Winter fruit

One thing you notice in the fruit stands and food stores around here - if it's in season you can have it; if it isn't, forget it. None of this asparagus from Chile or California lettuce for us. To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. That's not always a bad thing. When they're available, the cherries here are beyond belief. There's nothing to compare with a tomato from our local manav in the summer.

Mandarin oranges (mandalinas) began appearing a couple of weeks ago. They were green, but very good. Yesterday we bought another bagful. They were a beautiful orange, and they still had fresh leaves attached.

So that's what oranges taste like!

On the other hand, we tasted our first persimmon this morning. They're called cennet hurması here: dates of heaven. Well, maybe. To me it's kinda like the fruit version of okra - slimy and bland. Pity we have a kilo of them. Fortunately I've found a recipe for persimmon cake. I must go and get some baking powder soon.

The ones we got last night were tomato-sized and orange. The other day the manavcı talked me into buying a few hundred grams of some little brown ones. They taste sort of like date custard; not quite as slimy as the big orange things but still not what I'd choose to spend my days in heaven eating. I guess we're not qualified to be Turks yet.

Duhhh!

So today I had 5 minutes of my fame on the Metro Morning CBC radio show - I emailed them in response to their request that people let them know where they were when they listened to the show, and they called back to find out what we're doing here. I'd had a weekend of warning to prepare my response, but could I come up with anything interesting to say? Of course not.

What's happening there? "Well, it's sunny." Bo-ring. What I should have said was something like "We're not feeling any earthquakes today."

What surprised you about Turkey? I'd been spending the whole weekend thinking about that, and all I could think of was "The language and the food." What a sur-prise.

What should I have said? After almost 5 months in Turkey it's just about time to list the surprises:

1. Palm trees and fig trees; the pomegranate at the front of our apartment and the orange tree in the back.
2. The dirty streets.
3. The crazy driving (that's really not a surprise; what surprises me is that anyone survives. Even bigger surprise: we're still alive and have learned how to cross streets like the Turks do.)
4. The kindness and hospitality of every Turkish person we've had anything to do with. The limitless generosity of people who have become our friends.
5. The logic and relative simplicity of the language. We're about 50 years away from being fluent, but we still admire the logical spelling and grammar.
   
6. The recycling method: the poorest of the poor drag huge carts around from garbage bin to garbage bin picking out the useable stuff. We're learning, like others, to put our clean discards in separate bags outside the bin.
   
7. The street cats, feral and skittish, filthy many of them, but still charming.
8. The size of the dead cockroach I found on our back terrace (we haven't seen any inside the house, thank God!)
9. The cell phones - everywhere; everyone has them.Taxi drivers blowing horns and weaving through traffic while lighting cigarettes and talking on the phone.
   
10. The way you say goodbye on a cell phone: "Hadi bye-bye " - "Gotta go. Bye."
11. The number of people who smoke.
12. The way Turkish cigarette smoke doesn't stick to your clothes the way Canadian cigarette smoke does.
13. The murky atmosphere, thick with coal and wood smoke, as soon as the weather got cold (everyone seems to have a small wood or coal burning stove in their apartments.
14. How cold we are in our apartment; how much I wish I'd brought more sweaters.
15. The many young Turkish men who attend our church.
16. The beauty of the young Turkish women, and the old ones too.
    
17. The "covered" women, more than when we were here two years ago, and the stylishness of some of their outfits.
18. The village women who come into town to sell their produce, and the way they squat on their heels on the sidewalk for hours on end. Their extremely practical full skirt-pants that stay modest no matter what.
19. The chickens and sheep and goats roaming the poorer parts of the city.
20. The number of BMWs and Mercedes and Audis and I-don't-know-what expensive and beautiful cars coming down our modest back street.
    
21. The variety of ancestries we see in the faces of the Turkish people. The Turks came 1000 years ago from the Altai region of Siberia and must have been quite Asiatic looking. The Ottoman empire extended from India to Egypt to Hungary and people from all over came to Anatolia. You see people who could be from the Canadian First Nations ; you see people with African ancestry; you see Arabs; you see blonde-haired, blue-eyed people from the Caucasus; you see people who look Balkan. The colours are not as varied as in Toronto, but the ancestries are.
22. The stares when a Turk sees someone who looks non-Turkish. A young man at the church comes from Mozambique and is a deep blue-black colour. He thinks the Turks are racist because they all stare at him and ask him questions. We assured him that they all stare at us and ask us questions too.
    
23. The amount of time it takes to do business here. Most shops look more like offices, with a desk and chairs for visitors. If you're going to do any serious business at all (get your computer fixed, buy some wool) you have to sit down, have some tea and chat before you can get on with things.
    
