In the final months of our Turkish posting, I welcomed the arrival of a new attribute: competence. Competence, which I’d been so lacking only two short years before, which I had longed for and studied for and pressed people to try and achieve. Now it seemed within my grasp. A great deal of pride could be attached to figuring out a foreign city. And that pride was heightened in vast, complex Istanbul.

My newfound know-how brought back memories. In my last months in Yemen, I’d known Sana’a’s dusty, unpaved roads so well that my boss asked me to drive a new colleague around to look at rental units. In Costa Rica, shortly before we left, I had driven Angela all over San José, on roads that had previously confused me, to make sure she didn’t miss any end-of-the-school-year parties.

In Istanbul, my savvy didn’t manifest itself in expert driving; I had only used our car for Saturday and Sunday morning grocery runs. But I had successfully used buses, trams, boats, and the metro. I particularly loved riding Turkish buses. Unlike in the U.S., where buses are often ridden by those at the margins of society, in Turkey, it was a solid middle class that rode, quiet and contemplative.

Just like in Yemen and Costa Rica, as our tour in Turkey began to end, I was increasingly out and about, visiting people and places, trying to squeeze everything I could out of our remaining time.

One Saturday morning, Sankar away on a trip, I got up and bid farewell to two houseguests. I then changed the sheets and drove to the grocery store to stock up for two new guests who were arriving the next day.

In the afternoon, I set off to meet Joan, the adult daughter of a friend from home. She and her husband had just arrived in Istanbul for a visit, and my friend had asked me to give them some travel tips. I walked down to the Bosphorus, took a twenty-minute bus ride to Kabataş, and then caught the tram to Sultanahmet. On the tram I met a British woman who was traveling in Turkey by herself. We chatted, got off together, and walked through Sultanahmet. I then picked Joan and her husband up at their hotel, and we walked to a nearby restaurant with an enchanting view of the Hagia Sophia.

We talked about the sites they planned to visit and made a date to tour the Grand Bazaar later in the week, when my incoming guests would be out of town.

After this, I headed, via tram and funicular, to Istiklal Avenue. Istanbul’s historic “Tunel” funicular lets ascending passengers off on a sloped surface, and as I got off, I felt dizzy, as if I was stepping off a boat. I walked a few blocks north on Istiklal to a meyhane, a traditional Turkish tavern, where the American Women of Istanbul group had reserved a table. Sitting down among friends, I nibbled some traditional mezzes—slices of white cheese and smoked eggplant dip.

The head of the consulate, Scott, and his wife, Jan, neighbors and fellow ARIT travelers, sat down across from me. At that point I realized I was too tired to make conversation. It was out of character, and even a social faux pas to sit without contributing, but all I could do was try and silently process the hectic day. Thankfully, Scott and Jan were also leaving early, and I got an official (driver plus security detail) ride home with them. The next morning, refreshed, I got up and welcomed new visitors.

My progress with Turkish had seemed to stall during the year I taught, because of a dearth of study time. But I had heard quite a bit of Turkish around me in the office, and that had apparently been positive. Now, when I went out with Linda, I was often able to follow her fluent words. A complete sentence or two of Turkish would come through to me as clear as a bell, and at the same time, I would have the brain space to say to myself, “hmm, she is using the first person plural here.”  I was finally decoding the language, and it was every bit as thrilling as it had been back when I was 22 years old in Puerto Rico and hearing my first authentic words of Spanish.

Waverley and I and the remnants of the Monday Ladies (a couple of the Ladies had moved away) still met regularly. In the fall of 2012, thanks to an obscure couple of sentences in the Bazaar Quarter guidebook, we began visiting one of Istanbul’s major hans (ancient inns dedicated to particular craftsmen),The Büyük Valide Han. This, the largest han in Istanbul, dated back to the late 17^th century, and had been used for textile weaving.

Over the next six months we would make many trips to this han. We would locate it in the dense tangle of buildings outside the Grand Bazaar. Then we’d enter its huge, iron-plated doors and climb darkened stairs to the second floor, which formed a balcony around a large courtyard. Lining the balcony were workshops and deserted storefronts. We would pass a place where glass lights sold in Grand Bazaar were “antiqued,” and glance into a small takeout restaurant that delivered kebab lunches to han workers. We’d pass rooms where we could hear men pounding on sheets of metal. Finally, we would locate a retired weaver mentioned in the book, named Mehdi.

