Well, I’m a panicky idiot on a new continent.
***
Istanbul Airport is a place of wonder and enchantment, where
old meets new, east meets west, and so on forward.
Except that everything I just said is totally false.
Instead, I feel like Thomas Friedman. There really was was a Doritos ad
(NACHO—how foreign) within fifteen yards of getting off the airplane. I really
am sitting opposite a Starbucks—which is to say, I am on planet earth—and in
front of a place called “Bakes and Cakes.” The Starbucks is offering Organic
Ethiopia Yergacheffe, and hasn’t bothered to translate “organically grown
organic certification” out of the same sort of semi-English it would be in Akron
into, you know, Turkish. There’s an SUV being raffled to my right, and a couple
making out to my left.
This last detail rankles. One of my useless Turkish language
textbooks told me that public displays of affection are frowned on in Turkey; I
saw three of them in this very airport. If my Turkish were better, I would have
told those involved that they were being culturally inappropriate, according to
Teach Yourself Turkish. Alas, I don’t
know the Turkish for “get a room.” (Yet.)
Oh, and I wasn’t bright enough to figure out whether my
luggage would be sent on to my final destination, or whether I’d have to pick
it up after customs, just like I would at the dozens of North American airports
where I’ve had similar heart attacks. And, you know, this was a particularly
difficult airport to navigate, what with all of the signs in English and an
English-speaking staff. Because I am a moron, I did not trust them when they said "OK," even though they were right and I was, well, a moron.
That was me, about forty-five minutes after arriving in Turkey, in Istanbul airport. What I did next: lose the small cardboard tube containing my BA and MA diplomas, which I had to take out of a bag when a security guard requisitioned my corkscrew. (There's a metaphor there, probably.) Also my favorite hat. This blog was for a brief time going to be called "Turkey by Hat," until I lost my hat. And my diplomas.
***
Today’s Turkish expression: "tam istedginiz gibi Frappuccino
blended beverage." There’s a little sapka (hat) accent over the g in
“istedigniz”; I’ll put that in once I figure out how to type it.
Speaking of which: one month into my time in Turkey, and I still have not been able to successfully communicate in Turkish with another human creature. (The Bilkent cats, who wander through our campus, are similarly unimpressed.) It is almost as though, as I was saying to friends, the Turkish language was not set out for my benefit: it has practically no vocabulary overlap with English, has an entirely different structure from same, and is spoken rapidly.
A typical evening out: I needed matches, so I go to the vast German Wal-Mart equivalent obligingly located near campus. Having spent days wandering the teensy Chicago supermarket near my previous campus, trying to find out where, say, pizza sauce was located in its classificatory system, I was intent on finding "tebrikler," which I believed to be the Turkish word for matches.
Those of you who speak Turkish will be, of course, howling in laughter at this point: while "kibrit" is the Turkish word for a match, "tebrikler" means congratulations. I am actually surprised at how patient the staff was as I asked them repeatedly, and with no-doubt increasing agitation, where the congratulations were. Finally, I went to the cigarette station at the front of the store, where there were--amazingly--no matches (or congratulations.) But, the far-too-polite staff person pointed out, they did have lighters! This she showed me by taking a lighter out of its case and, in a moment I will remember for the rest of my life, flicking it on. "Fire?" she was saying, implicitly. "You have fire where you come from?"
Honestly, at that point, I didn't remember: do we have fire in Canada? It's been ages.
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