Loving and Missing
I have thought through this post a few times, and always I have settled on not writing it. But, I think it’s about time to reflect on these things. There’s still a lot of time to go, but psychological time barriers are being breached as we go.
Going back up to add this paragraph, I notice my “not miss” is going to be significantly longer than my “miss.” It’s important to note the “miss” things are huge while the “not miss” things are generally small. This is another paradox of living abroad, I think. Sometimes it feels like two mountains, but one mountain is made up of molehills.
Things I will miss about Turkey:
- Being surrounded by real history
- Perhaps the most travel opportunities I will ever see in one compressed period
- The food, culture, and language
- Learning to live with a little less structure and a lot more inşallah (1)
- Significant, varied, daily challenge
- Not having to drive everywhere
- The Bosphorus, our view of the Bosphorus, and stuff alongside the Bosphorus
- Galip Dede, Bebek, and Çükür Cuma, three seriously great neighborhoods
- “Tsk, tsk, tsk”
- Lots of vacation days and an airfare budget
- Daily spectacles and nonsensical events
- Shopping carts on escalators (2)
- Sharing a time zone with Minsk
- Fiat cars everywhere
- Curbside service for all kinds of food
- Feeling more exposed to the wider world
Things I will not miss about Turkey:
- Eight hour time difference, being separated (3) from family and friends
- Dirty everything
- Stress (4)
- Pushing (5)
- No respectable Mexican food
- Having to pre-translate and strategize before saying anything outside an English-speaking zone
- Rare and/or nonexistant products: zip-loc bags, large rubber bands, electronics, and many more
- Virtually no football, TV network website blocks, blocking of Google services
- Cabbies
- Difficulty breaking a 50 Lira bill (6)
- No garage, no tools, no yard, and other ways to lack creative and emotional outlets
- Occupied baby carriages as weapons
- Never feeling a draft or breeze indoors and rarely in a car
- Christmas as a commercial New Years festival
- Never knowing when to call it petrol or mogas or benzin or gasoline or ULG95 or FuelSave 95 or maingrade mogas
- GMT+3, aka Eastern European Time (7)
- Trouble getting anything done for you
- Three-factor online banking logins
- Visa drama
- No car
- VAT
- Cookies (8)
- No Target or Home Depot
- No personal space, no extra space
- Horn honking and other excessive street noise
- A real Winter season
- Guys wearing capri pants, carrying purses, and holding hands
- The europlug
(1) “God willing.” Every now and then, living in Asia Minor illuminates some memorable concepts from the Bible. The “do not worry” / “lilies of the field” discussion is one of them.
(2) The uninitiated might think the challenge is not tumping over, but it’s actually getting over the lip at the top once the stairs go flat.
(3) Away is one thing. Away is between LA and Chicago. Separated is feeling your daily life’s practical incompatibility with the lives of others.
(4) This is something I think a lot of people have trouble understanding about assignments abroad. If another country’s jokes make no sense, how can their workplaces be any anything but inscrutable?
(5) Behavioral and physical, it never stops happening and it never stops irking.
(6) It’s just not that big of a bill! Also, see “Cabbies” above.
(7) GMT+3 means any attractive time in the UK or mainland Europe runs over lunch time or quitting time.
(8) Not biscuits. You could make the same recipe in the same oven at the same altitude with the same ingredients, and still a cookie would be better than a biscuit.