Mehdi had a key to the roof, and we’d greet him and point our fingers upward inquisitively. He would nod and walk with us to unlock a dust-covered door at the end of the corridor. Then, after tipping him and climbing up uneven stone steps with the dirt of the ages ground into them, we’d find ourselves on a rooftop, sticky with pitch and scattered with small, protruding domes. An attic room off to one side was full of debris and a haunted-looking old loom with ghostly gray scraps of fabric still hanging off of it.

From the roof we could gaze out at the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus stretching off to the north, and the distant shores of Asia. Nearby were the Nurosmaniye Mosque, the New Mosque (completed in 1665) alongside the water, and the Beyazit Mosque. If we had timed our visit just right—and we knew to do this by checking the Internet for the day’s prayer schedule—we could be up on the roof in time for the prayer call. It was mesmerizing to hear the melodic words coming from all the mosques of Istanbul, echoing off the old buildings and the water. We felt like privileged, intrepid insiders (and also oddly proprietary, casting doubtful glances at the few other tourists doing exactly the same thing), and dubbed our experience “surround sound prayer call.”

Even during these days of pride and accomplishment, embarrassment still remained a possibility. Something as simple as laundry could reveal my shortcomings. It had started when my conscientious cleaning lady, Ayşe, decided to take down my lacy living room curtains and wash them. I hadn’t noticed that their white was gradually turning to gray.

When Ayşe left for the day, the drapes washed, dried, and back up on the windows, I noticed that my washing machine was now set to “B.” I had never messed with the settings after making the decision nearly two years earlier to set the knob on the picture of a tub full of wavy water. But now I stood staring at the knob as if I hadn’t seen it before. Hmmm, “B.”

Of course! Beyaz means white in Turkish. Ayşe had set the machine on whites!

I looked at the other letters and realized I might want to finally figure out what they meant. I didn’t have time to ponder them because I was heading off to meet Turkish teacher Ferda for class, so I wrote them down to ask her.

Ferda patiently explained. “R” was for renkli, colored. I knew that word. And “N?” That stood for narın yikama, delicate wash.

So what about the wavy water icon? I drew a picture of it for Ferda. “Ne demek?” What does that mean?

Ferda tried to explain using the word, durulamak. I didn’t know what that meant, and she didn’t know the English for it. But then she said sadece su, only water, and I finally got it. “Only water,” meaning Rinse Only.

For heaven’s sake.

For two years I had been washing all of our towels, sheets, and clothing on the rinse cycle. No wonder nothing ever seemed to get completely clean; I had thought well, ‘Turkish washing machine . . . maybe the quality isn’t so good. . .”

Turks place a great deal of emphasis on cleanliness—language books devote chapters to dialogues and vocabulary describing weekly housecleaning that includes removing draperies and rugs from the home; shopkeepers regularly scrub the sidewalks in front of their stores, making huge soap bubbles; and bus drivers wash their vehicles each morning. Although Ferda was too polite to say anything or even raise her eyebrows, I imagined she was inwardly shuddering, wondering why it had taken her student two years to get her laundry operations straight. And where, I wondered, had all the soap gone?!

Humbled again! Well, there was nothing for me to do but look down at the page of case endings we were supposed to be reviewing and change the subject.

Ferda was a great go-to person  for language and for information about Turkish culture, but now Sankar and I had a new and unusually insightful friend. The company had recently hired Emre, a marketing manager who had lived in both Western Europe and, for over a decade, in the U.S. Emre was one of the only Turks we met who was able to step back from his own cultural perspective, giving credit where it was due and criticizing his own country when merited. Sankar and I hit it off immediately with Emre, and began to rely on him for insights into social and political trends in Turkey.

Non-religious, Emre nevertheless felt that Turks who had been marginalized by Atatürk’s secularization needed to be integrated politically and economically. We had found the religious-secular divide so absolute in Turkey that his sentiments astonished us.

With Emre, like other Turks, we initially felt compelled to launch into a paean to Turkey’s greatness. We complimented Turkish roads, praised the overall quality of public services, and raved about the delicious food and the warm, hospitable people. Emre listened and nodded, but then volunteered, “You won’t notice this unless you stay in Turkey for ten years, but actually, Turks are not all that nice to each other.”

