Christmas in Turkey, Part I

Ah, the holidays abroad. The time of year when you try to uphold the traditions of your own childhood and culture, both for your children and yourself. We enjoyed our Thanksgiving and even managed a traditional dinner, along with the glee of being able to say “We’re eating Turkey in Turkey!” I, in a fit of childish behavior, had to make the joke right at the beginning of the meal because I couldn’t take the tension of waiting to see who would say it first.

But how to create a Christmas atmosphere for your children while living in a country that is 99.5% Sunni Muslim? Well, as it turned out, we didn’t have to do too much work. Christmas, so to speak, is everywhere in Turkey.

Obviously, the Turks do not celebrate Christmas, but they celebrate New Year’s the exact way we celebrate Christmas – with a tree and presents and St. Nick (I will get to this in another blog posting, but the fat man in a red suit that you know as Santa Claus is actually St. Nicolas, who was, of course, TURKISH. As I mentioned in an earlier posting about the history of Turkey, anything that was important in the ancient world has to do with Turkey.) So there are lighted, elaborately decorated, and to our eyes, “Christmas” trees everywhere – in building lobbies, malls, and city squares. Conveniently, New Year’s is just a week after Christmas, so to our kids, everything was decorated for Christmas. Our apartment building has a tree in the lobby, as does the building next door. All of them are fake, but no matter where you look the spirit of Christmas is here.

But our children have never had their own Christmas tree (for various reasons over the years) and we decided that this year, they would. So began the hunt for a real Christmas tree in Ankara, Turkey. Armed with some vague addresses of where people MAY have bought a tree last year, we set out. After a couple of hours, many liters of gas and no luck, we briefly contemplated a nighttime raid on one of the many lovely coniferous forests in the southern part of the city with a saw and dark clothing, but decided it was not worth being sent home for a felony should we be caught. But lo and behold, as disappointment began to reign, my sister, visiting for the holidays, noticed a bunch of pine trees propped up on the curb a couple of blocks off the Konya highway. A few exits and U-turns later, we actually found what she had spotted – a small, well, I hesitate to call it a nursery but that’s the closest word to describe it, “nursery” tucked into the sidewalks of an urban neighborhood. The trees were spindly and droopy but live. We picked the most robust, robust being a very relative term, 3-ft tall-on-a-good-day tree, bargained the guy down to about $100, and loaded it into my trunk.

And how to decorate? Well, you can get decorations everywhere in Ankara. The large store across the street has 2 50-ft aisles of, uh, New Year’s decorations – string lights, bulbs, ornaments, candles, tinsel, Santa figurines, Santa cups, Santa mugs etc. Could have knocked me over with a feather I was so surprised.

So call it New Year’s, but my kids were treated to a lovely Christmas here. Turkey really is a crossroads between the east and the west. But the whole season could be summed up in an ornament I couldn’t resist buying, a gorgeous hand-painted tree ornament depicting Santa in his sleigh, riding through the sky….over a mosque.

Hitting The Bus

Did I mention that I had a Minor Altercation with a large red metro bus?

Mmmm… I didn’t think so. That was fun. And now I have a formal introduction to the ways of processing a car accident here in Turkey. I dearly hope I won’t need the information for future reference, but I’m not holding my breath.

The whole event was more unfortunate and annoying than anything else. I didn’t even hit the bus, I merely rolled a bit too close to it. We each remained motionless for a minute while the traffic was stopped, and then when the bus started up, his protruding back bumper hooked my headlight. Completely my fault, but really no big deal. A $14.95 light for my car, and a bus bumper that someone could have banged back with a hammer. At home we would exchange licenses and insurance info and be on our way in ten minutes. But we are not at home.

The most important thing to remember is that if you move your car after an accident here, you are automatically at fault. Each vehicle has to remain exactly in place until the traffic police arrive (oh yeah, you can imagine the possibilities). So since chances are you will be sitting there for a while, one hopes that a) the accident occurs in a remote traffic-free zone where you are not subject to the anger of delayed commuters and b) that there aren’t a lot of other accidents that morning to take up the time of the traffic police. I was lucky with neither.

It took the police three hours to get to the scene. We kept calling them and they assured us they were on their way and then finally, after two hours and many phone calls later, admitted they had 150 accidents to deal with that morning and would be a bit delayed. ANY OTHER location in the world I would have said, “Yeah, right – spare me the theatrics.” In Ankara I can only say, “150? That’s all?” The modern day Sisyphus is alive and well and He Is A Traffic Cop here in Ankara.

