I thought that going to the US last week would make me want to move back.
Despite my conflicting feelings about going to the US, I secretly feared that I would become enamored with my home country in a way that I had never been before.
But it didn't happen that way at all.
Instead, I came home to Izmir with something altogether better than the desire to escape my life in Turkey.
Validation. Assurance. Confirmation.
I came back to Turkey feeling like I did when I first moved to Istanbul two and a half years ago. I feel giddy and optimistic. I feel like my life is full of joy and promise, that there are things to do and goals to meet.
I feel like I made the right choice to move here and that I keep making the right choice every day by staying.
These past several months in Izmir have been hard for me. Harder, perhaps, than I've let on to friends and on this blog. But you guys probably already suspected this.
I've been down, I've been grumpy, I've complained about pretty much everything. I've lamented moving away from Istanbul and was sour on Izmir for months, dwelling on only the city's negative attributes rather than celebrating its positives.
But I came back from the US with a completely different attitude. I remember now why I moved to Turkey in the first place and the kind of life I envisioned myself having while here. Even Philadelphia, my most favorite city in the US, wasn't able to convince me that life there would be any better than my current life here.
A little bit of distance gave me a new perspective on the life I've created for myself and what I have chosen to do with my time in Izmir. And I realized that I've wasted so much of the past six months. While I've been throwing back martinis and watching television, time and opportunities passed me by. And I did nothing about it.
But that's okay. I'm not going to shed tears for what I may have missed but instead make a resolution to move forward.
I chose to live here. I choose to live here. And more than that, I now choose to make the absolute best of my choice.
Jeff and me at my dad and step-mom's house in central PA (courtesy of my mom)
Yesterday we took our two cats Lou and Andy (both imported from America when we came to Turkey two and a half years ago) to the vet to get their nails clipped before leaving for the US on Tuesday. (Clipping their nails before we leave on a trip ensures minimal damage to my belongings. So does rolling up the carpets and putting them away.)
Lou and Andy
Both cats have gingivitis, something our vet Can was seeing for the first time yesterday. They've had bad teeth and gums since they were kittens, and a vet in Philadelphia told us three years ago that gum disease would continue to be a problem as Lou and Andy got older.
But Can's mind went to more sinister territory. As he showed me in his Turkish vet medical book, 25-30% of cats with feline immunodeficiency virus -- essentially, cat AIDS -- present with gingivitis symptoms. That's nice, I said, but they've already been vaccinated against AIDS, PLUS they've both have gingivitis since they were 3 months old.
Can wasn't having it. We went around and around, him telling us that gum disease is a clear sign of cat AIDS, me telling him that a) they've been vaccinated; b) they've had gingivitis since they were babies; and c) they exhibit no other symptoms of AIDS.
Assuming that I must have misunderstood him and did not grasp the magnitude of the situation, Can called his English-speaking friend Gul over to translate. She proceeded to tell me everything Can was telling me. Just in English.
"I understand everything you're saying," I told Can. "But it is impossible that they have cat AIDS. What you're saying doesn't make any sense."
"I am 99% sure they have AIDS," he told his assistant. In front of me. Striking fear into my heart.
Now, as anyone with a pet can attest, this is classic vet behavior. My cats are perfectly healthy, minus a bit of gum disease, but what vet is going to accept that? What vet can resist proclaiming that your cat needs a $240 test for this, or a $150 blood sample for that?
And to be honest, Can and I have been at loggerheads before. A few days ago, in fact, I took Phoenix and Frankie in to have their nails clipped and was berated for not bringing my cats in every three months for anti-parasite medicine.
But I feel that this issue is much larger than vet-takes-advantage-of-cat-loving-foreigners-willing-to-do-anything-to-ensure-said-cats'-health.
I think there are other issues at play here regarding different cultural assumptions, my lack of trust in Turkish veterinary science, and also, my weakness in standing up for myself and my beliefs in the face of what I consider questionable customs.
