Teşekkür ederim. (Turkish for Thank you.)
It’s pronounced “Tesh shek cure. Ed eh reem.” More or less. It took me days to learn how to say it, and believe me, I repeated it under my breath constantly. Then I’d somehow forget how to say it. Then I’d invert the syllables and say Shekehtur and silently curse my wooden tongue.
Now, of course, that I’m back home, I’m practically fluent in Turkish. (Kidding.) But I had a fantastic time in Istanbul and still can’t believe it was real and not a dream.
I was invited by the editor and publisher of ELLE Magazine Turkey, to participate in their 2nd Annual Style Awards. I said yes without knowing my role — was I giving an award? Getting an award? Giving a speech? Part of the audience? A judge? A nominee? (You know what they say: it’s an honor just to be nominated.)
In any case, who in their right mind would turn down a trip to Istanbul? (I mean, who doesn’t have a job or who isn’t occupying a park, and isn’t nursing a baby or going into labor? There are exceptions, of course.)
From the first person I met to the last, everyone at Turkish Elle was lovely, interesting, hard-working, fun. They thought of everything to make my trip comfortable, exciting, elegant: a private guide with a car for sightseeing days, a wonderful dinner in a mansion on the banks of the Bosphorous, a trip to the hammam (Turkish baths) where we received the traditional scrubbing, massaging, bathing, and shampooing, and the less traditional blowdrying that centuries of sultans and their wives enjoyed.
It turns out I did win an award (a very snazzy statuette) for being an “opinion leader in style.”
At last someone understands me.
The fact that I’m understood 5,026 miles from home isn’t ideal, but the world is growing smaller. Everywhere in the world — even on Taksim Square in Istanbul — you see young women wearing tight jeans tucked into Uggs. (Turks! They’re just like Us!) In the Grand Bazaar — which I remembered as a rough and slightly menacing place as a 17 year old girl in the 70s — (men grabbing your arms to drag you into their stalls to buy carpets), there are now flat screen tvs hanging at intervals from the ceilings — to show how your other currencies are doing against the Turkish Lira. Most of the stalls are now stores — stores that are likely to accept credit cards. The fact that some of these stall-stores also have framed pictures of Sarah Jessica Parker or Senator Richard Shelby (R. AL) tells us that soon, seeing the great and huge mosques that punctuate Istanbul’s skyline may be the only way to remember where we are when we travel there. Sip your latte at the corner Starbucks across the street. You may just forget where you are, for a moment.
Jet lag has just taken over my brain, and I’m rambling.
Üzgünüm (I am sorry).
Lisa