So after they finally show up, it takes another hour to process the accident. You each give your side of the story to the policeman who diligently writes it down. Oh, AND you have to submit to a breathalyzer test. All this for a busted headlight and dislodged bumper. Fortunately I skipped my usual beer-on-my-Cheerios breakfast that morning and my drunk and disorderly morning conduct was nowhere to be seen.

So lest you think that you are done, you need to go to the Central Police station a few days later for the judgment. They give you a copy of your statement which somehow doesn’t quite match what you said, but that you are allowed to correct. Those of you that know me will laugh at the image of me firmly but politely telling this mass of Turkish police that “no, no, I never HIT the bus, just sort of ROLLED into it. That needs to be changed.” My husband always laughs at me splitting hairs when it never matters. As it were, I was deemed 100% at fault. Which is true, although they often rule against the foreigner.

So, four hours of my time and a trip to the police station. And the epilogue? I’ve become insufferable because I can say to my husband, who hates my car, “That’s why I bought a junker. The odds were just too high.”

The Sound of Turkish

I’m back. Sorry for the long hiatus.

I’m back and finally in a Turkish language class. It’s really taken me too long to sign up for one - inertia can be a powerful force – but better late than never. The Turks are just the nicest people I’ve ever met (have I said that before?) and I really want to communicate with them beyond a smile and hand gestures.

And after some instruction, I have to say I really like the Turkish language, despite some unusual linguistic concepts I need to get my head around (i.e., there is no verb for “to be” or “to have”!!). It does have a logic and an order that appeals to my dominant left brain.

One of the biggest differences from French (which I have studied intensely and most recently) is that every single letter in a Turkish word is pronounced. In French you could easily drop four or five letters in a word, which sometimes happens in English as well, but in Turkish you can’t even forget a single letter (can you imagine if you had to pronounce every single letter in “through” - ta-ha-er-o-u-ga-ha?) This makes it much easier to hear an unknown word and be able to look it up. But of course, when speaking Turkish, you have to actually remember this rule.

For example…The windshield wiper on my car snapped and in desperate need of a new one, I went to the auto parts section of a local big box store. Since my Turkish is so limited, I brought the broken wiper with me and held it up with a smile. The salesclerk asked me the make of the car. Reflexively I pronounced Renault in my best french accent – rolled the r just so, the e like “ay”, pronounced the au like a long o, and dropped the lt. The nice gentleman looked at me blankly. I tried again. A furrowed brow. Don’t know why I was so slow…then I carefully pronounced each letter separately, inserting a y between the vowels – Re-na-yu-l-t. Instant comprehension, lovely smile, I had my windshield wiper.

Which brings me to another facet of Turkish – you can’t have two vowels next to each other, which is a boon to us poor foreigners. Every single vowel is always pronounced exactly the same, and you don’t have to remember how the sound changes if there is a second vowel like, a vs. au or o vs. ou , or ei or ie, etc. On the off chance a combination of suffixes produces two vowels, they just stick in the letter y. Just think about the double vowel sound possibilities in English with even this small example of ou:

Dough – long o
Furlough – long o

Through – sounds like ew
Ghoul – sounds like ew

Cough – short o
Ought – short o

Enough – short u
Rough – short u
Tough – short u

Bough – sounds like ow
Noun – sounds like ow

I’m not a linguistics professor, but do you see ANY rule here?

As for international relations…the political situation with the PKK has really brought out Turkish national pride. It reminds me of the US shortly after 9/11, that brief time when everyone was flying the American flag and proud to be an American. It’s like that every day here since the tension escalated on the border. There are Turkish flags hanging from windows, over doors, in taxi and bus windows, from car antennae, huge 75 ft. flags strung between apartment buildings. My children attend a Turkish school, and they have a lobby display - shrine, really - to Ataturk with balloons with the Turkish flag hanging from the ceiling. The nationalism here is rampant and oddly appealing. I guess the stark divisions in the US sadden me. I would give anything for a presidential candidate that could unite us, and yet I fear that no matter who wins, 50% of Americans will reject the winner on party affiliation alone. Can you blame anyone? Everyone has fanned the flames of partisanship in their own way.

And to close on an upbeat subject -

GO RED SOX! Red Sox Nation is alive and well in Ankara, Turkey.

The Temperature in Turkey

Not even the weather in New England changes this quickly.