There are some cultural differences that are completely innocuous and whether or not you subscribe to them is generally unimportant to how you live your expat life here in Turkey. Wearing slippers in the house, for example. Afternoon tea. Putting on an undershirt in the winter.
But expats also must deal with much larger cultural differences sometimes and most of my experience with these has been at the vet's office. I am, in general, skeptical of most vets in Turkey, and doctors, for that matter. I do not trust doctors to always know what is best for me (or my cats), the way that 73% of Americans do. And I do not have a lot of faith in Turkish vets (see here).
Despite this, when faced with the threat -- and I do not use this term lightly -- that my cats might have AIDS, well, Jeff and I did the only thing responsible pet owners would do: we authorized the test. That is, when confronted with the idea that my precious little babies might have a life-altering disease for which there is no cure, I went with the one thing that would ease my mind: a 240 TL blood test to tell me what I really already knew: Lou and Andy don't have cat AIDS.
Which, I should point out, was always obvious to me. But that makes me the dumb one in this situation, doesn't it?, since I essentially gave in to the vet's scaremongering tactics. I failed to stand up for myself, and indeed my cats, who were subjected to a quite unnecessary and stressful blood draw.
So the question I want to throw out there today is: How do you stand up for yourself in the face of differences -- whether cultural or not -- when you believe firmly that you are in the right?
Whether at the vet's office or the doctor's office, whether on behalf of your cat, your child or yourself, how do you say to a Turk, "No, I don't believe/trust/follow you"? How do you stand up for yourself when you are entrenched in an established community with certain beliefs and protocols that you simply don't subscribe to?
A little more than a week from today -- next Tuesday, February 9, to be exact -- I will begin the arduous, 14-hour journey to the US where I will spend 10 days visiting family.
I have many mixed feelings about this trip. On the one hand, I am looking forward to seeing my family, some of whom I have not seen for two and a half years, and on the other hand, I am dreading the travel time it requires to get from Izmir to Istanbul to New York City to Connecticut to central Pennsylvania to Philadelphia to New York City again to Istanbul to Izmir.
All in 10 days.
Gug.
Unlike some of my other expat friends, I don't get back to the US very often. In the two and a half years that we have lived in Turkey, Jeff and I have gone back once, in August 2008, when he defended his dissertation in Philadelphia. Our immediate families have all come to visit us at least once during the time we've been here, and for that reason, it has not been particularly pressing that we get back.
But it only seemed fair that we go back now because, after all, it's been a year and a half since we've last been. Plus, February is when Jeff has his semester break from school and airfare to the US is much, much cheaper now than it is in the summer months, when I would much prefer to spend my holiday in Cesme than the eastern seaboard. Sorry, Pennsytucky, but you got nothing on the Aegean.
There are some things about the US -- other than seeing family -- that I am sincerely looking forward to. Mexican food, for example. Indian food. Pubs. Stocking up on tampons and Tylenol at Target. And visiting some of our favorite old haunts in Philadelphia, where I plan to gorge on shopping and drinking and eating for 48 whole hours.
There is really not much that I miss about the US. Forgive me if that sounds flip or cruel, but it is true. Although sometimes I do get frustrated with Turkey and sometimes I do romanticize life elsewhere (although usually my fantasies take place in the UK or France, not the US), I really do like Turkey. If I didn't, I would hightail it outta here in a heartbeat.
I sometimes wonder if I am an anomaly among expats, like I should be really, really excited to go home all the time every time.
I am wondering how you all feel about going "home", wherever that may be. Do you go back every chance you get? Are you always excited to go back? Or are you conflicted about it like I am?
If you looked just on the surface, it would be understandable for you to wonder why we have become such good friends with Ümit Kızılırmak.
To be sure, there are a lot of differences between him and us.
He is a devout Muslim, for example, and prays four times a day, only skipping the early morning prayer.
He doesn't drink booze. One of the few things he knows how to say in English is "I am Muslim. Boycott alcohol."
Ümit doesn't speak English, which means we speak Turkish together and sometimes Kurdish. Well, he speaks Kurdish and we go "huh?"