Really? That was a surprise! I did realize, however, that Sankar and I tended to evaluate Turkey only in terms of our own treatment. Could these pleasant and welcoming folks actually be employing a kind of selective niceness? When I managed to turn the lens away from myself, I began to see that what Emre said was correct. Fellow teacher, Yasmin, a non-drinker, was considered secularly suspect by the teachers in power, her bids for promotion ignored. When Waverley had a first communion brunch for son Isaiah, a Turkish manager and his spouse stood stiffly, refusing to converse with the only other couple in the room, Taner, the family’s driver and his wife. And I recalled Ümit regularly dismissing my praise for Sankar’s secretary, Beyza, insisting she really was neither talented nor creative.      

 I hadn’t seen Beyza for quite awhile. The two of us had gone out for lunch a couple times—I found it both flattering and unusual that a secretary would show an interest in getting to know me—and she had come over for pizza once. When Istanbul had a slight earthquake tremor one evening and Sankar was out of the country, Beyza had immediately phoned to see if I was okay. In early 2012, she got married and we attended her wedding reception. She looked stunning in her white strapless gown—slim and elegant, her almond eyes sparkling. Her husband, Marco, was from Italy, and his fellow countrymen entertained us with stylish, jazzy dancing.

On Angela and Greg’s first visit to Turkey, Beyza and Marco had invited the two of them for drinks at a fashionable spot on the Asia side. I was floored by this thoughtfulness; I would have shied away from extending an invitation like this out of fear of awkwardness. But we rarely observed reticence in Turks. And of course Beyza had taken care of all of our newcomer needs as well as helping me get my job.

After my first six months I hadn’t needed Beyza’s help much any more. I was busy with work and sightseeing. And Sankar was often away, traveling in other countries. When he was home, we were increasingly busy with other activities and friends. In fact, Burcu had recently commented to us that we were “living fast.” Normally a homebody, I was traveling outside Istanbul at least twice a month, for ARIT trips or sightseeing tours of our own in addition to spending four to six weeks each year in Minnesota. And it wasn’t just the travel; it was planning, packing, organizing, and then nurturing the new friendships these trips sparked.

Beyza was now expecting a baby, and seemed to be experiencing a lot of illness. For the last few months, whenever Sankar mentioned her name, it was in the context of “Beyza is out sick today, so she can’t help me with [whatever].” Sankar would generally follow that with a sympathetic comment like, “She has been having back pain, and doesn’t know what to do about it.” Or “she’s having some sort of pregnancy problem.” When I asked if it was serious, he said he didn’t think so.

Sankar wouldn’t think of questioning female health problems or asking for a doctor’s note, standard procedure in Turkey. Instead, over and over, with Beyza’s absences, he shook his head in incomprehension and threw up his hands. Typically, I didn’t pay much attention, but after awhile it seemed like her absences were starting to make his job difficult. Although he didn’t seem overly concerned, I was annoyed, and started to wonder whether, at least some of the time, he was being duped.

In the space of a week in the summer of 2012, with Angela and Greg again visiting Istanbul, the situation blew up. Sankar once again told me Beyza was out sick, but my Facebook newsfeed showed her at the Madonna concert in Istanbul.

Immediately after that, Beyza again “wasn’t feeling well,” but photos of her sunning on the Aegean in Çesme appeared.

I abhor lying; to me it makes fools of the people being lied to. It challenges my judgment about a person and makes me angry at both them and myself. I called Sankar over to my desk and showed him the screens picturing Beyza. He looked for a long moment, and then nodded, his jaw tight. The next day, he went to the head secretary with the news, and she phoned me to ask for a screen shot. The posts had already been taken down, but it didn’t matter: Beyza was questioned and the following day she was asked to leave the company.

Sankar and I were surprised by how quickly things had been resolved, but it seemed that Beyza had precipitated her own demise. We had done the right thing.

Beyza quickly un-friended me. We would no longer be privy to her family happenings.

Within a few days, I began to have regrets. I recalled Sankar telling me months earlier that all was not well with Beyza at 3M. She had not been the head secretary’s choice for the job, and though she’d been hired more than two years before, it seemed the office women had never accepted her. There was some of that behavior Emre had told us about.

Now I thought back on the initiative and creativity that Beyza had showed when we were new. That first summer, when our apartment pool wasn’t working, she had actually called the neighboring building to ask if I could swim in their pool. When, not knowing that this item wasn’t available in Turkey, I had asked her for notecards to make flashcards, she had taken the initiative to locate card stock and have them custom cut just for me. And she had written job letters for me, locating all the right recipients and using just the correct tone.

