How to get to work- an ostensibly simple tale of commuting

Home to work is generally a four stop process.

1. Walk to the bus stop
2. Take the bus downtown
3. Walk from the bus stop to school
4. Take the elevator to the sixth floor or, if I had a big dinner, the stairs

In the United States, this would be a completely unremarkable commute, in which I would don my iPod and zone out until I reach the office.

But this is Turkey. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

There are two separate bus routes that come by our neighborhood and head down into Kızılay, the more downtown-ish area where my school is. Buses tend to come by every ten minutes. Sometimes. No, that's a complete lie. There is no discernible pattern to the bus schedule. At times I've waited twenty five minutes for a bus, only to then see three buses coming along, bumper to bumper, one in front of the next like a big blue caravan. It's quite difficult to know when I should get to the bus stop when I can't predict when a bus will come.

Paying for the bus is the next adventure. One of the first things I learned to do in Turkey was buy a bus pass, which is a pre-paid card good for ten rides. However, not every bus accepts the "Ego Kart" bus pass. No, a good two-thirds of the buses on our route only accept cash. It's a good idea to walk around at all times stocked with both a bus pass and a healthy amount of change. With the inconsistency of the bus schedule, only a fool passes up a cash bus to wait for another vehicle. The cash is collected by an attendant who sits at a desk near one of the doors, handing out change and making mysterious phone calls. It's a painfully isolated and dull job. I like to imagine that these guys are all novelists who brainstorm through the monotony of work and then go home to flesh out their ideas.

So once you get on the bus and empty your wallet of all the 5 and 10 kurus coins, the most exciting part of the adventure begins. The average bus seats around 33, but has standing room for another 66 people, and I'm convinced that they frequently exceed this maximum capacity. Social convention dictates that on a crowded bus, young, healthy people relinquish seats to the elderly. While I could probably pull the foreigner card to duck out of this, I generally choose to stand as the bus fills, which brings its own set of hazards. One's personal bubble ceases to exist in the standing-room section, and there might be uncomfortable encounters with a stranger's shoulder or elbow. But the real danger is Turkish traffic, which means the bus ride typically is comprised of a series of jolts and jostles as the bus careens around taxis and pedestrians, sudden stops and starts that send the average person flying across the vehicle.

While many view this as an annoyance, I've come to embrace it as a challenge, giving me ample cause to develop a skill I like to call bus surfing. In this, my goal is to remain standing without holding on to anything. Success varies depending on the bus driver's speed and ability to shift gears smoothly, but overall I'm getting pretty good. The key is a solid stance, feet slightly more than shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, body parallel to the length of the bus. This way I can anticipate stops and starts, and shift my weight accordingly to maintain balance. Usually I can survive an entire bus ride without falling, but there are still occasional mishaps in which I make a crash landing into the person next to me. But have no fear- one day I will master this skill.

Typically I work in the evenings, which means my trip in to school is timed just perfectly to coincide with the worst of rush hour. Picture a bus with people packed in like so many pickles in a jar, trying to squeeze elbows and shopping bags into any available crevice, and more people trying to board the bus at every stop. Then the last three blocks of the trip takes a good five minutes because traffic is invariably at a standstill and we can't seem to move more than ten feet at a time.

Once we finally escape at our bus stop, the ride isn't over. No, before we can breathe a sigh of relief in the sanctuary of the office, we must first survive the elevator. My school is on the sixth and seventh floor of a ten-story building which has two elevators. One of these is a normal size that can hold eight people, while the other is a four-seater. Both of these are rather sensitive to weight, and if too many people try to jump in a warning beep screams. I hear rumors that if there is too much weight, the elevator protests and leaves the occupants stuck in the no-mans-land of the shaft between floors.

The other weird thing about our elevator is that its stops appear to be dictated by a phantom rather than buttons. I've had several experiences where the elevator stops on floors three, four, and five, only to skip my stop on the sixth floor and take me instead to the ninth. Or it'll get down to ground level and decide to go back up without stopping to let me off. And there are always mysterious stops on floors where the button is lit up and there's no one waiting to get on. Half the time I opt for the stairs rather than subject myself to the whims of this machine.

Sometimes I long for American efficiency, but if nothing else I always have something to keep me on my toes while I'm trying to get to work.

Yeni Yıl?!