He reads crazy conspiracy theories on the internet. He refuses to buy a cell phone with wireless capability because he believes those phones have more radiation in them and thus, will give him cancer. (I would tell him to read this, but I don't think he would believe it.)
Ümit doesn't like cats. At all. He thinks it's sweet that I carry a bag of cat food in my purse to feed random street cats but probably thinks I'm crazy nonetheless. But when he comes to visit us for a week in May, I think he'll change his tune when he meets my four cats.
But for all that....for all the surface differences and the language barriers and the cultural misunderstandings....
For all that, somehow, we have become really good friends. And if you ever meet Ümit, you'll know why.
He is one of the most generous and altruistic people I have ever met. I've met some very generous people living in Turkey, but Umit and his family by far take the cake.
Ümit is open minded about a lot of things in ways that a lot of people here are not. True, he does have staunch views about some things (see above), but for the most part, he doesn't make assumptions or jump to conclusions.
In a lot of ways, some similar, some not so similar, we three know that we are foreigners in this land and don't quite fit in with the status quo.
We learn from each other. Ümit teaches us about Kurdish folk music and dancing and explains cultural nuances to us that we don't understand. We, in turn, tell him about life in Philadelphia and what Christmas means to us.
Really, when you think about it, we're friends for the same reason that you become friends with anybody. It doesn't get any more complicated than that.
The life of an expat is many things. It is sometimes adventurous, oftentimes frustrating, more often than not quite exciting, and occasionally even glamorous.
But it can also be very lonely if you don't have a close circle of friends who have become your family.
This is the worst time of year for loneliness, right around the holidays. I am not necessarily hungry for turkey or stuffing or pumpkin pie this year -- although don't get me wrong, I would LOVE some right now -- but I am more hungry for time and knowledge, the kind that comes from interaction with people you love and spend time with on a regular basis.
Living abroad you learn many things about people, about life, and about yourself. But the one thing that I think I am truly missing out on right now is the kind of learning that you pick up during Sunday dinners with the family, the kind that is fluid and spontaneous and without form.
There is so much to learn from family, from close friends who have been there, done that. I told my stepmother more than once, for example, that if Jeff and I ever buy an apartment in Turkey, I want her to come for a few months and oversee the renovations. She's good at that kind of stuff, she knows how to lay tile the right way and can tell if the contractor is doing it wrong.
And my mother, she and my stepdad could write a book about how to tell authentic antiques from fake ones, and how best to refinish a dilapidated dresser, and which kind of rusted watch sold for $1 at a flea market will get you the big bucks on eBay. And sometimes I wish I could ask my dad about all the stuff he's got planted in the yard, what kind of flower grows best in the shade, how I can grow basil on my balcony.
So instead, I turn to the internet for nearly everything I need to know. And the internet....well, let's just say it's lacking in so many ways, especially when you're trying to learn how to cook, which I have been trying to do for a few months now.
In a piece I read today, of all days, in the New Yorker titled "What's the Recipe? Our hunger for cookbooks" by Adam Gopnik, he writes about how many cookbooks have turned into rote grammar books, whereby we don't actually learn how to cook but instead learn how to simply put together a recipe:
But is learning how to cook from
a grammar book—item by item, and by rote—really learning how to cook?
Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the
commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than
just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone had written
a book called “How to Play Catch.” (“Open your glove so that it faces
the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the
glove shut.)
And that is EXACTLY what I have been doing. I do the same thing with food blogs (cookbooks are too expensive here) by finding ones I trust and like and go back to again and again when I want to make something. But by doing that, I'm really not learning how to actually cook anything.
My friend Chole is one of those people who can look at a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and judging by how many eggs there are or how much sugar it calls for can tell what kind of cookies you're going to get. When I told her last year that I wanted to make thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies but that every recipe I was trying produced flat ones, she found me a recipe that produced exactly what I was looking for. How? She knows that more brown sugar and egg yolk will produce thick and chewy cookies.
Now, I do all this stuff by trial and error which means that yesterday I boiled the lasagna noodles because the recipe I'm following says to EVEN THOUGH the box says NOT TO. But you must follow the recipe! Indeed! The recipe will show me the way!
