I made it. The first 10 days have streamed past, and somewhere I’m finding normal.
The city sidewalks are over-full, dumping people into the streets between the cars. The people are perfect urbanites, demure, focused, and too busy to mind you. The decade I’ve spent developing my city-scowl has paid off well.
The people are people. I can see them living their lives but I’m not in those lives yet. The grandma at the doner shop who offers me tea told me quite a bit about her day; I wish I could do more than smile and nod. The young women who work at the corner grocery are beginning to become familiar faces, though we have never exchanged more than a couple of words. Sometimes that seemed more even more confused than I am.
Kids come out of the school in droves, in cliques, in streams that look like every other group of school children. They remind me of years I often forget, piling out of brick buildings onto crowded, smoke-filled sidewalks in my uniform, thinking I blended in when everyone knew exactly where I had been fifteen minutes before. They stop in the shops and buy their snacks, spending precious savings on candy bars and lattes.
The corners are dotted with old men who sell bread from their carts. The signs proclaim “sayak 1TL.” I can ask for “one” or “two” should my fingers ever go out of commission. Beyond that I will be lost.
The sounds of traffic mingle with the school bell and the sounds of the ambulances coming to the hospital at the end of the street. In the evenings music students practice their violin, and as the sun sets the call to prayer rings out again. People seem to have so much to say about it; I find it is one more sound, blended into the cacophony.
Thus far, I like it. I feel a sense of possessiveness of my neighborhood, my side of the water. Every time I go outside I have earned my place a little more. I relish the 30 cent pomegranates and rejoice over understanding simple connections, like when the similarities between “sponge” and “dishwasher” reveals the word for “dish.”
Someday I may know this place. Today I see it and yearn to understand. I wonder what time will tell about these first impressions.