I recalled my own feelings of uselessness when I arrived in Turkey, and how they had eaten at my self-esteem. Now I thought about Beyza. When Sankar was out of the office, he placed few demands on her, and as I became settled, I had fewer and fewer questions for her. In an unfriendly environment, called upon less and less frequently, had Beyza also felt useless? Had it become easier and easier simply to stay at home?

Beyza had probably thought that all of her personal kindnesses toward us would have counted for something. Looking back, I now felt that they should have. Wouldn’t the right thing have been for Sankar, or for both Sankar and me, to meet with her, listen to her side of the story, and explain how things looked from ours? If we’d stopped and thought, if we’d pushed our anger aside, we probably would have done this. But we were busy. We hadn’t even considered doing that.

Our failure was partly cultural: we hadn’t fully recognized the importance of the personal here in Turkey. It was partly typical: we were busy, overly booked Americans. And it was partly idiosyncratic: instead of waiting to cool down—there was, after all, no real hurry to confront Beyza—our emotions had gotten the better of us.

You really can’t help but be who you are. You can try to function differently in a foreign country—and that kind of effort is generally commendable—but inevitably incidents will occur and you will revert to type. And that is when your true self will emerge.

Time is an excellent judge of what is right and wrong, and three years after we moved home, I still regret how we treated Beyza. I had been feeling so competent in Turkey, but it turned out I was poorly equipped to handle a complex, personal situation.

Clearly there are levels of expatriate expertise, kind of like levels in a video game. I had only passed Level One here in Turkey. And I wouldn’t have the chance to try and go any higher. It was time to think about leaving.

The post Living Fast appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

As if on cue, when September arrived, the humidity dropped. The days remained sunny, but the sky turned a deeper blue. Cool breezes ruffled the Bosphorus. I turned our living room air conditioner off, stowed the controls in a closet, and kept the doors to our balcony open all day long.

Now my walks down through the forested path to the sea were a treat. On the shore of the Bosphorus, I jogged between water and rows of pastel-colored Ottoman houses. Then, breathing the scent of pines, I climbed back up to our apartment.

It wasn’t just the drier air that felt invigorating. So did the thought of new fall activities. First priority: enrolling in a Turkish class.

Speaking Turkish would be my entry to the culture; it would help me start to develop my own pathway here. The Turkish language, neither Indo-European nor Semitic, is related faintly to both Finnish and Hungarian, and is spoken by many people to the east, in Azerbaijan and many of the “stan” countries. I already knew it was difficult: it has few English cognates, and requires to speaker to place verbs at the ends of sentences. On the plus side, Turkish is pronounced exactly the way it is written, and its rules have few exceptions.

As soon as language schools reopened for the school year, Umit and I set out to investigate. I had seen advertisements for schools named Tomer and Dilmer, and we headed to their somewhat shabby offices, one on Barbaros Street in Beşiktaş, and the other near Taksim Square.

I had cherished language classes in both of “my” previous countries. In Yemen, my employer, Catholic Relief Services, had granted me two months off work so that I could participate in Peace Corps language classes. The training had been scheduled for late fall, 1979, but after American hostages were seized in Iran, the American government had held its Middle-East-bound volunteers back.

“Yemen 13,” the country’s thirteenth group of American volunteers, didn’t end up arriving until January, after I was nearly six months into my job. I’d already completed an introductory Arabic course, taught by a Swiss priest, but relished the chance to review words and structures. Often, language classes move too fast and end up building on unsteady foundations. The repetition helped fix Arabic in my mind.

I had loved studying Arabic. In fact, some of my best days in Yemen had been spent reclining in the cushioned top floor mufraj of our mud-brick training building, listening to our teachers spool out Arabic lessons. And the results were rewarding: when I could finally comprehend what people were saying and begin to converse, my stress declined dramatically. And Arabs forever ceased to appear threatening.

Alas, I didn’t recognize what was clearly in front of me: I was far more interested in language than in my health education job. It was a sign that should have put me on a path toward working with words. Doing so would have eased a great deal of angst in the upcoming years. But the sign went unnoticed.

I arrived in Costa Rica a decade and a half later with adequate Spanish, but augmented it with much-anticipated weekly conversations and forays into Latin American literature with a wonderful tutor. And finally, after returning from that country at age 41, I realized that my professional work needed to focus on words.

