to be Modern?

A couple of weeks ago, while on a date, I was just sipping through the foam of my latte when the Turkish friend across from me asked my opinion: "So, is Turkey a modern country?" Finishing my sip, I rested my cup on the table and took a moment's pause. It wasn't the first time I had fielded that one. Come to think of it, I had spent the good part of an entire semester battling the question of modernity inside and out of sociology and Middle East Studies classes - what does it mean to "be modern"? Who judges? Who applies for admission into the "club"? Does the concept hold weight? Is it even useful? Or simply degrading?

Over the past few months here, too, the many young, Turkish people I have talked politics with are genuinely concerned that they have to convince me of just how "modern" Turkey is - of its merits, its civility, its humanity, of all the factors that, in their eyes, makes Turkey fit in with the ranks of the uber-"modern" (and uber-idealized): the Western Europeans and (although less so, increasingly) Americans.

As an American, I'm supposed to (to my surprise) know a thing or two about "being modern". I become, at first introduction and without consent, a legitimate authority in regards to the question of Turkey's modernity.

Whenever posed with the modernity conundrum in casual conversation, however, I always throw it back into the face of the inquirer: "Well, what does it mean to be modern?"

In this instance, however, we were speaking in Turkish and I, thus, found myself a bit less eloquent and a bit more unnecessarily existential. My question came out more like, "What does 'modern' mean?" To which my otherwise well-spoken date stuttered a bit and took a minute before coming up with some criteria. "It's when people are polite to each other. They speak nicely to each other. And they are clean."
"In that case," I noted, smiling over the tip of my coffee, "most of Turkey is probably modern, but the city of New York is definitely not."

hypotheses:

so I have decided that I am so sick because...
a. I am spit and snotted on (generally not purposefully) daily by 3+4 year old who are too cute to not hug and smooch,
b. my cat, mr. boncuk patlican tinkles, is a filthy little being who revels in crawling around on the wet bathroom floor (and especially behind the toilet - UUUUGH!) and then jumping into my bed,
OR
c. because almost everyone here smokes and my body has staged a revolt.

maybe this super-neat, Japanese anti-smoking advert would change hearts and minds....

oops - did i forget to mention that my roomate was deported?

Okay, okay, so the feds didn't knock down our door and stick her on the next flight to the US of A.... BUT it went something like this:

Expired visa, employers not helpful AT ALL in getting proper legal paperwork (contrary to what they had promised contractually....more proof that contracts don't really mean much in Turkey), trips to various government offices, special paper saying she can stay, some saying she needed to exit-re-enter from Bulgaria, some saying she needed to leave for a month, some saying three months....
Well, after a brief "vacay" in Bulgaria and numerous fruitless trips to the (clueless) Turkish consulate in Sofia, the truth comes spewing out that a new law is in effect this year for American citizens. It requires that US citizens with 15+ days expired tourist visas leave Turkish soil for 3 months (less than 15 days leave for one month), so Sarah, my roommate and conspirator in all things absurd and ex-patriotic, has flown the coop for the languid shores of Maryland, where she awaits her luminous return to Istanbul (read: hangs out with her family and friends, stocks up on good books and American snack foods to bring back here, and annoys the heck out of the DC Turkish Embassy...)

Bytheby, read about her adventures here.

But now her paperwork is in line and only one more month of living alone with a cat like a 40-something spinster (inşallah!).

mr. boncuk patlıcan tinkles playing like a fiend in my dirty laundry

sick in bed, reconnecting with the blog...

home again from work today... in bed, slurping oatmeal (breakfast of the past four days) and trying to avoid the springy advances of my overly jovial (read: psychotic) cat. my throat still hurts (day 5) like swallowing glass, but I think the antibiotics have helped ameliorate the sinus congestion. if this is strep, it's really nasty and moving to my ears...i have had fevers every night, a head cold (maybe it was a sinus infection - one of only three possible illness options in turkey, it seems...), nasty runny nose, and big white patches growing in the back of my throat. yes, really really disgusting; i am half fascinated and half repulsed whenever i open my mouth in front of the mirror. they're like big white craters, or maybe lichens, just growing there, keeping my uvula company. and making it so that i can't swallow without incredible pain. which all makes me sound, incidentally, like the elephant man. "my name...*wheeze wheeze*...is john...merrick...*wheeze*..."

last night i dreamt that my boss was trying to sneakily fire me and i went into school to find her showing my replacement - a leggy, gorgeous woman, most probably of the Argentinian variety - around, telling her "...and English is spoken here all of the time...there are English-speaking teachers in every classroom...and we have an international student-body..." Dream-Hazel laughed pretty hard at all the lines. But this morning when I confirmed by sms that I would be staying in bed because I'm still in a lot of pain, she cutely and grammatically incorrectly replied with, "take a good care of you!" So I don't think I'm in the fire yet. Although if she fired me, I don't think I would really be too heartbroken to be honest... It would be kind of a relief, actually, and an excuse to jump-start what I really want to be doing here (just wait, more info to come...).