I've got a kilo of pureed pumpkin in my freezer that I am terrified of using because I have no idea what to expect with any of the recipes I've found. Spicy Thai soup sure does sound great, but will it be so spicy that Jeff won't eat it? And what about all those pumpkin cupcake recipes -- which, first of all, would mean I'd have to buy a cupcake pan -- that call for cream cheese frosting? I don't know about those either.
I guess what I would rather do, what I feel I am really missing out on, is being able to call someone and say, hey, have you ever made pumpkin soup before? Come on over to my house and let's do it together. Oh, and bring an eggplant over, will you, because I have yet to learn how to broil one.
That'd be so much more fun than following a recipe off the internet.
Raise your hand if you enjoy mopping the kitchen floor.
How about scouring the bathtub?
Dusting the television?
No? Nobody? Yeah, I kinda figured.
Okay, even if you don't like it (or maybe you do, I'm not judging), do you still do it? Do you resign yourself to the fact that the kitchen floor simply needs to be mopped and, as the saying goes, just do it?
Because I am increasingly feeling like just not doing it altogether.
The first time Jeff and I hired a cleaning lady in Istanbul, I was thrilled. We came home from a garden party to find our floors swept and mopped, the windows washed and the dishes done. It was magical, just like being Samantha in "Bewitched" when she would snap her fingers and TA-DA! the house would be spic and span. Except without the snapping of fingers or twitching of noses.
I find myself torn yet again about hiring a cleaning woman to do what I am perfectly capable of doing myself but don't have -- or simply won't make -- the time for.
Though several Turkish friends of mine have pointed out to me that hiring a cleaning woman is simply a fact of life for many Turkish families and it provides much-needed income for the cleaning woman's family, I still cannot shake a small sense of guilt over paying someone to clean my toilet.
It seems so....so....upper-class, don't you think? Like, well, if we're going to have a weekly cleaning woman, why don't we also hire a butler too? Someone to hang my fur coat when I come in and hand me my gloves when I'm ready to go out. Because that's about where I put cleaning women, right up there with butlers and cooks and nannies and gardeners and all manner of domestic servants that I am by no means rich enough to hire.
And really, we both know what I'm going to be doing with the extra time allotted to me because I didn't need to wash the windows. Work on a cure for AIDS? Run an amazing non-profit that is ending hunger in Africa? Write the next great American novel?
Alas, I wouldn't be doing any of those things. I'd probably spend more time working and writing blog posts. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
And maybe having someone come in once a week would help keep my anxiety down, along with daily exercise and chamomile tea, of course. After all, I do get pretty high strung about the mess my cats make every. single. day.
All of this is to say: can anyone recommend a cleaning woman here in Izmir?
Let's face it: there are going to be times when an expat just doesn't want to be living in Turkey. It has less to do with Turkey itself, per se, and more with expat life in general.
I have a friend who, while living in Romania several years ago, would stock up on groceries on a Friday evening, then hunker down at home all weekend long, only to leave on Monday morning to go to work. That's pretty much what I did this past weekend, except I went out for groceries on Saturday, not Friday. But the first time I did leave the house in more than 48 hours was to go out for lunch today, which is where I wrote this post from. You gotta love Turkey's embrace of wireless EVERYWHERE.
My "opt out" this weekend, as I like to call it, stemmed more from the fact that since I stopped taking my anxiety meds late last week, my brain has been doing somersaults inside my skull. I can't seem to concentrate on anything these days, and I cry at the drop of a hat. On Saturday afternoon when Jeff and I were making mac and cheese, I put the macaroni into the pot, then covered it with water and put it on the stove to boil. Then I looked at it and thought, that doesn't look right. Immediately, I started to cry, but luckily Jeff just lovingly, quietly said, it's ok, we're just going to drain the macaroni out and boil the water first.
Oh dear.