I was so glad to have had experiences conversing in foreign tongues. Although nearly all of my friends had studied German, French, or Spanish in high school, most had never had a chance to use what they’d learned. That was a pity. Being able to understand another person’s words—even if one is not able to replicate that level of speech—was, I thought, a kind of magical phenomenon. It was like breaking through dense clouds into bright light, a seemingly dramatic emergence that actually required months of plodding study which, like the pain of childbirth, was forgotten once the breakthrough occurs. Rarely in my life had there been such a straight path between mundane effort and exhilarating reward. To me, this sense of exhilaration was even better than sex, and there was no question I was going to pursue fluency here in Turkey.

It was typical of the newcomer fog I went around in here that I hadn’t given much thought to what might happen when I visited a language school. At both Tomer and Dilmer, I was immediately guided to a small, empty classroom and handed a written test to complete: ten or so pages of multiple choice questions photocopied so many times that the lettering appeared blurry.

I had never taken a written Turkish exam before; heretofore my “tests” had simply come in the form of verbal communication. And I wasn’t particularly interested in reading and writing Turkish, only in being able to speak and understand it. Perhaps, I thought, there would be another phase of the test, one in which someone would converse with me.

Impatient, I turned in my papers before trying to complete all the questions. But apparently that was the end of the assessment. At Tomer, a stern-looking middle-aged man glanced at my test paper, but not at me, and told me I would be placed with students who had absolutely no knowledge of Turkish. At Dilmer, the situation was similar.

My Turkish was better than that of a rank beginner! I had taken an online course for three months, had amassed several hundred flashcards, and had a firm grasp of the present tense. True, that hadn’t made me very conversant, but at least I was able to communicate my needs to shopkeepers. Miffed by the impersonal treatment I’d received (and now with considerably more pride than my younger, more flexible Yemen self), I didn’t stop to consider that perhaps my Turkish underlayment was also weak, and thus taking a repeat course might be a good idea.

Back home, I expressed my frustration to Sankar. He listened and then, to my surprise, took my complaints to his secretary, Didem, whose job description included helping me get settled in Turkey. The next day, Didem called and offered to accompany me to the final school on my list. Its full name was unclear, but it went by the acronym EFINST.

EFINST was just off the main road that ran through the upscale suburb of Etiler, not far from our apartment. Inside its offices Didem and I sat down with the director, a heavily made-up woman of about forty named Ciğdem (CHEE dem) and, formalities first, sipped tulip glasses of tea. The two chatted in Turkish, referring to the organization as “EF,” and I noticed that Didem was poised and self-assured beyond her clerical job title.

After a few minutes, I went off to a classroom and took yet another written test. It was not much different from the others, but this time I was expecting it and applied myself more diligently, making educated guesses when possible. The result? I wasn’t told my numerical score, but Ciğdem told me I could join an intermediate class if I was willing to take two weeks of private lessons to bring me up to that level.

Ten full days of tutoring paid for by the company? What could be better? I thanked Didem for her role in securing this.

I had approached EFINST different from the first two schools, and in a manner I was unaccustomed to, bringing in reinforcements and throwing the weight of the company around. That went against my usual modus operandi—I disliked the feeling of getting something I didn’t deserve. But having recently capitulated to having a driver, I decided there was no use complaining about this new prerogative. I brushed any negative thoughts away: the school was probably pleased to have a new student and I was determined to work my very hardest.

I have always been the language person in our marriage. In our first years together, Sankar and I made several visits to Spain, and, not knowing a word of the language, he took my lead. In the mid-1990s we moved to Costa Rica, and he started Spanish lessons. He did well, thanks in part to his willingness to speak even when he didn’t quite know the right words. But I’d had a head start, and throughout our time there had enjoyed being the family translator.

With Turkish, Sankar and I had both started out at zero, but from the beginning I’d had more time to study the language. And Sankar’s job here involved traveling outside of Turkey a great deal, making any kind of mastery both more difficult and less useful.

I’ve always been a competitive person, and I enjoyed having this advantage. But my language skills didn’t always prevail. Perhaps because Sankar was raised in multi-lingual, multi-cultural India (and had spent his childhood moving from state to state in India, each time learning a new language and writing system), he used a kind of full-context approach, taking in body language, eyebrows, gestures, and tones of voice in addition to words, to suss out meaning.

From the opposite kind of background, in which everyone I knew had been essentially the same (this, I was beginning to realize, was a real handicap, and not just in the realm of language), I tended to focus solely on words themselves. When stumped, I’d find myself reaching for my pocket dictionary while Sankar focused on capturing an approximation of meaning and then acting on it. In those cases I ended up feeling both chastened (it galled me that imprecision, approximation, could save the day) and envious.