We left Ankara last Friday, in shorts and T-shirts and enjoying the 70-75 degree weather, to travel down to Side, a town on the southern coast of Turkey for a couple of days. Now granted, the Ankara locals were saying that this constant warm, sunny weather through October was not usual. But who listens? The weather was typically lovely and Mediterranean in Side, sunny and in the low 80s with occasional thunderstorms. Indeed we left Side on Monday in the blazing hot sun. But the temperatures dropped the closer we got to Ankara, and by the time we arrived home, it was 35 degrees. Yikes.

It was rather embarrassing on the way home to hop out of the car for gas and facilities in shorts and flip flops. I endured the stares of more than a few people as I walked my son to the gas station bathroom in his shorts and sandals while the two of us shivered. My Turkish phrasebook doesn’t list “But it wasn’t this cold when we left!” and really, would it have helped if it did? I was a bad mother. Two of the gas station attendants took one look at our outfits and then checked out our license plate, as in, “What country are these idiots from?” The plate might say Turkey but we’re from the land of Denial, my friends.

But nothing like driving to get a feel for the geography of a place, and it really was a gorgeous trip. The land around Ankara is almost lunar, with nary a tree to be seen. The land is parched and brown and windswept. But as you drive south past Konya (home of the whirling dervishes, a subject for another blog posting) you go over a high mountain range of green coniferous slopes that is reminiscent of California. The summit is at 6000 ft. (No snickering from the western corner, please, that’s high for those of us raised in the east) and from there you coast all the way down to sea level in Side, with palm trees, banana plantations and balmy blue ocean water. I can highly recommend it as a vacation spot. To hearken back to a previous posting regarding the history of Turkey, did you know that Mark Antony and Cleopatra once canoodled in the ancient roman city of Side? Bet you didn’t. Neither did I, not to beat a dead (Trojan) horse. I thought about asking for the room they slept in, but I refrained.

As for temperatures of a different sort…I have not personally felt any change in attitude towards us as Americans since the Armenian Genocide resolution passed last week. There was a small demonstration outside the embassy, and many public statements from Turkish officials promising dire consequences for U.S.-Turkey relations, but so far my daily interactions with Turks feels no different. The newspapers here, which are famously inflammatory, printed the headline “27 Stupid Americans” after the committee voted 27-21 in favor of the resolution. I think most Turks are extremely upset, but are too polite to express it to me. Although if the resolution passes in the House, as they are expecting in November, I think things could change rather quickly and unpleasantly. What can I say? We are all extremely disappointed here and hope that the resolution doesn’t pass. I’ll leave it at that. For those of you that know me personally, you can email me if you are interested and I’ll go into more than I can in a public space.

Ramazan

We are in the middle of Ramadan, known as Ramazan here in Turkey, the Muslim holy month. While the world recognizes Ramadan as a time for fasting, it is also an opportunity to refrain from envy, anger, greed, backbiting and gossip. The fasting is a time to turn away from worldly concerns and concentrate on a deeper spiritual relationship to God, as well as a reminder of the hunger of the less fortunate of this world.

For observant folks, nothing can be ingested between sunrise and sunset. Eating, drinking, smoking and sex are all prohibited during this time. Indeed for the most pious of Ramadan observers, the ban can extend to the licking of stamps.

Each morning drummers circulate through the towns and cities to awaken everyone an hour or two before Sahur, the large meal before dawn. This of course is helpful for those Ramadan observers who have a long hungry day in front of them and don’t want to oversleep (drummers have no snooze button), but pure hell on non-observant light sleepers. It just all depends on where you sleep and where the drummer walks. One of my friends has a bedroom that sits right above the alley of the drummer’s path, so she was awakened every day around 3:30 AM until she got used to the noise. She was so excited when after 2 ½ weeks she finally managed to sleep through the drummer. Her husband, however, swears that the drummer was actually IN their bedroom the other night. We have been fortunate (or culturally deprived?) as to not hear a drummer in our part of town – I don’t know whether we are heavier sleepers, have better sealed windows or perhaps just a weaker-armed drummer.

The dates of the holy month are based on the lunar calendar, which is about 11-12 days shorter than the solar calendar, so Ramadan drifts backwards year to year. This of course presents serious ramifications as Ramadan slowly backs down into summer. Sunrise materializes about 5:30 AM during the summer months, which means those drummers will be wandering around a lot earlier to remind you to eat. And the sun doesn’t go down until after eight PM. A long hungry day. That’s not even taking into account the heat. Can you imagine going the whole day without any water? This summer we had weeks of 95 degree + weather. The day during winter is a little over 9 hours long. The day during summer is 15 hours long. That’s 360 more minutes without water, and I’m sure you count every one. Next year Ramadan starts on 9/1 and it will be another ten years before Ramadan arrives in the cool increasing darkness of early spring.

