Griffin

After finishing my B.A. at Wesleyan University, I moved to New York, where a lot of people asked me why I had decided not to return to my home town, Boulder, Colorado. The answer seemed clear to me -- if everyone from New York is moving to Boulder, of course the best thing to do is buck the trend. Now I'm teaching writing at Kadir Has and doing my Ph.D. in English Literature at Bosporus University here in Istanbul, and I love it.

No doubt the main reason I'm crazy about Istanbul is all the contradictions that are apparent, particularly to someone who's not Turkish. Seven years ago, on my first day here, I got off the ferry from the European side to the Asian side -- and nearly had a heart attack as hawkers started yelling on either side of the exit. I noticed they were selling flower-print sheets, but only later did it occur to me that it was truly odd how these big burly guys were selling such 'girlie' products.

Now that I have 2 children (a boy who's almost two and a five-month-old girl), I've come to realize how much Turkish culture values family and children -- those same burly guys will drop everything to play with my children as we pass by. At the same time, even though Turkish food is delicious, I often find myself wishing for a hot, fresh donut, gumbo, or sweet-and-sour pork. More often than not, this stimulates me to learn how to make it myself, which is always exciting (though my wife has learned to keep a list of takeout numbers handy, just in case).

Like Mary Louise and Mary Lou, my greatest hope is that this project will remind all of us that, as my kids' toys always say in an electronic voice, "learning can be fun."