In the Swing of Things....

My life here continues to be interesting although I am in much more of a normal flow. I still am meeting new people and exploring new parts of the city but basketball keeps me pretty busy. We’ve had three road trips in the last month, all of them on the Eastern side of Turkey. Road trips are interesting. Its never the crowds that seem to be the biggest obstacle but the refs. We played an opponent outside of the farming city of Adana on the Southern side of the country. I think it was a team I had decided not to sign with and as we drove through the countryside and veered off into a small town, with deserted streets, I was extremely glad I had the foresight to choose a large metropolis like Istanbul as my home for eight months. There is some charm of course, the horse drawn buggy of oranges riding along the shoulder of the highway, small shops where I am sure everyone knows your name. There were children playing in a park and an old man squatting on the field in the exact same spot as the day before. But on the whole I’m sure it’s a place that gets old quickly, especially if you don’t know the language.

While we were in Adana, the anniversary of Ataturk’s death occurred. I had heard about it and the whole week before we saw huge pictures of him being sold on the street. They LOVE him here. I’ve never seen anything like it. We have nothing equivalent in America, not even close. Anyway, at the exact time of his death everyone stops what they are doing (we definitely had a minute of silence before our game the next day as well) and all the cars on the street honk their horns. Its 9:05 am and we were eating breakfast in the hotel when we heard all the cars honking at the same time. By the time we ran out life was going on as usual.

It is interesting to see the farming country. Turkey has so many different kinds of fruits and vegetables. Their produce seems quite diverse and varies from good to excellent in almost everything. But it blows my mind how cheap things are. How anyone makes any money on tomatoes that are consistently less than the equivalent of 30 cents a pound is beyond me. I have one friend whose family has been in farming for years and they are in the process of selling a whole lot of acres for that very reason. You can’t make much. But farming is different here than America it seems. Setting aside the corporate farming in America, most of my friends in Iowa who came from farming families worked on the farm. Their parents toiled the land so to speak and they grew up bailing hay and living on the farm. I still remember telling teammates in college to pretend they were lifting a pig when we were in the weight room. Doesn’t seem to be the case in Turkey. My Turkish friend grew up in the city and knows nothing about farming. His father owns the land but hires out all the work.

Labor is obviously cheap here and as we drove through the farm land we could see whole families out in the field, old women in raggedy clothes and head scarves bent over the cotton plants. I can’t imagine how badly their backs hurt. But to think that those tomatoes they pick go all the way to Istanbul, a good eight hours, and are still that cheap, they must be getting paid next to nothing.

Anyway, we lost our game. It sucked and the refs cheat. I’m not one to sit around and bitch too much about refereeing but road games outside Istanbul can look an awful lot like football and I’m not exaggerating. We got home late that night and while my friends went out to the club I went to sleep mad as hell.

The next day I decided to spend some alone time. I went looking for a New York Times, which I still haven’t found, but settled for an International Herald. I curled up in Starbucks and read about the news around the world, went and ate some soup in a Turkish restaurant and finally decided to top my day off with an American movie. There is nothing quite like going to an American movie overseas. It’s the ultimate escape from the constant stress of living in a culture not your own. It’s a bit of pride if the movie is good, a bit of nostalgia if it’s set in a place you know well, and a deep sense of relief for knowing what is going on if only for two hours.

I decided on ‘Babel’ because it was the one with Brad Pitt and it looked good, or more likely because he looked good. I settled into my non assigned seat and hoped no one would notice (they actually give you seat assignments here, and have an intermission for smoking….. so maybe not a total escape). I started eating my Turkish quesadilla and waited for my fun to begin. The lights dimmed and the music started. Unfortunately, the movie opened in Morocco and the actors were speaking some sort of tribal language I think, because it sure wasn’t French (not that it made a difference if it were). I started having flash backs to watching the ‘Interpretor’ in Greece when the first ten minutes of the movie was in the Koo language. Kind of difficult to know what is happening when the sub titles are also in a language you don’t understand. But, I’m following the movie. Something is going on about a gun. You know, the usual. Plus, I’m thinking, this is a Hollywood movie and Hollywood movies only have subtitles for a very short amount of time. You know impatient Americans don’t really go to the movies to read. So, no problem, this tribal language is going to stop pretty soon here and Brad Pitt will come on the screen looking beautiful and I’ll be happy. Not so much. Then the movie cuts to America but its San Diego so they are speaking Spanish. Not really what I was hoping for but I’ll definitely take Spanish over a Moroccan mountain dialect. But I mean really, I just keep thinking this is a Hollywood movie, this can’t continue.