Before moving to Turkey, I had somewhat steeled myself to the idea of a December with no holidays. It's only natural: no Jesus, no Christmas. There's no reason to have a celebration in late December, right?

Wrong. In mid-November I walked into Starbucks only to be struck dumb by the sight of Santa Claus, reindeer, and decorated evergreen trees all around. Bags of Starbucks Christmas blend were laid out on display tables, and the familiar Starbucks mix of jazzy Christmas tunes played in the background. I was nonplussed, to say the least. What on earth was Starbucks thinking; didn't their marketing team realize that Turkey doesn't celebrate Christmas? Does retail homogeneity have no limits?

However, as I waged my own mental war with Starbucks during the next few weeks, the city of Ankara rolled out all its decorations. Suddenly my daily commute became an adventure, as each day I noticed more trees covered in lights, or images of Santa smiling and saying "Mutlu Yıllar!" While the holiday cheer can't compare with any U.S. town, it was certainly more than I'd anticipated. One bakery has a giant sign reading, "Happy Christmas! Frohe Weihnachten!" My students were getting into the holiday spirit too. One of my classes proposed a "secret Santa" gift exchange for later this month, and all of my classes began asking about my plans for Christmas.

But to be fair, any mention of Christmas in Turkey ought to be accompanied by a hint of sarcasm denoting quotation marks. To Turks, there is no difference between "Christmas" and New Year. For this we can thank Starbucks, Hollywood, and anyone else who's helped import Western culture. It seems that the multitude of holiday traditions and celebrations built up around December are irresistible, even to those who don't care to commemorate the birth of Jesus. So at some point in the last century, Turkey adopted a number of Christmas traditions, bumped them all back a week, and claimed that it's all a New Year celebration. Gifts, trees, "Noel Baba" -- all of it is geared toward December 31.

This causes confusion to the point that my students don't understand that in the West, we have two separate holidays in late December celebrating two different events. I've had a number of interesting conversations in which I have to explain that we don't celebrate Christmas on December 31, and that Western New Year celebrations mostly involve staying up until midnight to toast with champagne.

Our school was gracious enough to give us the 24th and 25th off, so I'll be able to have some time with friends and attend midnight Mass at the chapel of the British Embassy. My students aren't so thrilled about this, as it meant four-hour make-up lessons, but they've been good sports about it. They understand that it's not easy to be so far away from family and friends during an important holiday, and when I mentioned that I never get to go to church because I work on Sunday mornings, they were sympathetic.

To make it up to them, the other two Americans and I decided to treat our classes to a couple Christmas carols. With a borrowed guitar and a couple slapdash rehearsals to finesse something resembling three-part harmony, we dragged our groups to the school's restaurant and sang to them. The response was mostly positive, even though some students were coerced into singing along on "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." I have no doubt that there are videos floating around somewhere on Facebook by now, considering the number of students whose phones were pointed at us the entire time. If nothing else, the guy from the accounting office seemed to get a kick out of our serenade.

In other news, all our snow has melted and it's been in the fifties so far this week. I hear this is supposed to continue through the week, so the odds are not looking good for a white Christmas. But it's still significantly colder than my past few Christmases, so I'm mostly okay with it. The main point is that no matter your location or environment, Christ was still born, and he dwells among us. This is the Charlie Brown minimalist approach to Christmas I've developed, and I'm content with that.

Merry Christmas to you all! 聖誕快樂!

First snowfall

Yesterday it rained like mad most of the day. But as we walked back from the bus stop last night, we noticed that the raindrops were floating more than falling, and that they were starting to look white and puffy. It was snowing! I didn't think it was cold enough for the snow to stick, but today, this is what I saw when I poked my head outside.


I've reverted to little kid excitement at the moment. I haven't seen snow since college. However, considering how much the rain jammed up traffic yesterday, I shudder to think what it will do to my commute to work today.

Submission

Hair grows. This is an inevitable result of the passage of time. Usually it's no big deal, but as with most aspects of life overseas, it can become a source of terror as you realize that you can only postpone a haircut for so long before you will have to suck it up, walk into a hair salon, and submit yourself to a stranger's razor.

