IST State of Mind

photo credit: courtney alemdar

I came to Istanbul for the keyif and I found it in good measure. My friends and I, we ate and drank and conversed and made merry to the point of bursting. I didn’t make the best choices for my body, but it was nothing serious or irreversible, and besides, I was content. But it was the stress and the pace of life in the city that more than anything else took its toll. And I think this very stress is the reason why people here take their leisure time, however limited, so seriously.

Istanbul is not an easy city to live in. Sure, it’s not as crowded as Delhi or as dangerous as Damascus is today, but it has a take on urban insanity all its own. Traffic, constant construction, noise, pollution, crowds, and every imaginable form of illogic: I don’t think I realized quite what I was in for when I left California. On top of all this, people work very hard, often doing long hours in terrible conditions. It’s quite common to work six days a week, ten hours a day. On top of this there’s very little job security and the fear of unemployment keeps people from raising a fuss.

"It's illegal to throw trash here." photo credit: courtney alemdar

There’s no way I can compare this to what most people in this city suffer through, but for my first six months I get caught up in a terrible job. I was teaching for one of the many language schools that profit off the intense demand for English language education by charging exorbitant prices and paying teachers next to nothing. I didn’t realize all this at the time. I came to Istanbul to improve my Turkish and explore and write, but before I knew it I was caught up working six days a week for mediocre pay. I would often work split shifts, starting at nine in the morning and ending at ten at night. On top of this, my schedule changed every day and I never knew when I would be working until 8:00 PM the previous night. Needless to say, I spent those first few months depressed and thinking constantly of California. Eventually, I broke my contract and found a much more bearable school to work at for the rest of my time.

In the end I’m glad I worked that terrible job because it made me thankful for the standard of labor rights (far from perfect and dependent on social class) I had been lucky enough to grow up with. Also, although it can’t even be compared to the awful conditions that most of the world’s population works under, it gave me a taste of what it feels like to be over-worked and under-paid doing something you hate; no dead-end job I ever worked in the U.S. was ever as bad as that job was. Most of all, the thing I took away from that experience and many other things in Turkey was the importance of standing up for yourself and not taking any bullshit. Employers in Turkey are used to cowing employees into compliance with the threat of unemployment. There are decent labor regulations but they are often unenforced or flagrantly ignored. No one is watching out for you because no one cares. If you don’t speak up you’ll quickly find yourself working 12 hours a day with a single thirty minute break. I met many kind and ridiculously hospitable people during my time in Turkey, but when it comes to the workplace just about all employers are out to screw you over. You have to be assertive and you have to demand what you need.

photo credit: courtney alemdar

Even walking down the street in Turkey or going to the store reinforced this lesson for me. The larger a city is the less human every face in the crowd appears. And in a city of more than 13 million, every person you see in the street is just another obstacle. If you wait patiently in line for a bus you will never get on. Old ladies in head scarves will elbow past you and young men will cut in front of you. Go up to a counter and wait for the employee to notice and attend to you? You might be waiting for a very long time while other customers come up and shout out their requests. (This last lesson was hard for me as I can be soft-spoken. I quickly learned, however, that when you’re speaking in a foreign language you need to speak with confidence if you want to be heeded or understood.) With all this I’m not advocating being an asshole, but being assertive is essential. This is true everywhere, not just in huge cities. Having grown up in a place where you can walk down the sidewalk without having to dodge motorcycles, where people stand patiently in lines, and where you can expect that you'll be given a lunch break at work, I learned to be too trusting of other people, too comfortable. Which in a big city like Istanbul will get you swallowed up. I learned a lot, quickly, and I’m thankful that I did.

A friend from California came to visit and at one point she commented that I seemed physically different. When I asked her what she meant she said that the change was more in the way I carried myself than in the way I looked. My posture was straighter, my movements were more sure, I walked faster, spoke more clearly, and seemed somehow taller. When even walking down the street or boarding a train can feel like small battle I guess you learn how to appear strong. I'm relieved that now that I’m back home I can relax a bit and let down my guard, but I hope that the confidence I gained in Turkey, and the lack of tolerance that I have for bullshit, will stay with me.

Istanbul is an intensely beautiful and thrilling city to live in, but once you're here longer than the tourist's two or three weeks it stops giving up that beauty to you free of charge. You pay a price for it - working too much, fighting through crowds, waiting in lines. You spend your first few weeks wandering culture-shocked and tongue-tied down chaotic streets. And then eventually you learn to fight for that beauty and stand your ground. You learn to navigate the city. You try to find decent work. You speak with more ease and self-assurance. You have to be hard to live here, and I’ve learned valuable things about asserting yourself and not backing down. But you fight and you fight and those moments come - on the shore of the Bosphorus, say, or having coffee and conversation in a smoky cafe on a rainy day, or strolling down beautiful windy streets - those moments come when you say, goddammit, it may not be easy being here, but right now it sure feels right.