Jandarma

This Monday, Hannah from Maine*, who has actually been, um, productive this year (unlike other people I could name), had an art expedition. She's quite a good artist, and managed to both apply to and be accepted at a number of prestigious art universities in the States from here, and let me tell you, if you think managing college applications is bad Stateside, you try doing it from a 6-10 hour time difference when all your applications are roughly two foot by three foot wooden frames covered with stretched canvas and a large quantity of oil paint. Puts those essays in perspectives, eh?

Hannah lives and goes to school out in the boonies, in an area that is off the Western edge of most İstanbul maps and isn't under İstanbul polis jurisdiction. It's a forty-five minute bus ride through a nice scrub pine forest before you reach her town. I actually lived there with my second family. I spent a lot of quality time on the bus then.

Anyway, the exhibition was fabulous. Hannh did a spectacular job of showcasing the contrasts of this city. I'd love to describe the paintings, but I really wouldn't do them justice. If Hannah agrees, I can eventually post pictures (gosh, remember when this blog used to have pictures?). It was a good time, and a really wonderful opportunity to see what Hannah's been working on this year.

The really interesting part came on the way home. Remember how I mentioned that the town is outside İstanbul polis jurisdiction? It is, however, located right on the edge of a major military base. So they get the jandarma, the military polis, instead. But the jandarma are pretty twitchy about certain things like...yabanci. Foreigners. Our bus got stopped on the way out of town. They wanted to check ID. Fortunately, we all had our residency permits with us. If we hadn't...I imagine that after our Rotary handler finally extricated us, she would have killed us anyway.

This isn't the first time I've been stopped. Once in Taksim, once when I lived in that same town. Once on the servis bus on the way to school. Once on a minibus going shoe shopping with my third host mother. That time, I didn't have my papers with me - they were in my other bag. Host Mom had me scrunch down in the seat far enough that I looked like a child, too young to need identification. Got lucky with that one.

At home, we complain about being pulled over for sobriety checkpoints and needing proper identification for commerial airlines, but when you think about it, it could be so much worse...

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* You have no idea of the effort it takes to refrain from calling her "Hannah from Montana."