Foreign country
Jeff and I have been battling what I liked to call mystery illness for the past three weeks or so. It's worse than a cold, sorta like strep throat, similar to the flu. Every time I think I had it licked, it kept coming back worse than before. Finally, last week, I took three days off work, stayed home, drank orange juice and slept and I think I have finally beaten it out of my system.
I spent three days watching English-language movies, reading the New York Times and the Economist online and talking only to Jeff. In fact, I think I only left the house once, to get more orange juice, and I didn't even bother changing out of my pajamas.
When I stepped out of my apartment building to make my morning commute to work on Friday, I was thus somewhat surprised to find myself in Turkey. After having spent three days immersing myself in my own culture, I had sort of forgotten where I was. It felt curiously strange to hear people speaking Turkish all around me, and everything that was so familiar, the doo-oop sound from the subway entrance as I pressed my Akbil through, the "Iyi Yolculuklar" tune that greets the train as it approaches the platform, all seemed so foreign. Kinda cool, actually. Now I know exactly what to do when I need a break.
Readin'
I have always had trouble buying novels. Unless I'm buying a book from a writer I KNOW I like, I have a very hard time discerning between crap and genius simply by reading the back cover and flipping through a few pages. This problem is, as many things are, exacerbated in Turkey because English-language books are imported and are thus way more expensive than they ought to be. And if I'm going to spend 20 or 25 lira on a novel, it better be damn good.
I should add, however, that this "problem" is off-set by the lack of so-called "chick lit" in this country. Instead of books like "Jane Gets Married" and "And Baby Makes Three" clogging the shelves, bookstores in Istanbul tend to carry titles by Richard Yates, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and other middle- to high-brow authors.
There seems, however, to be no Jodi Picoult or Wally Lamb, and because of that, I am extremely grateful for Amazon.
New passport
Yesterday morning I took the bus to Istinye to the seemingly impenetrable fortress that is the American consulate. I got my first passport when I was 16, and for 10 years I have been waiting for it to expire so that I could get a new one with a better photograph. I'm not going to show you the photo – that would be disastrous and the image would scar you for life – but I will say that I looked like a freakish nerd with my long, perfectly straight hair and big, round glasses.
Why the guy taking the photo didn't tell me I looked like an idiot I'll never know, but I also put some of the blame on my dad, who took me to have the photo taken at the Boscov's in the Camp Hill Mall. I mean, come on. I was 16. Aren't parents supposed to protect their children from having stupid passport photos of themselves? It's not like a driver's license photo, which you have renewed in four years. A passport is good for 10!
Nine times out of 10, when I would give my passport to a hotel clerk or an airline check-in desk employee, the person receiving it would do a double-take to make sure I was indeed the same person in the passport photo. So it was with special care yesterday morning that I fixed my hair and put on some makeup so that the photo I had taken wouldn't make me look like a freak.
Of course, I still don't like my lopsided smile, but hey, I can live with that for the next decade.