To help manage the times of each day, different businesses will print out a chart with each day of Ramadan, and a column for the exact time that day of Imsak (the hour that fasting begins), Gűneş (sunrise), Őğle (noon prayers), Ikindi (midafternoon prayers), Akşam (evening/sundown) and Yatsı (night prayer). I picked one up at the Armada mall here in Ankara and it reminds me of the tide charts I see around my father’s Florida home.

So after the long day of fasting, many people go out with family and friends for IFTAR, the evening meal during Ramadan that breaks the fast. Often you will find that restaurants are crowded and neighborhoods deserted during the month’s evenings. This of course has no bearing on the everyday expatriate life except in rare circumstances like if, oh, say, for example, one Sunday night during Ramadan THE RADIATOR PIPE IN YOUR BATHROOM BURSTS and starts gushing coal-black sooty water at an alarming rate, and the Titanic comes to mind and there’s no one to help because your building manager is at an IFTAR dinner and all your neighbors are at IFTAR dinners and the whereabouts of the water shut-off for the apartment (which unfortunately you didn’t know was bizarrely hidden in an obscure closet) is unknown, and there’s not a single plumbing business open on a Sunday night during Ramadan and oh, hey, I have a brainteaser for you:

Question: If a pipe gushes X number of gallons of sooty black water per minute, how many minutes does it take to reach Y number of inches of water in the bathroom before it spills out all over beautiful hallway hardwood floors and bedroom carpet?

Answer: Fewer than 30 minutes, which is how long it takes someone to come to the house to shut off the water.

Those rare circumstances can be killers.

The Dolmuş

Finally, a brief blog entry so you don’t have to spend your entire lunch hour reading one of my postings…

There are, I’m happy to report, other transportation options in Turkey besides driving to your own death in a car or braving the seatbelt-less, albeit clean and efficient, taxis. There is a uniquely Turkish mode of transportation called a dolmuş, which means stuffed in Turkish. A dolmuş is a small minibus, and it might run within a city, or between cities and small towns.

A city dolmuş runs a prescribed route through the city - unpublished, but fixed. The sign in the window gives a general destination, but the only way to figure out the specific route is to get on and ride it to the end. There usually aren’t any prescribed stops, so you can pick it up anywhere along this route simply by waving your hand. You get on and ride it for as long as you want for a fixed sum (equivalent to about $1) and get off wherever you want.

For such an informal transportation method, there are some rules to be followed. When you get on, you immediately sit down. Do not, under any circumstances, approach the driver. You hand your money to the person in front of you, who passes the money through each passenger up to the driver and then the driver passes the change all the way back to you. Now, the driver does all this while navigating the city streets. You’re lucky if he keeps one hand on the wheel, so I figure by giving him exact change I decrease our chances of hitting something.

At the beginning of a route, the driver will wait until the bus is full (ah, that’s why they call it a dolmuş!) before he starts. You may not, under any circumstance, wait around until the next empty one leaves. You will be yelled at.

And there are advantages to riding the dolmuş - it’s cheap, easy and you finally get to be the in the vehicle that stops without warning, instead of the idiot driving behind him.

We're not in France anymore...

It’s not fair to compare. But I can’t help but do it. I think we as human beings are looking to understand our world, and we do it by placing our current experience against the backdrop of our previous experience. So in my daily life, Turkey gets compared to France, almost always favorably. And during the course of a normal day in Ankara, I often find myself saying,

That would never happen in France.

My first instinct is to tell you that it’s because the Turks are so much nicer than the French, but that’s unfair, and far too simplistic a statement that doesn’t take into account the cultural differences. But those cultural differences – the role of children in daily life, the strict social rules that govern the French, the Islamic, albeit secular, culture of Turkey that reveres hospitality - add up to a very different daily experience, at least for me.

A day interacting with Parisians would leave me drained. And I was fluent in French, too. I always felt like I had to have my combat gear on to master Parisian life. Either you had to battle the bureaucracy, or count your change, or watch your purse, or coexist with reserved strangers or find a way, anyway, to make someone help you, even if it was their job. No one helped, everyone disapproved. Older women would lecture me about my children (they were too loud, ran too quickly, not dressed warmly enough), younger people would ignore me. People would rush by, annoyed by my stroller. My children in France were an utter liability. The hardest part of my experience in Paris was feeling like my children were growing up thinking that every adult disapproved of them.

