There is a time in any transition when the balance tips from what has been to what is now. Rather like when water gathers to an edge and then has enough volume and force to pour over or drip off.
























So here we are gathering at the edge of our new life and beginning of the pouring over.  What makes the tipping point? Who knows? Sometimes life’s changes are fought tooth and nail, resisted, hated, grieved, never accepted. These changes could be major like a death or an illness, forced move, becoming a refugee or minor like the aches of old age, the loss of possessions, the disillusion of a dream, disappointment in a faith or a friend.
But to be like water, which fills containers to overflowing and then moves on, to move on past rough banks, jagged rocks, to a place of smoothness and calm, that is a good transition!

One of my duties as a Turkish housewife is the procurement of drinking water, su in Turkish. The tap water isn't actually toxic, but everyone who can possibly afford it, buys bottled water. It comes in smaller bottles of course, but the household method is to get it in 19 liter jugs. The way they feel and look is about like 5 gallons, think 5 gallon pail. There is a small hand pump that you attach after you get these delivered and into the house. When it gets close to running out  the water people have to be called. I realized I was beginning to make the transition to living here when I no longer dreaded making that call in my very limited Turkish!

I can now show someone else, in this case Jesse (Yeah!) who just arrived, around. I know the transport system, bus, metro, tram, ferry, taxi, feet; the latter my personal favorite. I know where to buy most of the day-to-day essentials. I dropped off some dry cleaning and as I studied the receipt for a date of pick up the clerk said in perfect English, "tomorrow evening"!

People don't speak English everywhere, most don't around this area of Istanbul, but do much more so in the tourist areas.

We are making friends, we have been spontaneously invited into a Turkish home and given welcome water, su, again, and grapes and peppers from their garden. So much for the ugly American in a Muslim country!

My growing ability to cope with this new life of less responsibility and no driving daily purpose pours over into the minutes and hours of my day and I find that I don't have to be busy every minute; it is okay to just read a book or knit or look at the view. I am someone without my work, I can make friends with people of a different culture, I can get around, gather supplies, fill the unfamiliar spaces of this new life, like water.

There is an expression in Turkish "su gibi haytin olson", may your life be like water.

The most omnipresent aspect of leaving our house is the hill: up to the academic buildings, down to the lower gate and the Bosphorus.  Though Istanbul is known as City on the Seven Hills, Yedi tepeli şehir, that refers to just the old city across the inlet known as the Golden Horn for color of the reflection of the afternoon light.  But for us, the salient fact is that from the lower gate to the upper gate of the campus, a walking distance of about half a mile, the elevation goes from 13 feet to 472 feet above sea level!  For us to arrive home from the lower gate requires several runs of steps for a total of 87 stair steps connected by steady climbs along steep sidewalks.  The only significant flat area on the entire campus is devoted to the full-size real grass soccer field, The Plateau.

Wandering up and down you stumble upon remnants of earlier structures in the 150 year history of the school.

There is a service bus which makes two trips each morning to shuttle people up the hill: nice buses, air conditioned with sun roofs.  Though of course trying to keep up with Sue we never take advantage of the shuttle: get your exercise where you can!
We did make a Sunday afternoon trip to Ikea with other new and old staff last week.  The staff mostly filled two of the 16-seat buses and then upon departure another bus appeared which we filled, stacked to the ceiling, with purchases: mops, brooms, groceries (I bought fish that day in a huge grocery by pointing at the whole fish I wanted among the hundred arrayed on ice and yarim (half) kilo of shrimp and then, after much gesticulating, I finally understood I was to take a ticket and the fish, which a nice young man had placed in a small plastic basket, would be filleted and the shrimp beheaded and deveined in a moment.  Great service.), mattress covers, outdoor chairs, etc..  The small buses are used instead of big yellow school buses because the convoluted topography dictates winding switchbacks: you can’t find a rectangular grid within ten miles.  To travel from one side of the city to the other takes an hour or two.  The buses, as we experienced, navigate the roads like Night Buses in Harry Potter: they seem to shrink by six inches when necessary to make a turn or avoid taking off the fender of the sedan slinking past.  At twenty miles an hour.

Last Thursday, Victory Day (Zafer Bayramı, when the Turks led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk turned back the Greeks, like our 4th of July), Sue and I took the next step in public transportation and struck out to take a ferry across to the Asian side.  The first bridge across the Bosphorus was built in 1973 and the second and last, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, in 1988; each spans more than 1,500 meters, but ferries are ubiquitous and numerous.  I have two teachers in my department who live on the Asian side and they refer to the traffic across the bridges as bad, worse, or impossible.

We walked three miles, rambling beneath the deck of the 1st bridge, to Beşiktaş and, using our transportation card, holding it over the hot spot on the turnstile, spent $1.50 each for the 30 minute ride down the Bosphorus, around the corner into the Sea of Marmara and disembarked in Kadiköy, a 7,000 year old port, another of the many villages that have been subsumed by the city of Istanbul over the centuries.  On the ferry one buys Turkish tea, served in voluptuous curved glasses with saucer for $0.35 and a smiling young man buses your empties: civilized.

After a glorious lunch and afternoon shopping in the warren of shops–antiques, housewares, electronics, you name it–and buying a cd from street musicians, we made it home, another couple of miles walk and though Sue finally acquiesced to a cab ride, we still had the final trudge up the hill.

Eating supper after dark we were serenaded by the music from the Alumni Club, Bizim Tepe (our peak), just outside the wall of the school.  The alumni of this school are leaders of the commercial world, doctors, engineers and leaders of government.  With prosperous and active members, the Club, as the crow flies, just a couple of hundred of yards from our bedroom windows, serenades us: I often have to use ear plugs to fall asleep. The music ranges from excellent jazz trumpet with bongos and vibes, to Turkish pop, with interludes of Sinatra: an eclectic mix.  This night as we ate, Leonard Cohen, wafted through the trees.  When the evening call to prayer began the mix was heady: when one  source paused the other cut through elegantly, Cohen sounding haunting, acerbic and sorrowful, then the call came through, serious in it’s own right, demanding and evocative.  Interlaced you have Istanbul, multi-layered and complex.