T.I.A.

Things are finally starting to come together, in a very Asian sort of way. I don't mean this in any derogatory sense; it's just that Eastern cultures operate on a completely different plane than Western cultures. Americans enjoy precision, planning ahead, and knowing exactly what to expect well before something happens so we can be prepared for it. Well, welcome to Turkey. On a superficial level, you'd be fooled into thinking that you're in a Western country with familiar values and operational systems, but the culture and way of thinking is simply never what you expect.

We were very thankful that all three of us were hired at the same language school. Last weekend we were asked to visit several classes for observation, so we went over on Saturday morning. Nobody seemed to know why we were there ("You're supposed to be observing? Erm..."), but some teachers welcomed us into their classrooms nonetheless. After the first tea break at 11:00, one of the administrative assistants approached us and said that they needed a substitute for a conversation class at 1:15. Huzzah! At the 12:00 tea break, she came back and said they needed another substitute for a conversation class at 1:30. Huzzah!

We've been waiting since then to hear about schedules and which courses we're teaching. Tonight we finally got phone calls saying that we start Saturday morning, and we can go to pick up our schedule and course materials tomorrow. That gives us a whole afternoon to prepare for teaching! Huzzah!

The next step was finding an apartment. In typical Turkish fashion, we were introduced to an apartment owned by a friend of a friend of a friend's sister. The place is located about a block away from the Russian embassy, a tall gloomy-looking apartment complex painted green and garnished with barbed wire. Cheery neighbors, those. But it is a nice central location, within walking distance of work and fairly near other Ankara hot spots.

The apartment has two bedrooms and one Harry Potter closet bedroom. It's furnished, not only with the sofa and chairs you'd expect, but also all the former occupant's belongings. Shoe boxes, eggs in the unplugged fridge, rows of empty beer bottles, a treadmill, Russian nesting dolls, even a poster of some Turkish pretty-boy celebrity smiling down at us from high on a wall. Poking through the cupboards in the kitchen, the woman showing us the flat smiled and remarked, "Look at all these curry mixes! You can have curry every day!" Hm. Well, I do love curry.

Junk aside, the flat is pretty nice and we're looking forward to occupying it. It's cozy and homey, nice but not extravagant. Just about perfect. We're negotiating and praying that it gets cleaned out a bit more before we take over.

Back in Taiwan we had a saying about this feeling of being overwhelmed and lacking any sort of mental schema to explain our surroundings. "TIA- This is Asia." (We stole it from Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Blood Diamond.) It's a metaphorical shrug, as if to say, "Well, let's just take it for what it is." At times, it's the only way to stay sane when everything around you appears to have descended into madness. Technically, I'm still in Asia, so I'm going to keep using this phrase when I'm completely perplexed.

"TIA" moments don't all stem from frustration, however. Turks have already provided me with lots of experiences that both baffle and delight me.

For example, last week my two flatmates befriended the flower man who runs a streetside stand a block or so down. When we went back to get flowers for a friend's birthday, the man greeted us each with a kiss on the hand. He arranged our floral bouquet with flourishes of the hand and expressive gestures comparing the beauty of the flower with the beauty of the ladies before him. Then he threw in an extra flower and kissed the tips of his fingers in melodramatic satisfaction at his handiwork. TIA.

Another time, we were cooking a pot of beans on the stove when our Turkish teacher arrived. Somehow in the ensuing conversation, we mentioned that we liked black beans. He told us that they don't really have them in Turkey. The next day, he showed up with a big bag of black beans for us, because he knows the one place in Ankara that you can get them. TIA.

Creepy clown garbage can sure to scare children away rather than encourage them to throw their garbage in an appropriate place: TIA.

I looked out the window the other day and saw a middle-aged woman across the street crawling out her fifth-story apartment with a squeegee to clean the outside of her window. She accomplished this dangling by one arm, so caught up in her war against smudges that she didn't notice how high up she was. TIA.

Most parks have an exercise area with lots of equipment like this. Many of them have clear functions, but a few of these gadgets are pretty odd. TIA.

Yep, little joys, moderate frustrations- it's all part of the ride. This is Turkey.