People in Ankara are delighted with my children. They smile at them, stop and wave, ask their names. I don’t watch salesclerks stiffen when they see me walk in with small children. We take our kids to all but the fanciest of restaurants here. The Turks, most especially the men, LOVE children. It’s like being in Italy or Egypt. The waiters pull out the chairs for my kids, ruffle their hair, ceremoniously hand them a menu, pour their water and generally fuss over them. The fancy bakery down the street always hands my children a cup of freshly squeezed juice and a chocolate as soon as we walk in the door, while I look on, hoping the kids leave me some.

The waiters in Paris would take one look at our kids and tell us they had no open tables. Or give us a disapproving look (if the other diners hadn’t already) if the kids’ voices rose above a whisper. Oh, and how often did that happen? I didn’t count occurrences per meal, but per minute.

In Ankara, I’m not guarded every time I walk out the door. I feel confident that if I walk into a store and need something, a combination of charades and my 15 words of Turkish will at least start a “conversation.” If they can’t help me, they’ll find someone else who can. The Turks give. A smile, a sample, a cup of tea, their patience. A day running around Ankara leaves me tired, but emotionally energized from my personal interactions. Paris was exhausting, and there were few random social interactions to recharge you.

Some of my criticism is unfair, Paris is a large city, and people are busy and impatient, just like New York, and Hong Kong, and London. You can’t spend the day in New York and come back disappointed that you didn’t soak up any positive energy. Hey, did you get back home alive and with your wallet? Say thanks, move on.

And Paris deals with more foreigners on a daily basis than anywhere else in the world. So I guess we must forgive them somewhat for being tired of dealing with us. While there is a small foreign community here in Ankara, we do remain more of a novelty.

But still I continue to say, That Would Never Happen in France. And every day, it seems, I have a new reason to say it.

Last week I had a friend visiting from CA, and we decided to take the bus to Ulus, the old part of town. I had never braved the bus before, but hey, you need a brand new experience each week just to keep you sharp - or humble, depending on how it turns out. Well, we boarded the bus with a sign in the window saying Ulus which I assumed was the destination. It wasn’t. It was just a stop along the way, a long way. Anyway, we started talking, failed to pay attention, you’ve heard this one before…and when we looked up, there we were, in very northern Ankara, almost off the map. And neither of us speaks Turkish. My friend tried some Turkish out of the phrasebook on the woman next to her. I opened up what had to be a 4’ x 3’ map and proceeded to loudly rustle the huge folio while simultaneously peering out the window searching for a street name. Neither of us was particularly worried – you can always get off a bus, cross the street, and get on the same bus going in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, we must have looked worth taking pity on.

A gentleman immediately stands up and says, “Can I help you?” and proceeded to get off the bus with us, hail us a cab, and explain to the cabdriver in Turkish something to the effect that we were American friends that needed to get to Ulus (the words American and friend are in my 15-word linguistic repertoire.)

That would never happen in Paris. EVER. A number of other ex-pats have said the same thing – that the Turks they’ve encountered have gone out of their way to help them, even though it was inconvenient.

One day my husband and I pulled up to the apartment with a huge box that needed to go upstairs. There happened to be two guys standing on the street waiting for a friend and as they watched my husband struggle with the unwieldy and heavy box they jumped up immediately, didn’t even ask him if he needed help, just picked up the other end and helped my husband carry the box into the building.

That would never happen in France.

But not because I think the French are unhelpful. Their strict social rules truly prevent them from interacting with strangers easily. The average Parisian would consider it intrusive to offer help without being asked. They are all about dignity, and by offering help they are acknowledging an uncomfortable situation that you are in, depriving you of dignity. Plus they don’t know you, so they don’t intrude on your world.

We found that if we had a personal connection to a French person, they were absolutely the warmest and kindest of people. Our French friends truly, truly opened their homes and lives to us very generously. I couldn’t thank them enough. But the average encounter on the streets of Paris makes for a lonely existence.

But there are many reasons I say it. They are repaving the ramp that goes to our underground garage. As a consequence, we have had to find street parking for a week. Last Sunday morning, our family headed out and as we passed the construction, I stopped dead and stared. My husband, a bit concerned, said, “What? What is it? What’s the matter?” because I kept staring. I just couldn’t believe it. There they were, working. On a Sunday. Because it was important and because it greatly inconvenienced the residents, they were working on Sunday to finish it.

That would never happen in France.