Umit dropped me off at EF for my first day of lessons. On a large, shaded terrace in front of the building, I sat down with Ferda, EF’s director of language studies and my Turkish tutor for the next two weeks.

Ferda didn’t look the way I expected. To my inexperienced eye, Turkish women fell into just two categories: stylishly Italian (slim physique, shoulder-length brown hair, careful makeup, stylish clothing) and Russian peasant (filmy headscarf with a point halfway down the back; baggy, often floor-length coat; little or no makeup). But Ferda didn’t fit either of these. Tall and forty-something, she had black hair that she wore twisted into a braid, and little makeup. She was wearing a woven peasant top and a wrap skirt that almost looked Guatemalan. She would definitely fit into my more nuanced American categories: crunchy, earth mother.

Ferda greeted me in Turkish and always spoke it thereafter (I didn’t know if she spoke any English.) Her voice was light and almost singsong-y, a pitch that could have been annoying, but wasn’t. I found her words unusually easy to understand—and have never figured out quite why that was so. Even more amazing, she understood all of the broken Turkish that came from my mouth. She talked, I listened and understood. I tried to talk, and she affirmed. Our two weeks flew past. I wished I could continue private study with Ferda, but knew that wouldn’t be practical.

On the first day of intermediate class, I arrived early and was directed upstairs, where I waited outside a locked classroom. A portrait of Atatürk hung on the wall and I stood in front of it, gazing at this fierce, handsome Turkish demi-god. His pale blue eyes were the key, I decided: both arresting and exotic. I tried to read the lengthy quotation under the picture, but quickly gave up.

Soon another student arrived, a compact, athletic-looking blonde. She introduced herself in British-accented English as Annika, from Sweden, and we began to chat. She told me she’d been living in Turkey for a year, having moved here with her husband, who managed a subsidiary of a German machine tool company. Their 11-year-old son was with them, and they had four grown children back in Sweden.

A staff person came and unlocked the classroom door for us, and other students drifted in. Two Germans, one named Karl, who said he was spending his two week vacation here studying Turkish, and the other, Adrian, a Gallic–looking young Berliner. And finally Anete, a striking, chestnut-haired young woman from the Czech Republic.

Ten minutes late, the teacher, a thirty-something woman with dark, curly hair, named Gülcan (GOOL jahn; Gül = rose and Can = dear) sauntered in in no particular hurry. She seemed to know both women from previous classes and greeted them. Then we went around and introduced ourselves. When it was Monica’s turn, to my surprise, Gülcan broke in with, “This is Annika. She is very karamsar.” Gülcan explained in Turkish that karamsar meant positif değil (degil negates the word in front of it), not positive. Annika looked surprised, and her face reddened, but she gave a shrug of admittance.

Then we got started. First, Gülcan spoke to us in Turkish—about the weather, about what she’d done the past weekend, about the previous night’s television programs. This was difficult and, as she was going too fast for me to use my dictionary, I found myself leaning forward and staring intently at her, desperate to try and pick up any and all cues. After that we got to work on a Turkish verb tense. A printed reading followed. The class would continue in this pattern.

At noon (the class met from 9 am until 2 pm three days each week), we students walked several blocks to a tiny Turkish restaurant run by a family from Anatolia. This was my first exposure to Turkish neighborhood food and it was positif. The place offered a buffet of rice and barley dishes, meat and vegetable stews, bread, and usually a sütlü tatlı, milky dessert (Turks are hopelessly addicted to pudding). It made me smile to think of the provincial staff having, simply by dint of their café’s location, to accustom themselves to tongue-tied students stumbling in, pointing dumbly at foods they wanted to eat, and then fumbling to count out Turkish lira.

After lunch, if the weather was sunny, the five of us would walk to a tiny park nearby and sit and chat (in English) about life in our countries.  

It was quickly clear that I was the weakest student in the class. First, I had to tune out the others in a kind of trance just to understand what Gülcan was saying. Self-consciousness forgotten, I raised my hand for help whenever I was stumped, which was often. But then, when asked to come out with spoken Turkish, I became tongue-tied.

I remember a conversation about “what we did over the weekend,” in which I wanted to tell Gülcan about a delicious orange-colored tabbouli-like salad I’d encountered. I thought the salad was called kisir, which would have been pronounced keeSEER, but it was actually kısır, using the undotted Turkish i, which pronounced “uh.” As I struggled to say kuhSUHR, Gülcan looked at me, first with puzzlement and then with annoyed exasperation. The class fell silent, embarrassed. Finally, she rolled her eyes and gave up, turning back to the board.

