Friday, September 18, 2009

Oranges, kebabs, and mosques

‘Hairy men’ they say. ‘Hairy macho men,’ and ‘Oh they are rude, more than the people in Istanbul.’ These are some of the descriptions I get when I ask people about Adana, a city in the south of Turkey, where I am going in less than a week for a teaching job.

I know that Adana has a large agriculture industry, is famous for kebab, and from what I see of photos online there are many mosques. Beyond this I have no concept of the place, and have relied upon the answers of Turkish and non-Turkish friends alike to help me visualize my home for the next several months.
Based upon what I have heard thus far, I admit to being frightened about the experience to come.

There is little variation in the answer to the question, ‘How is Adana? ’ ‘Hot, boring, conservative.’ ‘Hot.’ ‘Really hot.’ ’Very hot’. ‘HOT!’

I start to picture myself walking the streets of Adana. They emit smoke, and the air glows red and orange like a red light district. Everyone moves really slowly, and my face bubbles and blisters from the heat like a science fiction movie.

I should know better than to let my imagination run. I usually have odd static images of places that I have not visited that are so detached from reality they are laughable. When someone says ‘Armenia’ I see green plains with a single house and a bald man standing with his hands on his hips, just looking at his house. The image is so detailed in my head and feels so real, however I am going to assume that absolutely none of it is true.

Before my first visit to Istanbul I envisioned it as one would see an image on a television screen. The image was tilted like the villains were in the old Batman show. Istanbul in my mind was endless brown and red streets crowded with stampeding bulls.

Producing images of the future and places not seen has been an involuntarily evoked system for coping with fear of the unknown. I suspect that by imagining in great detail what we don't know makes us feel somehow closer to knowing.

But sometimes the ways we try to ease our mind to make the unknown more familiar make it more bleak or scary than simply allowing the mind to be a blank canvas for reality to fill.

Up to now my Turkey travel has been limited to Istanbul. I am looking forward to the chance to see how representative Istanbul is of Turkey, or rather how much Turkey might not be Istanbul.

It is certain to be a different existence and I hope that in some ways it could even be a better one. There is comfort knowing that the population is around two million, and that it is quite urban. But in the coming days can these comforts stand up to the preconceived notions of Adana that I and others have conjured up?

Is it really a dreary land of meat, brutes, and sweltering temperatures?
I’ll have to resign myself to the following truth: I’ll know when I see.

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