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.
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