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.