This doesn't sound like it's worth stressing over, but hairstyles can vary greatly from country to country. And as much as we like to say that all people are the same, it's also true that ethnicity is a factor in the thickness, texture, and color of your hair. In this regard, we are not all equal. I once learned this the hard way in Taiwan when I allowed a stylist to give me a haircut that looked super cute on Taiwanese girls, but resembled a dead rodent when combined with my thin hair and heart-shaped face.

The other problem with haircuts overseas is that salon vocabulary is not a priority in any language training. No beginning level books will teach you essential phrases like "Are these layers too long?" or "Do you like your bangs straight across or angled?" or "Just a couple inches off the back, please!"

So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I climbed the stairs to a salon in Kızılay, a block or two away from my school. Last week a fellow teacher had recommended this place to us, which was helpful because there seems to be a disproportionate number of salons in Ankara. I would guess there's one salon for every six people here. How do you find a good one? Ask a friend with good hair, of course.

The staff greeted me with a friendly "Merhaba" and asked what I needed. I was only able to respond, "My hair.." and make a snipping motion with my fingers representing scissors. The woman smiled, and asked if I simply wanted a cut or a [garbled rapid Turkish], which I can only assume meant any number of hair services from perms to dyeing to God knows what else.

I was directed to a chair, where a man came to take care of me. For some reason, all stylists here are men. I have no idea why this is. But this guy was also very friendly, and tried chatting with me despite his complete lack of English. After shampooing my hair, he plunked me down in front of a mirror and started asking me what I wanted from him.

This was the scary part. There's no way I could even come close to coherently explaining in Turkish what sort of cut I needed. He did his best to visually represent several options, giving me a choice between "hands swooping forward" and "hands making horizontal sweeping motions." I hesitantly chose "hands swooping forward," which seemed like a nice, nonthreatening gesture.

The next step was asking how long I wanted it. Again, this was accomplished mostly through sign language, but when I showed him my desired length, he looked at me quizzically and said, "Really? That long?" I reiterated that yes, it's what I wanted, and he kind of shrugged. I began to wonder if "hands swooping forward" was not the style I thought it was.

He then started reaching for things in the tool belt he wore around his waist like a mechanic. My hair was soon pinned up, and he deftly took a razor to the back of my hair. The next thing I knew, he was holding a mirror up so I could see. "Like that?" he asked. "Yes, that's great," I replied. Or at least that's what I thought I said, but it's quite probable that I was wrong, because he immediately whipped the razor back out and chopped off another inch or so. I watched in horror, but really, what can you do? Once it's short, that's it.

There was nothing left to do but sit and watch as he kept chopping. I'm used to being in this childlike state where I put myself in the hands of others and hope that they point me in the right direction, but I felt myself slipping into a sort of despair as I realized that I had no choice but to let this man have his way with my hair. There was nothing I could do but sit there, smile, and trust that he was professional enough to give me a decent-looking result.

In Islam, a "Muslim" is defined as "a person who submits to God." The whole religion is about submission, about putting ultimate trust in God, seeking his will and then following it wholeheartedly. For some reason, sitting in that chair, I thought of this and wondered if that kind of submission does indeed bring peace, or if it only creates more fear, as it did for me, putting a large part of my physical appearance into the hands of a man I didn't know.

Then I realized that the submission doesn't have to be about fear. As a Christian, I also believe in submitting to God's will, but for me, it's more like the way I submit to my hairstylist in Taiwan. Penny also doesn't speak a lick of English, and the first time I went to her my Chinese wasn't much better than my Turkish is now. But over time, I came to trust her, to realize that she knows a lot more about my hair than I do, and that her taste is better than mine. She is a jealous hairstylist, who chewed me out once when I came in after having visited another barber. But she was completely right; my hair didn't look as good when I'd strayed. I was better off sticking with Penny. After my salon Chinese improved enough that I could talk with her about my hair, she still ignored most of my suggestions. "No. I'm not going to do that," she'd respond. "That would look terrible. Here, let me do this." And I'd shrug and let her do whatever she wanted, because it always ended up looking good. Similarly, I trust God because I know him, I have seen how faithful he is, and I know that his will always ends up being better than my own.

So while I was philosophizing, my stylist was still snipping and blow-drying his heart out, whipping things in and out of his tool belt like some sort of cartoon character. And while I still would've liked more length, everyone else seems to like the result he came up with. I don't know; what do you think? Is this guy worth trusting next time I need a trim?