All posts tagged Love

  • Fat-Bottomed Dames will go Shopping Today

    Kazanlak Pazar, BulgariaI’ve started shopping at the pazar near my house. I am a great lover of food pazars and farmers markets, and generally assume that everybody feels the same excitement about them that I do.

    Not my boyfriend. I sweetly asked him if he wished to accompany me to the bazaar so that we may feast on the scent of perfectly ripe strawberries, buy farm-fresh produce for pennies, and look everywhere for fennel, which I have yet to see in Turkey but am still hoping is just not in season.

    “No,” said he, “I don’t like pazars. I prefer grocery stores even though they are more expensive.”

    Incredible. “Bu-but why?” I stammered, wondering momentarily if we were truly meant to be at all. Besides being more expensive, grocery stores sell a limited selection of produce, most of which looks not sufficiently crunchy or juicy as the case may be.

    “I don’t like Turkish ladies with fat asses.”

    “What?”

    “Old Turkish ladies with big butts take up all the space between the stalls and they never move aside for you. They are very inconsiderate. They feel like they own the pazar.”

    Since people bumping into him without acknowledging his presence is truly Adem’s number one pet-peeve and is not specific to bazaars, I acquiesced and went alone. It was not busy, and I was not inconvenienced by any fat-assed Turkish ladies. There were also very few full-grown men shopping, and most of the ones I did see appeared to be accompanied by a woman.

    Turkey as a society is generally very patriarchal, particularly (though not exclusively) among the older generations. In these generations, women who have never worked outside the home are common, and it stands to reason that their skill at cooking, cleaning, and caring for children make up a big part of their self-worth and conceptions of their own competence. It is therefore understandable, though perhaps not reasonable, that they may consider the bazaar a space to which they are entitled.

    photo by:
  • Turkish Culture II: Ankara is SO BORING

    Ankara is the capital city of Turkey, and if I had one lira for every time a Turkish person has told me that it is a boring hellhole, I could buy a plane ticket from Ankara back to Istanbul. For a long time it was a mystery to me how nearly all Turkish people could feel such unbridled hatred for their capital city, so I decided to go there to learn what none of the fuss was about.

    To be honest, Ankara is a fairly inoffensive city with some nice trees and one huge mausoleum (on which more some other time). But okay. My Turkish friends were right. After admiring the trees and the mausoleum, there’s nothing in particular to do.

    IMG_2665

    In Ankara, there are some trees.

    A friend of mine and I have a pact to send each other postcards from the worst most uninspiring areas of the world that we can find, so as soon as I discovered how right everybody was about Ankara’s things-to-do scene, I went on the postcard hunt. Finding myself in a huge underground bookstore, I soon realized that, not only do Turkish people hate Ankara, they do not even consider it exciting enough to make postcards about.

    That’s bad. Even Ottawa has postcards.

    As luck would have it, I spied a teetering pile of dusty secondhand paperbacks and wondered if I could find some funny covers to rip off and use instead.

    IMG_2693

    On the left, ‘fiery nights.’ On the right, ‘what women want.’

    I was not disappointed. The paperbacks turned out to be Turkish-language Harlequins from the 1990s. Not only did they do their duty as postcards, they confirmed that people in Ankara get up to the same thing as people in boring cities everywhere.

    Suddenly overcome, I wiped a single tear from my eye. From Margaree, Nova Scotia (which, believe it or not, is more boring than Ankara) to Ankara Turkey, one thing transcends the manifold cultures of humankind: where there is nothing to do there is always at least one thing to do.

    But seriously, if you’re planning a trip to Turkey, don’t go to Ankara. I’m not sure if the faint possibility of a fiery night is worth the trouble.

  • This Girl Moved to Turkey After Falling in Love with a Man Who Didn’t Use Toilet Paper!

    Once upon an undergraduate classroom, I was reading a fantastic book partially set in Turkey called From the Holy Mountain. My friend Holly was also in the class, and at some point, one of us turned to the other and said, “Let’s go to Turkey and BUY! A! CARPET!”

    This was a far-fetched dream, considering neither one of us had a job that would allow for the sort of time off or  financial support we would need for such a foray into the world of international travel. So we sat tight, and dreamed, and sighed forlornly, and looked out the window at the pissing rain as we dreamed of the way our lives could be if we could just finish our degrees and do something else.

    By some strange stroke of luck, we both managed to get jobs at the same time that had paid vacation time. And so we booked our tickets, bought our visas, and jetted off to Turkey in February and March, 2014.

    When we finally found a good place to perform our planned carpet purchase, the carpet merchant and I really liked each other. We spent four days together in total, and when I came back to Canada we were both pretty upset about it.

    Looking back, this feels dumb. But a lot of things happened in the following months. I got word that I would be doing my Masters in September. I started feeling a lot of trepidation about moving again, because I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be able to find a summer job in the city where I was living, I had already moved three times in the previous year, I’d had a lot of trouble making friends, a pretty brutal breakup, and a job that I was really excited about but never really panned out into what I’d hoped it would be. Basically, I’d had a shit year, and the prospect of being more uprooted was a lot to bear.

    To combat the sense of displacement and rootlessness, I decided to make the most logical decision I could: move halfway across the world! Not to Western Europe, which is the most far-fetched thing my Mom could wrap her head around being a good idea. To Turkey! In the Middle East! To see if I could make things work with a carpet merchant!

    Yup.

    Since I didn’t have time to get a proper working visa, I found an au pairing gig online, and I got said carpet merchant to check them out for me. He gave the all clear, and I arrived in June.

    Things started fizzling between me and him before I even left Canada, but I was already committed to the job. They finished fizzling rather quickly on my arrival in Turkey. I went to visit, and asked for the bathroom.

    “It’s upstairs,” he said. “But there’s no toilet paper. But don’t worry. It’s not so bad to go without it.”

    “Oh, haha!” I laughed nonchalantly. “That’s not a problem at all. In fact, I shall just waggle my dick to dislodge the last few droplets, and we shall go on our merry way into the world of stuff and fun! It will be a laaaark!”

    After 24 more hours of similarly inhospitable treatment, I told him we wouldn’t be seeing each other again, and suddenly found myself thrust into the muddy waters of living in Turkey for no reason in particular.

    And that, my friends, is the story of how a holiday fling can motivate you to spend large amounts of time living in a foreign country equipped only with your sense of adventure and general pig-headedness. It is a foolproof formula to have the most wonderful, horrible, and bizarre experiences of your life.