Saturday, June 6

Brian has finally visited Ataturk's Mausoleum! We spent a pretty long day at the mausoleum (Anitkabir) taking more photos, enjoying the sunshine, and viewing the exhibits in the museum. A very memorable day, even for us non-Turks.

I may have imagined it, but our taxi driver smiled when I told him "Anitkabir", and drove right on away, no questions or confusion. It was a good start for the day.

Just down the road there was a car accident involving many cars and a street sign, with cars up over the curb and way up on the grass. Our taxi driver shook his head and added his, "Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk" tongue clicks and drove on. It seemed puzzling that Saturday 9:30 AM traffic could be so exciting, but, alas, we are in Ankara after all.

Maren insisted that she hadn't been to the mausoleum before, even though she had been with me both of the previous times I had visited (with Myron and Kaye, and with Rob). Once we arrived she told me I should have told her it was the place with the "still guards" and then she would have remembered. Then she changed her insisting to telling me that she had been here with Brian before. Nope. Uncle Rob.

We showed Brian around the perimeter towers, filed past the 40-ton marble block that marks the spot where Ataturk is buried, and looked through the amazing assortment of Ataturk memorabilia available in the gift shop. We finally gave in and bought the model of the monument that Maren had asked for on the previous two trips (and asked for again this time), and Lacey picked out a Turkish crescent and star necklace with Ataturk's face too. Then we went into the museum that I had skipped on my two previous visits.

The museum wraps around underneath the perimeter towers and is quite extensive in showing Ataturk's feats and the creation of Turkey. There are life-size dioramas of war bunkers complete with sound effects, so the issue of war was made much more real for the the girls. After a while, Maren asked me what countries the United States had been at war with. I just threw out some names: Korea, Japan, etc. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, "But that is where my friends are from." Priceless. And one of the moments I was hoping to find during this year. Awesome.

Lacey was visibly disturbed by the war scenes and paintings and we actually detoured a bit to stay away from the more graphic ones since she was getting so upset. I don't like to see her upset, but I was so glad to see that she was getting a better handle on what war means and how taken aback she was.

In addition to the war dioramas, there were Ataturk's clothes and shoes, his identification cards (both the Ottoman script version and the new Turkish version after he changed the alphabet to use today's letters), his signature stamps (both as Gazi Mustafa Kemal and as K. Ataturk--Ataturk was only his name after surnames were added to names under his direction), and his multi-lingual library. I had been wondering if he learned English (the books I have read only mentioned him learning French), so I asked the guard, who spoke enough English to be able to answer that yes, Ataturk had learned English, Dutch, German, French, and Arabic (I think that's the right list!). No small feat for his time and position. Amazing to me.

Lacey summed up her museum experience by suddenly (and very seriously) saying, "I understand now why the Turkish people like Ataturk so much. He did a lot of very important things for Turkey." I think she has a new crush.

No cameras were allowed in the museum. It was nice to focus on the museum and not on picture-taking, but hard also to just rely on the brochure. The library area, especially, was very impressive, with book after book in all sorts of languages on history, wars, and seemingly everything under the sun.

From 2009-06-06Anitkabir

After the mausoleum, a stop at Armada was in order for some very important purchases: chocolate covered Turkish Delight, ice cream cones, some groceries for dinner time, and a new movie to watch.

Paul, Becky, Emma, and Catherine came over for dinner and Phase 10 (card game) and we enlisted their help in eating Aeden's official birthday cake (finally). As Maren would say, NOW he's 2. You're not your new age until you have your birthday cake! He sported his birthday "hat" and did a great job of blowing out the candles. What a cutie!