But back to the topic at hand: disengaging from the expat life for a little while. It happens to all of us, at one time or another. You get tired. Tired of speaking Turkish, of dealing with a culture that, after two or 10 or 20 years, is still foreign to you in many ways. Some days you wake up and think, my god, if I have to deal with my nosy neighbor/the crowded pazar/the gym that refuses to open the windows/the wine that is taxed 200% at the grocery store/insert something that annoys you here ONE MORE TIME, I'm going to scream.
That's when a weekend spent indoors speaking nothing but English, watching only American television and eating peanut butter and marshmallows is good for you every once in a while. It grounds you, keeps you from getting lost in this foreign land where not everything is clear 100% of the time.
I pride myself on being pretty good at getting out there, learning and speaking Turkish, really getting involved with my community and my neighbors and embracing the way of life here. I moved here so that I could live a different lifestyle that wasn't available to me in the US, and I completely avail myself of it here, believe me.
But sometimes....oh sometimes....I wish that I could get an electrician who understood that when you tug at a cord plugged into an outlet, the outlet and all the wires attached to it SHOULD NOT pull away from the wall. Sometimes I think I will catch the next flight to Philly if one more person tells me that my cats' hair will get in my brain (which is why, of course, I must get rid of my kitties before having children). Sometimes I really do want to slap the woman who rams me in the ankles with her pazar arabasi (grocery cart) at the market because she wants to get to the broccoli ahead of me.
And those are the days that I go home, close and lock the door, put on my pj's and The Philadelphia Story, eat a chocolate chip cookie and pretend that I'm somewhere else.
How about you? How do you cope when you just can't handle the stresses of expat life?
Turkey was ranked 122 out of 175 in the latest worldwide index, falling 20 spots from 102 in 2008 and 21 spots from 101 in 2007. As Reporters Without Borders notes, Article 301 still puts journalists under an enormous amount of pressure to comply with the government's mandate to refrain from offending "Turkish identity." Amendments made to Article 301 in 2008 didn't change things much: instead of it being illegal to insult "Turkishness," it is now illegal to insult "the Turkish nation."
I was already thinking about these things when a friend of mine who lives in Greece asked me some questions via Facebook about what it's like to be a blogger in Turkey for a thesis that she's writing. She wanted to know if my being an expat influenced what I choose to write about on this website and why.
My answer was a resounding yes!, of course my being an expat heavily influences what I choose to write about and say and do in this country. In a lot of ways, I feel very much like I am a guest here; my residence visa is only valid for a year at a time and is contingent on having a job. The last thing I want to do is piss somebody off in Ankara and then my permit doesn't get renewed.
Turkish Muse is a personal website: I write about my personal life, the silly inane stuff that happens to me, along with posts about travel and culture. You'll notice there is not much, if any, talk of politics on this site.
The reasons for this are twofold: One, I'm not really interested in writing about Turkish politics. If you want to read about that, you can go to the BBC or any other major news organization. Two, there is a very real danger in Turkey of writing something somewhere that will offend someone in some ministry in Ankara and BAM! your blog, plus the hosting service that you use, gets banned, which is what happened to Blogger and WordPress. Thank goodness this hasn't happened yet with TypePad, my blogging platform, but that doesn't mean it can't or won't.
Of course, this is not to say that I don't complain about life here in
Turkey sometimes: I gripe about the post office and bureaucracy and banking, for example, but I make it a point to never
ever disrespect any aspect of Turkey, its culture or its people. Not
only would that be a terrible thing to do, it very well might get me into trouble.
And you know what? At the risk of sounding like a petulant child, that totally sucks. There may be some things that I would like to say on Turkish Muse, but I bite my tongue sometimes. In the end, my desire to keep my blog, and other TypePad blogs, available for all readers outweighs my desire to say something nasty about the president or the prime minister. (Just because I am not Turkish does not mean that I am immune to Turkish laws.)
But these concerns are trifling compared to what actual media outlets face here. The Dogan Media Group, which owns the English-language newspaper the Hurriyet Daily News & Economic Review, is facing a $2.5bn fine for being critical of the current administration. (Check out the paper's "Assault on the Press" for more information.)