So, I (I just remembered how much my mother hates it when I use improper punctuation. Sorry, Mum.) should probably back up a bit, considering that I have been an inconsistent and selfish blogger over the past four months... Amongst other slow-moving, procedural routes that have led towards living in (somewhat) normalcy (like getting hot water, a functioning cell phone, furniture, a fridge, a bank account, a home phone line, permits to be here legally - YAY!), I have humbly welcomed the internet into my home. which means, that I will (hopefully) not be such a blog-lackey in the future. I'm hoping that this post helps rekindle my "writerly fire," since I, frankly, haven't found the words to say just what I want to of late. The Turkish-English linguistic limbo has shaken things up, I think.

Some life updates:
I have spent the last 3.5 months working as a preschool teacher at a Bilingual International Preschool in a ritzy, glitzy gated community in the northern Anatolian side of Istanbul. The kids are great (although, much to my shock in our first week of school, none speak English and almost all are Turkish..which makes communicating an interesting endeavor, to say the least.), but the school is owned by a greater network of schools and its upper management and businessy end of things is, bluntly, awful. Generally speaking, the Turkish teachers are treated unfairly - given much lesser salaries (around 700YTL per month) than foreign teachers (around 2200YTL per month) and expected to do more work. And then there's the fact that the Office broke my contract to essentially result in my demotion without telling me (What's the point of a contract, again?). At the same time, the Office tries to hyper-control the curriculum, sending out weekly programs (that don't make sense and have really unrealistic expectations - this week's four-year-old lesson plan theme, for example, is "Canada"...not ideal for a bunch of kids who don't even know - in Turkish OR English - which city in the world they are living in!) in English and constantly changing things through the network of higher-ups (coordinators, principals, other teachers, and on down the giant game of "telephone") to completely ignore predetermined plans and make way for new commands (On the morning of:"Oops, it's the anniversary of Ataturk's death, everyone clear your agendas, scrap your plans, and center the day around the founding of the republic - make flags, make remembrance wreaths, make more flags and remembrance wreaths...!!!"). It's not the plans that annoy me (although we have decorated enough Turkish flags to line the walls of my entire house, I think), it's the inconsistency, the change without concern for the fact that YES, we are legitimate teachers with legitimate plans and YES we put thought into our work. It's really the disrespect that gets me.

Okay, so a bit more complaining about work, and then on to new topics... My brain has been in a constant state of frenzy, since, as of about a month ago, I work with two teachers (lovely as they are) who only speak Turkish. Now, my Turkish is improving (yavas, yavas...slowly, slowly..) BUT I have become the official translator of not only our weekly newsletters home to parents (90% of whom don't understand English themselves) but, more crucially, our weekly lesson plans! Which is frustrating, since, without a full understanding of what the Office tells us the week's plan should be, my lovely co-teachers can't mold and morph their lessons to fit what our kids need. I worry that our students are getting a very strange sort of education that brushes the surface of many, complex ideas (in two languages), but never touches down to the solid root of a foundation.
ALSO I have found that when the kids overhear me speaking in Turkish with the other teachers (and they always hear, no matter how sneaky and covert I try to be!), they undo the English practice I have been trying to instill and revert to talking with me in Turkish. So then when I try to respond to my co-teachers only in English (as my job description requires, remember) a) they have no clue what I'm saying and b) they get passive-aggressively annoyed with me for replying in English when they know I have the ability to respond in Turkish. Whoosh! More on language: For two months we had two Spanish cousins attending our school. They were inseparable, adorable, hated rules, and only spoke Spanish. So, they were placed in my class and thought of, essentially, as "Hazel's students"... so to add to the general mania of our crazy little school , trying desperately to get up on its feet (see next paragraph), my brain, for two months, was working daily 7am to 7pm in Spanish (with the two boys), Turkish (with my co-teachers), and English (the only language I'm contractually supposed to be speaking!).
To top all of this confusion off, our school, I realized quickly after signing my contract, is a bit of an emergency case. The majority of last year's students were pulled and sent elsewhere because of the nightmare that was last year. The lack of organization and solid curriculum turned many parents off. So now we're left to clean up in the wake of our last principal, who left very abruptly this year. New principal, new teachers, one teacher left, new students coming, old students leaving, new servis (van with driver) plan bringing kids to and fro, old security guard fired, new security guard hired, pay cuts, pay cuts, more students leaving... It's constant. And tiresome. So enough blubbering about work.

Some cute photos of (the good parts of!) my job:

art project - making giant anthropomorphic veggies with the 4-year-olds

halloween party - many spidermen were in attendance...

halloween again - with a cute makeshift cat-princess. (the turkish teachers thought i was crazy for painting my face with the kids!)

a very serious fruit-salad lesson...

Going for my morning dose of antibiotics. More later, inshallah.

