YOU MIGHT BE AN EXPAT IF... (or, the trials and joys of living abroad)

Ayvalık ruins and my friend Senem.

I have decided that, to a large extent, being an expat living in a country where you do not know the language is strangely similar to becoming a child again. Anyone who has been in this position will tell you that within the first few weeks you may find any of the following regressions part of everyday life:

1. You go throughout your day mumbling badly mispronounced words with caveman grammar.
2. You get used to people talking ‘at’ you rather than to you, gesturing extravagantly, and reacting with surprised enthusiasm when you do manage to say something recognizable.
3. You are frequently sport a doe-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights expression; have that “they’re talking about me, but I have no idea what’s going on” feeling; or laugh even when you don’t get the joke.
4. You need at least 15 people to help you do even the most menial tasks (and it still might not get done.)

Also like childhood, expat life is ridiculously sensitive to the ups and downs of life. Every little thing becomes laughably inflated, leaving you feeling either undefeatable-on-top-of-the-world or temper-tantrum-angsty.

For example, you might find yourself feeling like the most incompetent human on the planet after any number of deceptively common-place circumstances:

-    Like when you wake up early and put the kettle on the stove for tea, being extra careful not to wake your roommates, only to have a shrill alarm erupt from the gas line both inside and outside the apartment… leaving you to stand there helplessly in your pajamas as a stream of Turkish neighbors, then the landlady, come to point, gesture and cover their ears until it turns off… leaving you deaf and tealess, with three woken roommates.

-    Or that one time you attempt to exchange money, so after being directed to the giant bank in the middle of town, you get a number and sit in the waiting room for over an hour, next to a sweet Turkish grandma who cannot understand anything you say or vice versa, despite multiple attempts at making small talk on both sides… only to finally have your number called and find out, with the help of two random strangers’ limited knowledge of English, that you cannot exchange money there without a Turkish residency number, which you still do not have.

But then for every frustration, there is almost always an equally commonplace event that brings undue feelings of satisfaction and triumph that make you giddy as a child:

-    Like the time you bought a cloth closet and attempted to put it together in your living room floor… only to find that the pieces don’t fit together as they should, and the directions consist of tiny, pixilated diagrams with insightfully translated English captions like “Put bars like picture”... but after an hour of pounding, twisting, constructing and reconstructing in your air condition-less apartment you finally have something resembling a closet and officially stop living out of a suitcase for the first time since April.

-    Or the first time you and a roommate came back home, exhausted after a long day of running errands and attempted to open the two locks on the front door of your apartment… and after a good five or six minutes of struggling with both sets of your keys (at times even simultaneously) you are about to collapse in the hallway and give up, when it finally decides to work… and after another few minutes of experimenting with the open door you figure out the strange pattern and forever-afterward get a spark of triumph when you lock or unlock your door.

After a long first two weeks of ups and downs, I had started to get frustrated by the rollercoaster of this childlike existence. Then, two of my roommates and I took a weekend trip to Ayvalık, a beautiful coastal city on the Aegean Sea. There, wandering through the crumbling ruins of an unnamed old church, I came across Senem and her two sisters. Senem, fearlessly scampering over the stone walls with a white bandage covering her chin, was clearly the ringleader of the little trio, while the younger two bounced around in her wake. It turned out that my impossibly limited Turkish was a perfect match for their shy but eager banter, and so we exchanged smiles, laughs, and they served me leaves on stone platters at their cardboard restaurant. 

I suppose it takes meeting someone like Senem to remember the beauty of being open and vulnerable to life, of being able to see the potential of every hidden adventure in life, of being a little kid again.