Oddly Enough

 You've probably heard the allegory before. An old man was working in his fields when a stranger walked up to him, said he was planning to move to the nearby town, and asked what kind of people lived there. The old man thought for a minute, and then asked, "What were the people like where you came from?" 

"Oh, they were the nicest people you'd ever meet. Friendly, helpful, real neighbourly," the stranger replied.

"Then don't worry, you'll find the same kind of people in this town," the old man grinned.

Sometime later, a second traveler trudged up to the old farmer and said, "Excuse me, I'm coming to settle in this town and wanted to know what kind of people live there." 

The farmer looked at him, stroked his long gray beard, and asked, "What were the people like where you came from?" 

The traveler replied, "Oh, they were the meanest people you could imagine. Petty, jealous, backstabbing people who never helped a soul. I'm glad I don't live there anymore." 

The farmer paused for a moment, then returned to picking his corn as he said, "I'm not sure you'll like living in this town then, because you'll find the same kind of people here too." 

The meaning is fairly simple to deduce: be a friend and others will befriend you. Or be difficult and you will find that others are difficult too. 

Except there's one country that perversely refuses to follow the norm.

I first moved here almost three years ago with my husband, 4 suitcases just tipping past 23 kilos each, 2 bulging backpacks, a pillow each, and as many travel pillows, jackets, and plastic bags of food we could squeeze past the Pegasus Airlines security. We were excited. This was going to be an adventure for us, after 4 years of grueling survival in a country where hyperinflation was the worst the World Bank had seen in over 150 years. It was time for a breather and we were ready for it. 

The adventure started in a tiny apartment in the western part of Istanbul. We took the M4 metro to Kadikoy 3 times a week to Turkish classes, and when we weren't in class we were hunting for an apartment, buying used furniture, visiting every Koctas and MediaMarkt for an hour's radius to look at appliances, applying for residence permits, and generally enjoying the newness of it all. Every night, we tumbled into bed, barely able to keep our eyes open long enough to set an alarm for the next day's adventure. 

I was loving it all. The yellow and white ferries, the obnoxiously loud seagulls, the midnight planes overhead, the packed metro and cheap lokanta where you could buy soup for $1 on a cold winter's day. There was free lokma from a roadside truck, Friday market packed with little old grandmas jostling for the freshest cucumbers, and malls that went up 8 floors. Every time I turned around, there was something new to see. 

As I opened my heart wide to soak up the flavour of Istanbul and started to haltingly communicate in my few words of Turkish in the little shop around the corner, I naively expected that Istanbul would throw its arms wide open in a welcome return. 

Except it didn't. 

I smiled at everyone, made eye contact, said Tessekurler (thank you), and did my best to conjugate a few words to communicate what I needed. I tipped waiters (not a usual custom), helped a little old lady push her cart to the recycling place, and tried to answer when someone asked me how many more stops until we reached the end of the line. 

But after nearly 3 years of struggling to communicate with people who looked at me dourly, if at all, refusing to let me try to get out a few words and, instead, shutting me down by shoving reams of papers at me, or people who spat on my international marriage certificate to see if it was authentic and then declared it was not (it very much was authentic), or people who spoke so fast I couldn't understand what they were saying and to leave because I couldn't get what I needed, or people who scoffed "yabanci" at me with a dirty look, or people who took my small bag of carefully chosen veggies and threw 3 or 4 more rotten ones in and then tried to charge me for the extra produce while disregarding my protests, I was done. 

I stopped communicating. I refused to go to the Friday market by myself; my husband had to come with me or I wouldn't go. I went silent in the small shops, communicated only the bare essentials, and stopped smiling at people. Most times I went out in public, I came home on the verge of tears, oh so very tired of struggling to survive, yet again, in a foreign country. Would it always be like this? Would I never feel like I was home? 

And then we moved. 

I'd traveled for the summer, came back to an apartment whose utilities were cut off a couple of days later, and suddenly we were packing up our first 3 years in Istanbul into a truck and unpacking it into a very different sort of neighborhood. It was as if we'd stepped into our very own Narnia and everything turned magical. 

The stout man at the dogalgaz sat behind his desk, answering "yok" to everything my husband asked, including putting me on the new utilities subscription, but then a moment later he was presenting me with a tablet and gesturing for me to sign my electronic signature. The new landlord painstakingly went over every paragraph of the rental contract to make sure my husband understood everything it said and bought us a hot drink. The translator in the notary office (the nice one) invited me over for tea and conversation. Our new neighbours smiled and said hello as they passed us in the hallway and one said she would show me where the Monday market was. Even the man who registered our change of address in the immigration office grinned as he handed us a slip confirming it had been updated and said, "Hayirli olsun" as he wished us blessings in our new apartment. 

Everywhere we turned, people were reaching out in kindness and my lonely heart started to melt. 

I thought if I was kind, people would be kind in return. It didn't work that way here at first; people were too tired and had no time to help a muddling foreigner find her way. Then I started to become like the people I met, impatient, distant, easily irritated. And strangely enough, as I pulled way back and stopped trying to engage, I began to meet people who cared. People who were the opposite of what I had expected. 

I used to wonder how much longer I could manage; now I look out my window and think, "I could stay here forever." And for that, I am grateful.