On setting up shop

We have had a long, sometimes frustrating, sometimes thrilling, sometimes depressing, sometimes hilarous time of finding and settling into our new Istanbul apartment. We spent one night, for example, almost homeless, saved by the love and kindness of a friend's family, who showered us with affections, incredible home-cooking, and freshly made beds. For the first week after finally moving in here we slept on the floor on makeshift beds of bunched up clothing and two rugs generously gifted to us by our old landlord, whose room we rented for three weeks. He has a nack for finding superb goodies amidst other people's trash and, because of his talents we now have, amongst other found accessories, a big, cushy couch in our salon. By the grace of used appliance stores, the kindness of incredibly generous friends and coworkers, and the sweet deals at a place called "Maxi" (my new favorite hangout), we have been able to scrap together a fully functioning kitchen. When we finally bought a mattress (during an epic journey to Ikea - miles away in an oversized shoppingmall/parking lot akin to my ignorant mental-image of Texas) we carried it home, rolled up and vacuum-packed, on our shoulders from the downtown bus stop, to the hilarity of onlookers. That was only topped by the night I found two remarkably clean overstuffed armchairs by a dumpster a few blocks away. We walked them home, one each, slung upside-down over our heads like gigantic white, square hats. With Sarah walking in front of me, a box with little legs, I couldn't stop laughing. It's remarkable how often people going in the opposite direction offer help when they see you carrying extremely awkward-looking things (one man, seeing us by the dumpster deliberating the best way to carry the chairs home stopped and asked, "Can I help you move your trash?"). One teenager on a bicycle followed us for a block, earnestly trying to get us to let him help. We, being the two stubbornest people in all of Kadikoy (especially when together), of course would not concede.

Things are slowly, slowly coming together for us. Eventually, we'll upholster our furniture so it matches and will swap real curtains for the sarongs hanging in the window. We're sleeping in remarkably comfortable beds (with pillows, down comforters, and all), eating yummy and healthy home-cooked foods (I just made tabouli for us tonight, actually...and picked up fresh mint and peaches from the Tuesday market in our neighborhood. Goodbye, 2YTL durum sandwich from a street vendor!), and there's a hammock on loan from a friend swinging in our living room. Our next challenge, though, will be succeeding in turning on the natural gas so we can finally stop taking cold showers. Brrr.

On being understood.

Istanbul is, like Boston, a city in which people seldom pronounce the "r"s at the ends of their words. Being only a beginning student of Turkish, it has taken time and many instances of sounding like an idiot to recognize verb conjugations where I thought there were nouns, to begin discovering the accents and linguistic nuances of Istanbul. Most of the time, I feel confused and the understanding is always delayed (like a badly dubbed movie), if it comes along at all. In every interaction I have moments in which I just want to, like the two-year-old grunters at our preschool, point towards something and make whiny noises. I think that my Turkish is improving, though - the other day I was surprised to find myself infinately more confident and capable in talking with a friend who I hadn't seen for the past three weeks (although I can't belive I have been here long enough to not have seen a friend for three weeks!). He speaks perfect English but, out of what I have identified as anti-imperialist resistance, only will speak to me in Turkish. Which I will most likely be thanking him for later. Our conversation moved with ease, from work to home to films to military requirements to when I need to pay my rent to needing a vacation... It was so refreshing and rejuvinating to feel that I could both understand and be fluidly understood. Moments like that have been few and far-between since I came to Turkey. I'll have to pay him back with English practice someday. He also wants me to teach him Spanish, though, which I have been trying to explain was once in itself an imperial language. But maybe I will do a better job of explaining in another three weeks...

pop icons from afar

thoughts from 20 August 2008 (copied from my little blue journal):

I finally saw the new Batman film last night, which was, in a nutshell, well worth the wait and exciting to watch. Sarah, my new partner in all crimes, and I saw in the theater like giddy six-year-olds, chit-chatting and giggling while the all-Turkish audience around us sat, all business, around us, not saying a word.
As a loud critic of American policy and facets of "American culture" (a problematic concept in itself -- fodder for another blog post probably, so I'll leave it alone for now), I'm always shocked by my occasional upwellings of emotional response to uber-American things - to pop-culture references from the US, or a sense of solidarity with other American foreigners, excitement at hearing SOFT-SPOKEN English in the street, etc... The Dark Knight, I guess, is just one of those references that strikes a chord - Batman being a symbol of my childhood, of the specifically American comic legacy, the creativity of American productive capabilities, the freakishness of the American collective unconscious...
The film as a work in and of itself, I should add, was very well-done - acting well-thought out (for the most part anyway- I did inevitably feel a few cheese-factor moments), shots artistically configured, moral dilemmas presented - the twisted mind of the joker, the struggle of good over evil and the easy slippages between the two all complexly converged. I had to scoff a little bit at the moment on the ferry boat when the "upstanding citizens" decided to take things to a vote - as if the simple, uncomplicated, and severely flawed American fall-back of "one person, one vote" could fix even the most complicated of moral dilemmas.

settling in...

so, having decided (somewhat whimsically) to stay in istanbul after finding a job teaching (bilingual international) preschool, sar and i have set up shop, found an apartment (entirely sarah's doing), wandered the neighborhood (we even have "our vegetable man" who sells us wonderfully cheap and delicious cucumbers and tomatoes, always throwing in a little extra sweet pepper or parsley - or both!), and things are slowly, slowly falling into place.

it still feels sometimes as if this all is a hallucination - especially when moving across bridges over the bosphorous, taking the ferry to the european side, wandering during late nights in taksim, walking (and watching) up bahariye street on the way home from work, reflecting on the call to prayer...