The taste of initiation

At my women-only gym, the middle-aged Turkish women I do crunches with talk about pastries. It reminds me of my first summer in Turkey, where instead of crunches, my neighbors would knit or crochet in our garden while talking about baked goods.

Is there no bad time or place to talk about pastries?

My vocabulary has become peppered with the Turkish versions of pastry dough (börek), cake (pasta), and salty or sweet cookies (tuzlu and tatlı, respectively). Baked sesame seed rings (sımıt) are a daily part of our life.

Sımıt, for Pukka Living

Eat, and then work it off. Bonding in the form of locker-room chat. On the aerobic floor, commiseration over leg lifts and latent stomach muscles. Chats about tattoos, taboos, and domestic routines.

Food was my initiation into Turkey - hours in my mother-in-law's kitchen taught me the aromas and textures that filled the Turkish table - but my gym in Turkey is a social sphere of my own choosing. 

What's one surprising place you go that makes you feel at home?

Cultural style memo

Last weekend I went to a wedding. Evening at poolside, giant sparklers shooting into the air while the happy couple walked the aisle. Husband in cotton jacket with red polo, me in fancied up jersey dress with pleats and sparkles and flats.

Every. Single. Woman. was wearing heels. And some version of black with sequins. I had skipped the coiffeur and wore a ponytail.

"It happened again," I moaned to my husband, who's closest friend at the wedding chided him for wearing beige. I had led him astray telling him he didn't need to wear a suit. "I wore the wrong thing at the wrong time. Was there some sort of memo I missed?"

Some sort of cultural memo, I wanted to add. The one that tells me what to wear and when in Turkey.

I've learned to kiss hands and cheeks, touch hands to foreheads, implement a no-shoes-in-the-house rule, offer something to drink the second a guest enters the house, and implore them to sit down and stay even after five hours of tea. I've learned to accept that plans change at the last second, that mostly everyone will be late. I've spent hours at the coiffeur, basking in the pleasantries of salonistas and manicurists. I've even learned how to make some tricky Turkish food that impressed my mother-in-law, but for some reason, I've blindly guessed about what to wear to Turkish events and been wrong.

High Drama, from my Style Journal for 365 Days of Style

Tights and heels to a dinner where everyone is wearing sleeveless shirts and open-toed shoes. Jersey when everyone is wearing silk. Jeans when everyone's in a dress.

When have you felt this way, and is there something to learn from being slightly out of sync with your surroundings?

Path finder

The path from there to here involved some stops along the way, but I'm a Midwesterner through and through. This illustration is a visual trajectory of the direction I took. On any given day, the things that affect my perception change. It can be something as immediate as noisy construction, the call to prayer, or school children out my window, or as reflective as considering each step I took to get on the plane to come here. This is not exclusive to the expat. This is inclusive to everybody.

What language do you use to describe your trajectory?