And of course everyone knows about the fate of Hrant Dink, a journalist of Armenian origin who was shot dead outside his newspaper's offices in January 2007. Dink was convicted in 2005 of writing about the Armenian "genocide", a term Ankara rejects. (See how I put quotation marks around the word genocide? Article 301 at work, folks!)
I'm curious to hear what you all think about this issue. If you have a blog, do you censor what you write on it? How do you decide what to say and what to withhold? Even if you don't have a blog, do you lower your voice in public when certain topics come up? If you are an expat here, do you think twice before you write or speak?
Have this ever happened to you in Turkey: You enter a museum of some kind and start seeking out signs that list the price. Most of the time these signs are in Turkish but even if you don't speak the language, you can figure out the cost simply by looking for numbers followed by "TL".
You find the price but notice that there seem to be two rates: one for Turkish citizens and one for everyone else. What do you do when you discover that you have to pay more because you're a foreigner? Do you gape in horror? Do you refuse to pay and walk out? Do you insist on paying the local rate?
It's one thing to be charged more for touristy knickknacks in Sultanahmet -- I mean, you're almost asking for it, aren't you? -- and even another to be charged more than a Turk for a kilo of tomatoes in Cihangir. In those kinds of situations, you're allowed, even expected, to negotiate on price. There is quite a bit of leeway in how much you can end up paying.
But I do believe it is another thing entirely when a museum or tourist attraction blatantly charges more for people who don't carry a Turkish passport. I mean, that kind of thing is illegal in the US. A business owner would be sued faster than he could yell "lawsuit" before a judge would be slapping him with a fine or closing down his business.
I know this isn't the best photo, and for that I am sorry; the lighting was not in my favor that day and I am still learning how to use my darn camera. This printed sign shows the entrance fee for the Aya Sofya museum in Iznik, which Jeff and I visited a few months ago.
You'll notice that the entrance fee for Turks is 3.50 TL, while it's 7 TL for foreigners. That's double the price simply because you carry a foreign passport!
It's the same story at at the Galata Tower in Istanbul. For the privilege of taking an elevator eight stories, then inching your way along the edge of the tower to snap a few photos, you'll pay 10 TL if you're a foreigner. You pay 5 TL if you're Turkish.
In both instances, I paid the higher foreigner rate, although I truly regretted it at the Galata Tower. It simply wasn't worth paying 20 TL for Jeff and me. At the museum in Iznik, we paid the 7 TL fee for me, and 70 cents for Jeff since he's a teacher. In both instances I grumbled silently but forked over the cash in the end.
And, really, it's not about the money; it's more about fairness. I'm happy to pay 7 TL to visit a museum if everyone else has to pay 7 TL too. I don't know what the reasoning is behind some museums charging foreigners more, but I think it's good and stinking.
How have you dealt with this in the past? Have you given this a second thought and protested or have you just paid up?
In honor of National Cat Day, which is technically October 29 in the US, but somehow I missed it -- but who cares, right? we can celebrate cats every day of the year! -- let's look at some of the ways to identify the cat lover in your life.
You know you're a cat lover in Turkey when...
You choose a different table than the one at which you want to sit at a restaurant because you see a sleeping kitty on one of the chairs.
You choose your entree at a restaurant based on how much of it you can give to the street cats circling your table.
No matter what you end up ordering, half of it goes to the street cats anyway.
You stop to love up any friendly kitties you meet on the street.
You promise to purchase all of your books at a specific shop simply because they're nice to cats and let them sleep on the books. You also do the same thing with coffee shops, restaurants, bars, hair salons, any place really.
You take pictures of random cats sleeping in parks, hanging out in trees or doing anything cute.
You have a habit of picking up wounded, sick or otherwise hurt animals on the street and taking them to vets to get better. This particular kitty was rehabilitated in our bathroom and then went on to a new home!
There is never any place for you to sit in your own home because the cats got to all the good seats first.
After having brought two street cats of your own into Turkey, you pick up two more on the street and bring them home forever.
