this Ş
and this Ğ
and this Ü
and NOT this @, which took me about 9½ minutes to figure out how to type yesterday.
Not much to report from The Most Interesting City On Earth other than being sick in bed for two days, eating an OBSCENE amount of Çokokrem (Turkish Nutella AHMAHGAH), and freezing my ars off STILL.
Although on Saturday night a quest for sushi ended with another nail in the coffin of effective communication with Turkish locals.
After dropping mad Lira on a taxi and gorging our fine selves on some Americanized sake rolls, me and a couple of my main bitties found ourselves lost in the middle of Taksim. It was freezing tits as per usual, and we must have asked everyone in the world who does not speak English how to get to the club we were trying to find. We eventually made it there, but everyone knows how the story of clubbing goes: get groped, hang out in the bathroom for a minute, and then leave because it sucks.
We ended up at (arbitrarily named) bar with our table scooched next to some really nice Turkish dudes from a different university. And then shit got awkward. I´m already infamously dreadful at small talk with English-speaking people, so trying to swap life stories with people who know three phrases in the mother tongue is a giant cosmic joke.
"What your name?" asks Seth Myers (I already forgot all their names. Dude 1 looks kind of like Seth Myers)
"Brittany," I lie.
"Where you from in US?"
"Los Angeles," I partially lie
"How old are you?"
"22." Whatever.
5 minutes later.
"What you say your name was?" asks Gryffindor (wearing maroon and yellow scarf)
"Los Angeles," I yell over the shitty American music that followed me across two continents and an ocean.
We leave the bar and start trekking back down the main street, which is no less crowded at 2:45 am. I start chatting with Dude 3 whom I will affectionately refer to as "Um" because that´s the word he used the most.
Stoner thought interjection: what if we were all like Pokemon and the only word we could use was our own name? My name would be something like "Damn, Son" or "Çokokrem."
Anyway, Um kind of broke my heart because he kept apologizing for his Tarzan English. And I didn't know how to explain to Um that it was okay, because me no speak English good too. I speak a language that some of the smartest people in the world just get lost in: I speak Irony.
One of my biggest challenges in Turkey so far has been trying to recover the bits of my personality that get lost when I can't speak Irony. If I can't use sarcasm and bad puns and cliches and made-up words, who am I?
When someone asks me where I'm from, what I want to say is, "I am but a rugged nomad riding through the desert on a horse with no name," but instead, I have to say "Los Angeles."
When someone asks me what my name is, what I want to say is "Call me Carmen Sandiego, motherf____," but instead, I have to say, "Brittany."
If I had my way, in these Survival Turkish lessons we would be learning how speak in clever metaphors and make references to funny Youtube videos before learning how to ask where someone is from or how old they are. Because you can ask those questions, but after that, the conversation either grinds to a halt or you awkwardly order a chicken wrap because that's the only other thing you know how to say in Turkish.
I guess if I were wise and thoughtful, I would say that it is enlightening and cleansing to discover who you are once all the words are stripped away and you stand there glowing, a mere essence. But I am not feeling wise or thoughtful, so I say
"TAVUK IZGARA DÜRÜM"
Oh and look at this! There is finally pictorial evidence that I´m actually in İstanbul and not just blogging from a padded dungeon!
Oh Snapdragon, they almost had me.
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