Right now, I’m actually a little mad at my host brother. We are going to Norway tomorrow to visit friends, and he’s currently sitting in the living room, playing Pro Evolution Soccer and generally doing absolutely nothing, while my mom and I are busy packing. Now, I know that this really isn’t his fault – the idea that he should help just isn’t going to enter his mind. Part of that’s my individual family, and part of that is Turkish culture in general. The idea that your mom still packs your bag for you at 16 years old would be a little strange in America. Yes, I suppose there are some people who enjoy this slothful privilege, but I sure as hell am not one of them. Bulatcan will wake up tomorrow to find his bags already packed and ready to go. I will spend tonight agonizing, as I normally do, over whether I forgot anything important for the trip.
Ah, yes, the age-old packing dilemma. Bring too much, and you have to lug it around, plus you look like about as graceful as a beached whale. Pack too little, and… well, I don’t really know, because I’ve never actually packed too little. I tent to err on the side of bringing just about everything I can think of. I remember when I went to Morocco I brought a pair of binoculars, which left the bag just long enough to get saturated with Saharan sand, which lingers there to this day. But I have the image of not packing enough, and ending up stranded in some horrible situation, cursing myself for forgetting to bring enough AAA batteries or failing to bring enough of the 100 mL airplane-approved tubes of toothpaste. It’s a risk I simply refuse to run.
Packing is also annoying and stressful for me, because we don’t have a clothes drier. Normally, this isn’t a huge problem. But right now, it’s rainy, and all my clothes are sitting under the heater. It’s basically a race against time to see if enough clothes will be dry by tomorrow.
It’s amazing how many little things whose presence I take for granted in every house in America are abscent in Turkey. Peanut butter. Clothes driers. Zip-loc bags. Can openers. Trash bins. Stoves. Re-usable water bottles (I probably use about 2 plastic water bottles a day… somewhere, Al Gore is weeping).
One of my AFS friends, a Kiwi, recently mentioned to me on Facebook how ironic it is that Turkey is a country full of engineers, yet so many things are badly designed. And he’s right. Everyone in Turkey wants to be an engineer. If you ask someone what they want to be, they will frequently tell you exactly what kind of engineer they want to be. It’s a job that carries a high amount of social status, although the job prospects aren’t really better than any other profession in Turkey – that is to say, not all that great. Still, pretty much everyone in Turkey wants to be an engineer (wanting to be a doctor is also an acceptable choice).
So, despite this overabundance of engineers, why is it that no one in Turkey has discovered housing insulation? Even in the frigid north of Turkey, houses and apartments are basically concrete shells. It’s cool in the summer, but has absolutely no ability to hold heat. And central heating systems are rare as well – we heat our home by using air conditioners (very inefficient) and electric space heaters (probably more inefficient). These also serve as clothes driers.
It poured today. I’m not sure how much rain we got, but the driving was terrible. Turkish people are terrible drivers anyway. AFS espouses the belief that “it’s not right, it’s not wrong, it’s just different.” Most of the time, I agree with this. But when it comes to driving, I have to put my foot down. The Turkish system of driving is just plan wrong, and people are horrible, horrible drivers. Also, there are traffic lights in the middle of rotaries (roundabouts). It’s ridiculous.
Because of the rain, in some places there was about a foot of standing water in the middle of the road. There simply isn’t any drainage system in place. The roads in Turkey are almost always divided, meaning that there are raised curbs everywhere and consequently the water has no place to go.
Another thing about Turkey: doors with round handles are called “American doors” and are pretty posh. In our house, we have door handles, not knobs. Every time someone enters a room you can hear it with a giant “clunk-clunk” as they unlatch the door. It’s the weird things like hearing that noise that frustrate me. Being an exchange student, at least for me, is more about dealing with the little things – like annoyingly loud doors – rather than big things, like learning the language. I’ll learn Turkish eventually, or at least enough to not feel like a failure. (High standards I’ve set for myself, I know.) But sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the tiny, mundane aspects of every day life here. And it’s weird to think about this, because I’m not really sure if these things are culture or not. Perhaps these are just material characteristics of Turkey that don’t really have a whole lot to do with the culture. After all, if you took Turkey and dropped it in the middle of the US, it would still be Turkey, right? Would the culture be any different if there were central heating and can openers?
I don’t think I’m being so articulate – I’m writing completely off the cuff here. Normally, when I write a blog post, I’ve pretty much planned out everything I’m going to write ahead of time. Sometimes, at night, when I can’t sleep, I write blog posts in my head, and usually these find their way into whatever I write next. This time, this is all completely spontaneous.
I haven’t written for a very long time, I know. I guess I’m just not great at blogging. As someone who doesn’t really like reading blogs that much, I know that short, frequent posts are infinitely better than long, infrequent ones, so I apologize. But I guess it’s easy to justify not writing when I’m pretty sure that the only ones who reads the blog are my Mom and Dad, who pretty much know what I’m up to anyway. If you’re not my Mom or Dad and have made it this far through the post, it’d be awesome if you felt like leaving me a message so I’m a little more motivated to right in the future. Also, if anyone has any questions or things you’d like me to write about, I’d be happy to take a crack at it. Facebook also works.
