Stairs

Istanbul is a city of stairs. They lead up the steep hillsides connecting upper street to lower street; sometimes they are the street! They go to house doors, they lead into basements, into the Bosphorus, into ruined cities. They are made of marble, stone and cement–sometimes all three together! They are beautiful and daunting, treacherous and necessary, gradual and short, steep and long.  Perhaps all the metaphorical steps of our lives also have these qualities.

Learning to live in an unfamiliar culture in a different part of the world, in a beautiful city rather than the beautiful countryside of my home has taken a lot of steps. We are still taking them.

Every trip off campus into the city requires going down or up stairs depending upon whether I leave through the top gate or the bottom gate. Then there are the steps of getting the transport card, id card and money in my pockets, back pack on, speaking to the gate guards in my infant Turkish (they are very tolerant and friendly!) and then going out onto the street.

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On the street there are the stairs up the park hillside on the way to Ortaköy or down the many into Arnavütköy in search of provisions to bring back up the stairs to our house partway up the hill of Robert College. Or up the few steps onto the bus to places further afield in this huge city.

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There are the steps to climb up to the school building for Tom's work, to see the office about residence permits and other paperwork, to the fourth floor for Turkish classes, to the library. These are also steps we take to find our places here, to do some good work, to step toward understanding, toward making sense of where we are.

There are many steps on all our journeys, sometimes we skip up them two at a time and sometimes we plod. But the beauty of the journey is incredible  even when it isn't  always pretty, the calf muscles are all the time getting stronger!

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