Speaking out in a foreign language opens a person to ridicule, and I hated being in this position. These excruciating moments would occur again and again in class—and would come back to me every time I ran into the now-hateful salad.

I had always been an eager, sit-in-the-front-of-the-class kind of student. Smiling, keeping my homework up to date, always turning in assignments on time. But here my effort and interest seemed to draw the teacher’s ire. I began to feel anxious about asking Gülcan questions, and was even less able to produce Turkish. One day she even singled me out, much as she had done to Annika on the first day, with, “Susan, siz duygusal, bence,” Susan, I think you are emotional.

One morning in pouring rain—the dry, fall weather had given way to frequent thunderstorms—Umit dropped me off at EF and then headed back to Asia to take Sankar on a customer visit. I went upstairs and waited by our classroom as usual, but nobody turned up. After ten, then fifteen minutes, I went down to the administrative offices and asked what was going on. The secretary informed me that Gülcan had cancelled class that day. I hadn’t been informed; clearly, the others had.

If it had been nice day, I would have simply left, making the half hour walk back home, but with rain coming down, I didn’t quite know what to do.

“I don’t have a ride home, and I wasn’t told about the cancellation,” I informed the secretary. I was angry, and becoming more so as I thought about what had happened. But I was also aware of being a guest here—and acculturated enough to be embarrassed at having fallen out of favor with my teacher.

One of EF’s drivers (all organizations had them) finally took me home that day. I called Annika and learned that Gülcan had emailed her, and presumably all the other students, about the cancellation. The next day Gülcan told me she hadn’t had any contact information for me.

If this incident had taken place back in the States, I would have headed back to the administrative office, insisted on seeing my files and contact info, and then taken that information to Gülcan to show her. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t want her to treat me even worse.

Gülcan was one of only two hostile Turks I would meet in my years in Turkey, and I spent time trying to figure out the reasons for her behavior. The first thing that came to my mind was that perhaps she disliked Americans. Surely our war in Iraq had given her and her countrymen reason. During our several days of language and culture training back in St. Paul, a Turkish trainer had confided that she had been furious with the U.S. back in 2003 and afterward because our war had nearly destroyed Turkish tourism. But the woman had gone on to say that most Turks had gotten over those sentiments.

I was Gülcan’s oldest student, the weakest in Turkish, and probably the most intense. My face took on a confused expression whenever I didn’t understand something, and then my hand would shoot up. Maybe my eagerness irritated her. Maybe my constant curiosity seemed like a challenge to her teaching. Or perhaps she simply realized that she was the gatekeeper for my ambitions, and decided to lord that power over me.

I disliked going to class each day. But I didn’t think seriously of quitting. Staying home would be worse than putting up with Gülcan: it would put a roadblock in my way here. At least I was meeting people and making a few friends. I appreciated having something to do three days a week—and having homework to do in the evenings. Besides, after failing to pursue my interest in language for so many years, how could I step off the path now?

I remember sitting in class frustrated almost to the point of tears, but I don’t recall many conversations about the situation with Sankar. I recently asked Sankar about this, and he said he doesn’t remember me being overly upset. Apparently I hadn’t made a big issue of it at home, hadn’t asked him for advice on whether I should continue. This strikes me as an inadvertently healthy move: I was making my own way, not tying this problem to his bringing me to Turkey. I had insisted on a higher-level class, he had helped me get it, and now it was my own business.

At this point, it simply became a matter of waiting the class out. It was only eight weeks long; perhaps we would get a different teacher for the next session.

The class did have one non-language positive: my interesting classmates. Karl, from Neuss—oddly, the only place in Germany I had ever visited—was quiet, but he apparently worked as a salesman. I suspected interest in a Turkish girl was his impetus for studying the language, but I never found out.

Anete, 27, was from a village of less than 200 people in The Czech Republic. She had been discovered as a model at the opera house in Prague, and had come to Turkey on location. Here, she had fallen in love with and married a Turk.

Adrian worked as a German teacher back in Berlin. Most days he arrived in class carrying a bright yellow duck umbrella (the weather was becoming more and more rainy), and he told us he taught German simply by walking his students around his city. Ever since, I’ve always pictured Adrian leading a group of student-ducklings along Berlin sidewalks with his umbrella unfurled, rain or shine. Adrian had forgotten to bring his passport to Turkey, but had managed to talk the normally ultra-serious Turkish authorities into letting him in—an amazing feat. He had a genuine interest in learning Turkish because, as he said, “I want to get to know the Turks in my city.” That sentiment would have melted the immigration officials.

