February 10, 2021

Turkish real estate

Hello all,

I’ll start with how I’m feeling right now, which is a little bit burned out on the constant newness. It’s not that Turkey is so different from the US, but it’s different enough that I constantly expect the unexpected; I don’t know all the rules here, so I assume they’re all different. Am I waiting for the bus right? Am I making the right amount of eye contact? Am I supposed to be saying something right now? The thing about expecting the unexpected is that it is very tiring! It’s about 7pm here, and here’s the run-down of my day so far:

• Take the bus up to the university for my three hour Zoom Turkish class. My apartment doesn’t have wifi, so in order to not use all my cell phone data on Zoom, I’m going to the university each morning to use the wifi there. I just got the course schedule this morning, so I end up still waiting for the bus when class starts, and I join it from Zoom on my phone. There’s a different professor each day of the week, so this professor has never met me, and asks a series of questions (I get terribly stuck on “how old are you” — kaç yaşındasın!) which I have to answer with traffic noise in the background and am overall stressed. I leave the class while I’m on the bus and rejoin from my office, where she asks me a question about the text I missed, and then I can’t answer her next few questions either. It gets better from there—in my quiet office, it’s easier to keep up and I’m able to get into the swing of things for the rest of the class. My summer Turkish class actually prepared me quite well! I also get a chance to talk to my classmates while the professor has technical problems, and I now have some WhatsApp friends, other foreigners in Alanya. Being American makes me like the popular girl at school: everyone wants to talk to someone who speaks English!

• Walk back downhill to my apartment where I take a nap. I’m 80% adjusted to local time, but 2am-4am I am awake while 2pm-4pm I sleep.

• Do a little bit of language preparation to go to the bazar, which runs on Wednesdays and a colleague suggested I go to in order to buy household goods. It turns out to be more of a farmer’s market. I want to buy some towels, but the one stall selling textiles doesn’t have them. The woman there starts speaking to me in Turkish, and I tell her [in Turkish] that I don’t speak Turkish, so then she starts speaking to me in Russian, but I am not so skilled to be able to distinguish Russian with a Turkish accent from Turkish. She keeps talking to me in Russian and I keep telling her I don’t speak Turkish until she realizes that maybe I also don’t speak Russian. I do manage to buy some greens and vegetables. At the first stall, the smallest bill I have is ₺50 ($7), and they reluctantly dig out ₺47.50 of change. I keep trying to say it’s okay not to give me all the change (“Tamam!”) and they keep saying it’s not okay (“Tamam değil!”) and also they’re not so good at math and I don’t really know the numbers, but it all works out. Once I have coins and small bills, everything else goes pretty well, and by the time I am buying green onions and leaving, I’m feeling quite proud! Sure, I bought a mystery leaf bunch because the man was really pushing it, but I successfully asked if someone had mint and gave people the correct amounts of money.

• I drop off the greens and go to Migros (the nicer and more European supermarket) where I buy some other food and household items. I am very happy in Migros, which has the aisles labelled in English and is virtually identical to an American supermarket. I can’t find butter in amounts less than a kilo, but I when I check out, I can understand and answer all the cashier’s questions (at least, I think I can; who knows what the cashier thought).

• Back at home, I listen to the freshly released morning news podcasts and start preparing dinner. I’m still working out how to use the stove, and I wash all the produce very carefully. While I’m cooking, I get two calls from the Fulbright commission, because apparently I transferred $175 to their bank account, which shouldn’t be possible because I don’t know their account information and also I didn’t do that. We figure out that it’s their payment to my American account bouncing back because my local credit union does not play nice with international money transfers. They tell me to open a Turkish account ASAP. I’ve just heard from some other ETAs that the process of opening a bank account is a huge pain, and the idea of it makes me lose all my steam. I text Fırat — he’ll go and help me with it tomorrow — but I’m so existentially exhausted that I just walk away from dinner-in-process.

Up till now, I’ve been chugging along pretty well! I’m still doing well — the ginger ale I’m drinking out of a Turkish tea glass is reviving me — but after googling “culture shock,” you know, it’s culture shock.

Close readers will note that I am now in my apartment, which is a tale unto itself! The tldr ¹ is that Fırat is a miracle worker and Turkish real estate is bizarre. We had found some listings online, and Fırat called up a former student who is now a real estate agent to find some other places. Monday morning, we drove around the neighborhood while he called the number every “FOR RENT” sign we passed and asked everyone he recognized on the street if they knew of a place. It was like being on a rental rollercoaster/meet-and-greet. At one cafe, he got a few leads and spent a long time talking about fishing with the barista. They compared tackle boxes while I drank my first Turkish coffee and took pictures of a stray cat. We ended up looking at three furnished apartments: The first place was kind of dirty and didn’t have a real kitchen, the second place was beautiful and completely new, and the third was the fully decorated apartment of a mother and daughter who were moving to another city. We both decided on the second, so I withdrew ₺5000 from an ATM for one month’s rent + one month’s rent as commission (even closer readers will note that this means my rent is $355). At the real estate office, forms were drawn up with my passport and signed, cash was handed over, and that was it. No proof of income; no co-sign. Move in same day. And the apartment is beautiful—modern, all new appliances, stocked with soap and silverware and linens. From the balcony I can see the mountains and a sliver of the sea. I was so shocked by the whole thing that I kept asking if it was a setup. The phrase “too good to be true” has never cut quite so deep. But apparently the place is mine, and although I can’t get the oven to turn on and the bedroom has blue LEDS, I am still astounded by the whole thing.

The COVID situation in Turkey is significantly better than in the US or UK, so I’ve felt more comfortable interacting indoors with others. Masks are widespread and required indoors, but aren’t worn that consistently or correctly, especially by men. For better or worse, it doesn’t bother me much, and I don’t have an alternative to being around maskless colleagues regardless — I rely on them and their graciousness. Insofar as I am here for cultural exchange, my job is essentially to sit around and have tea with people, which is not easily accomplished while masked. And I love sitting around having tea with people! It’s been so nice to just chat (a verb I learned today! sohbet etmek).

Among some of the Turkish English faculty, they often speak great academic and professional English but lack some day-to-day forms, since they never have a reason to make small talk in English. I notice this most when I ask, “How are you?” And they answer, “Thank you,” which is perfectly acceptable in Turkish but sounds so funny to me. I had this how-are-you?-thank-you interaction twice with one of the professors, which left me with an unfairly low estimation of his language proficiency, since later he told me about his PhD, “I’m a literature man. Postcolonial masculinities,” and later, “Trump is a scamp. It’s Biden time now.” I knew and have even told some of you about this kind of language juxtaposition, but it still surprised me to actually witness it!

The gap between how I use English and how Turkish people use English has also become evident in my Turkish classes, where a grammatical form was explained with the English example: When will your homework be finished? My homework will be finished until tomorrow.** Which I still can’t parse. Like, I know what that means to me, and I am 100% sure that that is not what they mean.

Lots of love,

Netta

My apartment

At school

The faculty of education, home to the school of foreign languages: (unfortunately, cannot rotate images) My desk with its online Turkish class setup:

Views from around town