Turkish, as I've mentioned before, has borrowed a lot of foreign words, which are generally transliterated into Turkish spelling in hilariously literal ways. There are a couple of French girls in my Turkish class, and I think they have an easier time learning the language because so many words came from French and have simply been converted into Turkish spelling. For example, one day we encountered the word "puan" in Turkish and none of us knew what it meant until the French girl looked it up in her dictionary and said, "Oh-- point!" which in French sounds exactly like "puan." Of course, we have the exact same word in English, albeit with an Anglicized pronunciation. It makes me wonder which the French hate more: Turks retaining the pronunciation of borrowed words but mangling the spelling, or the English retaining the spelling but mangling the pronunciation.
The Turkish word for hair salon, "Kuaför," is one that threw me for a loop the first few weeks I was in Turkey until I had mastered the rules of Turkish pronunciation and started reading signs aloud to myself to practice, an obsessive-compulsive habit that makes me look crazy but also helps me learn languages faster. "Balikçı, kitabevi, ayakkabı hastanesi, kuaför--oh, coiffure! Got it." It seems so ridiculously simply once you pronounce the word out loud and can hear the similarity.
Anyway, this is where the story begins. Last week I decided it was yet again time to submit myself to the scissor-clutching grip of a Turkish stylist, so I went back to the kuaför that I had visited previously. I was a little less nervous this time because last month I started taking Turkish lessons and I feel a lot better about my listening comprehension these days, although my ability to form sentences is still on par with the average three year old. So I walked into the shop, told the stylist I needed a trim, and he escorted me over to the sink to rinse off my hair. All was well, they were chatting with me about the usual- how long have I been in Turkey, do I like it, etc. Then the stylist looked at me pointedly and stated: "Boya." This is a word I do not know, so I kindly asked him to explain himself and he said, "You need to change your hair color."
"No, no I don't, thanks," I replied.
"No, you definitely need to change your color. Here, look, I can make you beautiful!" He then enthusiastically whipped out his book full of tiny hair samples in a variety of tacky shades and pointed to a vivid color that in Crayola terms I'd call either "razzmatazz" or "violet red." "Beautiful," he kept repeating.
"I like this color," I said, desperately hoping that my kindergarten sentences would be enough to fend off what seemed like a very determined effort to turn my hair magenta.
He dropped my hair at this point and leaned back dramatically to make eye contact with me through the mirror. "Why?" he asked. "This color is not good. You are a beautiful girl, and you need beautiful hair."
"But this is my natural color!" I insisted. "And I like it!" He shook his head sadly, baffled by my preference to remain in the prison of my own fashion ineptitude. "Don't you at least want some highlights?" he tried. "I could make you blonde just on the top here. It would look so nice. You don't really like your natural hair color, do you?"
He finally gave up after a few minutes when he saw that my resistance was not abating, and resigned himself to simply cutting my hair. During this time, however, he did discover in himself a secret passion for teaching and realized that this was the perfect opportunity to help a hapless foreigner by instructing her in his native language.
"What's your name again?" he asked a couple times as his assistant ran off to fetch me a cup of tea. "Heidi! That's a nice name. And you say you understand pretty much everything I say?" He stopped and looked at me as if I were completely paralyzed, able only to respond yes or no by blinking my eyes. I managed to reply as best as I could, but my ability to keep a conversation going at this point is pretty limited, which means the burden of coming up with new topics is on the Turkish person. Most Turks get annoyed by this, but my new friend relished the opportunity.
"Heidi!" he'd say, dropping his scissors and coming round to the front of the chair to look at me. "Tell me about your family. How many siblings do you have? Where do they live? What do they do?" And he'd grin broadly at my stammered, childlike answers while he congratulated himself on his marvelous ability to teach the Turkish language. "I'm a great teacher, aren't I?" he said periodically to his assistant, who was perched on the windowsill laughing hysterically at everything I said.
To be fair, he is a pretty good teacher, and I'm fairly confident that he could switch careers successfully if he ever put his mind to it. At one point he was blow drying my hair when he suddenly turned off the blow dryer, looked at me, and said, "Heidi, do you know what I'm doing to you right now?" I replied that I couldn't say it in Turkish, and he beamed again. "I'm blow drying your hair. Repeat it after me. Okay, now again. Now let's practice. Next time you're going to come in here and what are you going to tell me? Here, stand up. Pretend you're ringing the door bell. I come to the door and say, 'Welcome!' Now what are you going to say?"
This went on for an hour and a half, during which time a couple of his friends wandered in just to hang out for a bit, and they began chatting with me too. The stylist fawned over me like a prize pupil. "Heidi is so cute," he said over and over. This seems to be a common theme in Turkey. In many countries, such as the United States, foreigners with limited language abilities are mocked and scorned, but in others it just ups your "cuteness" factor and can actually make you quite popular. "I like you a lot, Heidi. Do you like me? You're going to come back here and talk to me again, right? I'll teach you more Turkish!"
Later, when I insisted that it was time to leave because I had to teach a class, he seemed genuinely distressed. His friends got my cell phone number and texted me later to invite me to visit their office at the ministry of culture and tourism. The stylist escorted me to the door and reminded me to visit him again, even if I don't need a haircut.
Turkey: land of always getting more than you bargained for.
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