And then there was Annika. I had experienced First Overseas Friendships before, and knew they didn’t always last, but Annnika and I were getting along well. To be sure, she was negative; I would always associate the word maalesef, (MA luh sef), meaning, “unfortunately,” with her. She used it all the time. Maalesef, she didn’t see her other children enough. Maalesef, Turkey was not at all like Sweden. Maalesef, there wasn’t much to do here.

Hearing Annika criticize Turkey made me want to defend it. I pointed out interesting places Sankar and I had visited, urging her to appreciate the bountiful treasures in Istanbul and outside the city. I offered to lend her a guidebook, and asked her if she was interested in coming with me to the upcoming International Women of Istanbul meeting, but she shook her head. These kinds of conversations ended up buoying my own mood, if not hers, reminding me of the positives here in Turkey.

I understood how Annika was feeling and behaving because I had felt and acted the same way in Costa Rica. Being with Annika was like revisiting my past, like taking a look at Expatriate Wife 1.0. while I was busy working to build version 2.0.

Annika did have some habits I admired. She told me that every morning, she went to her apartment complex’s gym and ran several miles on the treadmill, all the while composing Turkish sentences in her head. Simultaneous exercising and language learning: what a boost to the entire body!

And so I continued, attending a class I often dreaded. I was gaining the kind of perspective adversity often provides: I had never bothered to consider the “bad” students who had been my classmates in my school days—the ones that sat in the back or off to the side, fooling around unhappily and silent when called upon, but now I had ample insights into how they must have felt.

Was my Turkish improving? Probably. My flash card pile was growing, and every day I felt just a little more confident.

Stone by stone, step by step. Building a path that would lead me out of isolation. And before long I got some good news. Our next eight-week class would be taught by Ferda!

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Sankar and I had no choice but to put ourselves totally into the hands of others, helpful folks like his driver, Umit, and his secretary, Didem. We resigned ourselves to not knowing and not knowing and not knowing for many days and months. Trying to drive up the twisting hill from the Sea Road to our house, we took a wrong turn and ended up on a dead end street behind a garbage truck that was trying to back up. Despite being dropped off four steps from a mall entrance, I walked smack into a plate glass window. Even though Sankar’s secretary downloaded appliance manuals for me, I managed to wash our clothes for two full years using only the rinse cycle.

The line behind me got longer and longer as I tried to figure out how to buy a subway token.

Finally, the not knowing began to coalesce into something approximating comprehension. The routes up and down the hills to the Old City began to fix themselves into our minds.  I learned how to ask for a plain pogaci at the bakery and how to purchase and load an Istanbul Kart  for trips on trams, boats and the metro. We figured out how to follow Turkish cash machine instructions. After that came a great deal of deserved pride (“Yes! We can do this!”), but also a truckload of humility about the vast amount we still did not know.

I can’t recall this issue bothering me at all when I lived in Yemen. In my mid-twenties, I rarely chided myself for getting lost, and I didn’t feel particularly embarrassed when it took me six months to realize I should fold my legs under me when sitting on the floor.  Perhaps pride is age-related, perhaps it grows slowly, like the plane trees that shade the palaces lining the Sea Road.  All I know is that at age 57, I’m fiercely proud of my competence, and I’m hanging onto it as hard as I can.

Recently I have been puzzled by friends who could travel here inexpensively but choose not to visit, and visitors who have seemed unhappy asking us how to navigate the city. It has helped to think back on my days and months of stupidity. Just as we put ourselves in other hands during those first weeks and months,  our guests must also hand us a measure of authority. They have to let us take control, to let us be “wise,” and for some folks that can be challenging.

For me, the past two and a half years in Istanbul have been like falling deep into one of my favorite childhood storybooks. Sure, I didn’t know where I was when I woke up, and the Disney-like animals chortled in amusement. But once I picked myself up and started down the path–and let others take care of me–I have had a most exhilarating experience.

As I tried to sleep the other night, I pondered the difficulty of understanding others. I was beginning to realize that my experiences here in Asia Minor can provide insights about friends on the opposite side of the globe, but I didn’t quite have the answers I wanted.  Restless, I decided to repeat the mantra, “knowledge of humanity,” “knowledge of humanity.” Isn’t that what we all really seek, above and beyond knowing how to navigate any one city or part of the world? After awhile the mantra began to do its work, and soon I was fast asleep.

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