24. The men playing tavla (backgammon) outside their shops.
    
25. The street sellers.
26. The small number of people who speak English.
27. The number of times we have been taken for Germans. (No surprise that a lot of people speak German.)
    
28. The amount of time I still spend being surprised.
    

That's some of what I wish I'd said in my 5 minutes of glory. Oh well.

I'm back

It's been far too long since I got around to writing here. Lots of excuses, of course:

1. Computer problems. My laptop had never been satisfactory. I bought it because I wanted something to experiment with Linux on and was assured that it would be exactly the thing, but Linux never worked well on it. Then things started breaking - a wire in the power cord, a hinge, the ethernet plugin. Finally it began showing blue screens of death in Windows at inopportune times, and then refused to start up at all. Our local computer shop was able to fix that, but by that time I was visiting Murat Akgül's computer shop friends and had a new one, an HP Compaq. It's a pleasant change having a brand name computer. Things work. But it takes time to set everything up again the way I like it - and the key caps are for the Turkish layout. I haven't decided whether to switch to the Turkish keyboard or to paint the English characters on the keys.

2. I felt grouchy about Turkey for a while after the earthquakes. I thought people overreacted. I began seeing all sorts of idiocies around the place, and I didn't want to write while I was in a bad mood. (The silliest scene: the shopping street a couple of blocks from us is having its pavement torn up and replaced with interlocking bricks. It looks really nice, but it's a big mess while the work is going on. One evening traffic was really backed up while drivers figured out how to get where they were going without falling into the metre-deep hole. One idiot decided to pass the whole line going really quite fast, dodged around the barriers blocking off the work area, missed hitting a street seller parked in the opening, and went flying through the air into the hole. His car will never be the same. Yay! And no apologies for the un-Christian attitude.)

3. During Ramazan we weren't getting all that much sleep. There was lots of visiting at all hours in this apartment building and along the street, and things didn't seem to quiet down until after midnight. Then at 3:30 a.m. the drummers came around, pounding loud enough to start the car alarms and wake the dead. We slept through it after a while, but the quality of our sleep wasn't all that great. So we got moving rather late.
Towards the end of the month the drummers came around to collect their fees - they'd been providing the service of waking us in time to have a good breakfast before fasting began again at dawn. We'd heard they would stand outside the building and keep pounding the drum until everyone paid up, so I gave them some money. They thought it was so funny that a foreigner would pay up that they stood outside our house and give us a special serenade every day for the rest of the month.

4. After Ramazan comes Şeker Bayram - sugar feast, a week of holidays so the country can recover from the deprevations of the month before. Ron didn't have any teaching to do that week, so we took off for a few days in England. It was lovely! The weather was mostly very good: cool, but just one rainy day, good for doing a lot of walking and travelling. We shopped in London one day, then rented a car and drove around Norfolk for two more days. My mother's father's mother came from there, and one of our relatives was known as the Norfolk Giant because he was 7 ft 8 ın tall. We found his tomb at a lovely Saxon church out in the country at West Somerton. It was ınteresting seeing something that has been a legend in my family for years.

Then we spent another day in London, picking up a few more things we needed and visiting Terrance, Sarah and Andrew Bell (who slept through most of our visit). They were the real reason we decided to go to England, and it was good to see them - especially Andrew, 2 months old.

We have some more pictures in my November Yahoo album. If you find you can't see them please let me know.

So life is perking along nicely. We had a pleasant evening yesterday: Begüm's mother Hülya was in İzmir on business and stayed overnight with us. Our landlords, the Akgüls, were able to come for dinner so the people who have been the kindest to us during our time in Turkey could meet each other. We enjoyed the evening a great deal. It's a delight too spend time with such good people. And then, to top it all off, our friend İlker and his fiancee dropped in.

We buy our drinking water from İlker. He delivers it on his motor scooter and carries the huge bottle up 3 flights of stairs for almost nothing. A couple of weeks ago he saw Ron walking past his shop and dragged him in. They'd bought a new computer and he needed help setting it up because all the menus were in English. One thing led to another, and for the past couple of weeks Ron has been dropping in most mornings for tea and English-Turkish lessons. İlker and his fiancee will be getting married in January and moving in across the street from us. So we had a whole bunch of good Turkish friends in our house - what a delight!

Today the people across the street have set up a lokma stand outside their house. It's a custom unique to İzmir, I think. On the anniversary of someone's death the family hires caterers to make these little doughnuts drenched in syrup and hand them out to anyone passing by. I don't think it's done anywhere else in Turkey. I suspect it's a very ancient custom, perhaps dating from Greek or Roman days; it reminds me of the Roman refrigidarium we learned about in Trinity College liturgy classes. I wonder... If possible I'll get a picture and add it to the album.

So here we are more or less up to date. Someday I will get around to writing down my reflections on Turkish appliances and plumbing - you have that to look forward to!