A Poetic Interlude
T'was the night before Bayram
And all through Istanbul
People were getting hit by dolmuses.
(Editor's note: I hadn't realized how much that near-fatal brush with death made me hate dolmuses!)
February 22, 1999
Had the best meal of my life last night with four of my students, who, incidentally, all have nice teeth and well-groomed eye-brows. You haven't lived until you've eaten sea-bass and drunk raki by the Marmara. That's what my TESOL instructor told me. I thought he was a tad crazy then, I mean, the dude took his dog water-skiing. Poor thing - didn't have fingers so he kept falling off. The dog, not the teacher.
And so last night I drank my first raki. Godawful stuff. It made me make funny faces. But my students found that amusing.
Occasionally I hear noises fromunderneath my bad and I know I should check to see what it is, but I'm afraid I 'll come face-to-face with some kind of angry rodent. Thus I ignore the noises and hope like hell that the rats realize that there is nothing interesting to do or eat in my room, so they burrow into Ann's. Ann can handle rats. All she'd have to do is fart in their general direction.
Turkish men are really a breed of their own. I had spent 26 years trying to decipher the codes of Canadian men, and when I think I'm finally honing in on the truth, BAM!!! I end up in Turkey and have to start back at the beginning. Turkey, ahh, can't you just smell the testosterone in the air?
Dating a partner whose mother language is not your own lends a whole new complication to the relationship. Turkey is rife with good looking guys. Not just average-type guys, either, I mean, Adonis was from this neck of the world. I have never seem this large a concentration of good looking people in one place without any cameras.
It's hard to get to know someone when you can barely put together two sentences. What I notice is how others act around him. Is he generally well respected? Or do others noticeably talk down to him, or react as though he just announced that he enjoyed strangling kittens. You don't have to speak his language to be able to figure out whether this guy is decent or not. Body language may vary from country to country, but the vibrations don't. You can always pick up a person's vibrations by noticing his interactions with others.
Two bombs went off today - one in Bakirkoy where I frequently go to shop, and the other in Atakoy, across from my school, where I also frequently go to shop. I was there yesterday. From the news footage, I could tell I walked right through the parking space where the bomb exploded. I don't know if anyone was killed, although aparently six people were killed in Bakirkoy.
Renewed terrorist activity. Great. I called home tonight, not to tell mom about the bomb but just to say hi. I don't think she needs to know about this. I am not considering going home. A bomb exloding across the road from my school would, you'd think, make me change my mind. But what the hell would I do back home? I feel like a completely useless idiot back home there. Plus I have 37 grand in student loans and no job prospects.
I am staying.
I actually heard the bomb go off as I was teaching my class. We found out the details later. My students were telling me it was a bomb, but I had refused to believe it at first. The thing is, I do not have any doubts or little voices telling me to go home, though I have had a dream recently where I did go to Canada and wasn't able to return to Turkey.
So, I'm not going to go back yet. Not for awhile. I can wait. I'm not finished with this country by a long shot. If my students stay, live and work here, then so will I. I am beginning to feel more loyalty towards them and Turkey than I do for my own country. I'm not wrong.