Finally, Brad Pitt comes on, a bit reticent I might add. Him and his wife Cate whatever her name is, aren’t talking a whole lot but at least it’s a familiar face. Sweet, here we go I am thinking, ENGLISH. Ahhhh but wait, from the two famous actors I can understand, the movie cuts to Japan and guess what they are speaking cause it sure isn’t English! I’m sitting in the movie theatre thinking ‘for real?’ I’m really wishing my brother was here so he could make some sense of the Japanese because with my limited Turkish I can only make out when they are talking about basketball which is never or food and people in this movie apparently don’t eat. I can’t get up at this point, we are 20 minutes into the movie and I’m not going to be the dumbass schlepping my gym bag across the theatre, ducking below the screen to go to the ticket office to explain that I can’t understand to someone else that I can’t understand. Not gonna do it. Plus, the quadruple lingual has to end soon and I am doing alright understanding the movie. And then it happens….. The Japanese girl is deaf and the movie then goes into sign language. SIGN LANGUAGE! I am sitting in this movie theater thinking this might be the only movie ever made that has such a wide spectrum of languages and I just have to see it overseas. And still the optimistic side of me is still thinking the movie has Brad Pitt in it, it was made in Hollywood, the bulk of the movie has to be in English and since we have only had five minutes tops of English so far, the rest HAS to be in English. Not so much….. the rest of the movie was a nice conglomerate of international travel; Mexico, Japan, America, Morocco, maybe even a little Egypt but I’m not sure because I don’t know how to spell Egypt in Turkish, and a whole lot of deaf people. However, due to my keen sense of body language and guessing I could follow the movie for the most part, or at least convinced myself of things to cover up the holes in the plot. Until the end, when…. Well, I won’t ruin the movie for you but lets just say all of a sudden someone was naked and I didn’t really know why. Kind of a big gap in the plot I would say. Oh well, I got up from the movie, entertained but maybe not in the way the director had in mind. I LOVE living overseas!

The next road trip was a five hour bus ride and thankfully done during the day this time. Unfortunately, it was also Thanksgiving so I knew it was going to be difficult to call home outside my apartment. All my extended family was getting together and its always a good opportunity to pass the phone around and catch up with relatives I haven’t spoken with in awhile and hear about all the food I am missing. We were staying in a nice hotel in the capital city of Ankara so I was hoping it wasn’t going to be a problem. Oh but it was. I don’t know what business people do here. I had my manager on the task with me but it obviously didn’t help. First they told me they don’t have the capability to call outside the hotel. Then I asked them how they called outside the hotel and then they remembered there was a phone right to the left of their hand that magically calls outside the hotel. They said I could use the front desk phone but they would charge me, but they didn’t know how much they would charge me. So how will you know how much to charge me was my next question. I felt like I was talking to a two year old. He thinks about it and then says it will be 1.30 lira a minute despite the fact that I have my own phone card. Where am I?!!! I said thanks but no thanks. So that was that and I went to my hotel room and got a massage from our trainer. To top things off, hotel food in most of Europe is sub par in my experience and we were served pounded down chicken schnitzel, apparently they serve this fried crap in Turkey. It was a pile of grease with fries. So much for turkey and mashed potatoes. Ah well.

We lost our game on Friday and then went to Burger King (not the best road trip food on the whole this time around) before getting on the bus to head back to Istanbul. I had a nice long talk with my coach at a rest stop and told him we need to play five on five full court in practice. Just a thought, might help us to be ready for games. Half court is fine for some things but literally we didn’t play full court all week. Luckily he listens to me for the most part despite the fact that I always have a lot to say and many suggestions. Now this whole week we’ve been getting up and down the court in practice so that’s good.

We had the whole weekend off so Saturday I meet up with my teammate to workout. Unfortunately, despite checking with both coaches, the gyms were both taken. So we got some weights in and then luckily got half court cleared for a bit. The guys that work at the gym all coach the younger teams. There are girls from about eight years old and up and they are SO cute. Everyday I am there they run up and give me kisses, want me to do their hair, speak to me in Turkish or practice their English. Their coaches clear everyone away and have a couple of them rebound for me. Their passes are more like lob passes but they hustle their butts off rebounding. Then if I am there at the end of their practice they have me say the ‘1,2,3’ in Turkish for their cheer. Today I got there when they were having a layup competition from the left side. Every single one of the ten year olds was traveling but they all were yelling and arguing about the score long after the game was over. The little eight year old with her long braided ponytail was stomping her foot in consternation, just disgusted with the parent who was working the score clock. She twirled around and stomped off, mad that it was a tie. I’m sure I was that kid. I was dying laughing.

So this weekend we had three birthdays on our team. Saturday night was a party at a Turkish teammate’s house then it was out with a bunch of the other American players for Marita’s birthday. Our Turkish teammates were all having a sleepover but we had to go out. At least I did. I needed to go out in the worst way. It was to the point where I didn’t even remember the last time I dressed up and looked like a girl. When I saw my teammates they thought I had gotten my hair cut. No, I just blow dried it. I have never been so happy to put on makeup and heels. After making our way home from the party at 10 ish, we all met up at Meek and Marita’s with about 10 Americans, one whom I played with in high school (Enjoli Izidor), three that I played against in college, and three that I played against in Greece. The basketball world is a small one. After drinking and catching up, we crowded into cars and made our way to the hip hop club but not before getting stuck in traffic and throwing Reece’s Pieces into a friendly cabbie’s car and making friends with all the other passengers in cars rolling along with us. It was about 1 am at this point and after walking through a hotel trying to find a bathroom (“act normal, act normal” we kept reminding each other), it was into the club and free shots from the bartender I met my first weekend here. Just a little something to get the night started right. The rest of the night was typical European clubbing; loud music, packed dance floor, and a really really late night, five in the morning to be exact. As a special treat my most favorite teammates showed up as they had left the sleepover when the birthday girl fell asleep. I was so excited to see them.

Anyway, not much else to report from the club, at least not much that I remember. I really didn’t sleep but a few hours because even after we left the club we kept having fun. I woke up the next day smiling which is quite the opposite reaction I usually have from getting annihilated and not sleeping. For some reason it was just what the doctor ordered. After the stress of the last few weeks I just needed to have some fun. The next day we had off from practice but our whole team dragged themselves to scout our next opponent. Seems like everyone who was at the club was at the game and we all just looked at each other’s tired eyes and laughed. I was asleep by eight.