much difference to me.
Since I had the camera and the day off though, I decided to walk around and take random pictures. This is the little store that loaned me 20 lira.

Here is the view up the street.

The other direction are the train tracks. Crossing them, I saw this little ruin and thought it worth a picture.

Then I found this beautiful old locomotive. I climbed up in the engineers cabin, but someone had taken a big dump in it, so I didn’t stay.

I walked around a big stadium and one of these horse drawn wagons built on an auto chassis that I love in both Turkey and Morocco came down the street. My camera was out too late though to capture the big peasant ladies who were driving it.

Back across the tracks, I encountered what I think was a wedding since there were lots of women waving scarves out the window. The wedding procession is led by a big traditional band playing in the back of a flatbed truck. This is the same as the circumcision parade for young boys but since I didn’t see any horse and carriage with little boys dressed up like fairy tale princes, I knew this wasn’t one of those.

I walked up to the Manisa museum which is under construction so I couldn’t go in but I did get to see lots of marble columns and architectural pieces that are probably around 2000 years old through this gate.

I took a couple of pictures of the mosques. I didn’t go in though. Not today.

The statue in the roundabout is Merkez Effendi who was an ancient doctor who created the famous candy/medicine of Manisa which is called Mesir and which I will write about in detail in a future post.

From there, I went to Fatih Park and took a few pictures of the Monument of National Sovereignty which was decorated with wreaths today and since I saw a lot of military guys in dress uniforms as I wandered around, I figured it must be a holiday of some sort.

The Monument of National Sovereignty was built in 1985 by the sculptur Tankut Oktern. It symbolizes the public, army, and youth working together with the founder of modern Turkey, Kamal Ataturk. To me, it looked like a statue of Daniel Boone in shorts and the world’s tallest man with his normal sized family.

In fact though, the Daniel Boone figure and the two warriors are ‘Zeybek’, an ancient Turkish word, meaning a wise person. The zeybek were like the samurai of Turkey.

After that I bought some mesir and went to the Hollywood Cinema where I watched “The Expendables” which was in English with Turkish subtitles. It was an incredibly bad film. Bad writing, bad acting, bad everything. Awful. The mesir on the other hand was delicious spicy stickiness.
Then I walked around taking pictures of Tarzan who I will detail tomorrow in Manisa Monday. Yes, I figure one day a week devoted to the town I live in for the next year is a decent amount of time to spend…after all, what else am I going to do with all my time here?