This is a long one....
A few weeks ago we had a tournament in Central Turkey. I found out about it soon after I arrived in Istanbul in the beginning of September and realized it was the week my brother Jordan was scheduled to fly into Istanbul. But I knew far enough ahead that I could arrange for him to get another flight and meet us in Kayseri, right in the middle of the country for a few days. It was serious drama figuring that out due to the fact that they couldn’t tell me our hotel name ahead of time and my address in Istanbul is a building number and no taxi driver would know exactly where it is. But luckily I have a good Turkish friend who speaks perfect English to help me out.
My first week in Istanbul I am taking care of the usual logistics, making sure the bugs are all dead in my apartment, braving the metro, getting a cell phone, perfecting my Turkish “thank you”, and getting a bank account. My team manager helps me with most things and her English is fine but by no means is our communication without its snags. We are sitting at the desk of a young banker, my manager and him discussing whose name it will be under, handing passports back and forth, I am signing, no joke, twenty eights pieces of paper all written in Turkish. Probably signed away my first born, when the banker says, “Sign here.” In perfect English. I look up surprised as it has been eight whole days where I have not talked to one person comfortably. I wanted to stay there, get his number, take him out to lunch, hug him. But I simply comment on how good his English is. He says he lived in America for six years. “Really, where?” In Iowa he responds. “I lived in Iowa! I went to Iowa state.” Me too he says. And so we continue with graduation years (one year apart), where we lived, what bars we went too, when we last went back. Etc. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the places in the world. Anyway, Kavanch and I have become fast friends and he was so nice to help me get my brother to Kayseri.
So our team informs us that we will be driving to Kayseri, eight hours on a bus, after practice on Monday. Every other team is flying of course or at least only has a four hour bus ride. But its fine, I am fairly used to long bus rides after playing in Greece and they aren’t so bad. I know the drill, someone is inevitably smoking, we stop every forty minutes for coffee (or tea), and my teammates, being mostly under 20 years old, will have more energy for socializing than I can even imagine. But overall, it a good chance to team bond and eight hours really isn’t so bad when your usual travel arrangements consistent of crammed transatlantic flights. So, I’m thinking, no problem, we will practice early on Monday, drive to Kayseri, practice Tuesday and rest and play Wednesday through Sunday. No big deal. Oh was I wrong….
So Sunday they inform us that we have weight lifting Monday morning and then will need to bring our bags to night practice so we can leave for Kayseri from the gym. Fine. Then we find out that not only is night practice not earlier than normal, it is later. So we will finish at 8 pm, then have a no less than 8 hour bus ride. Sweet. ETA: Four in the morning.
At this point we should have known that NO ONE within our organization has a freaking clue what is going on or why and if they do, no one communicates anything to us at all. After we finish weights they decide to tell us that we need to go downtown, another hour in traffic to sign our contracts that could have been done oh say, WHEN WE GOT TO THIS COUNTRY!!! Instead of the day we are too leave when my teammates haven’t packed for a week long trip. And if they had only told us the previous day we could have planned accordingly. But then it would have been too easy. Ahhhhh. Plus we are starving as we get shuttled from the bank, the tourist agency, back to the bank, with no explanation. We just sit there looking at random Turkish people typing away, shuffling papers and talking to our assistant coach. So we are tired, hungry, confused and unsure when we are getting home. We start getting a little loopy and laughing at things that really aren’t funny except when you are in a foreign country and the only other option is to scream.
We get back to our apartment with a good 45 minutes to get everything together and rest for practice before a “special taxi” is going to pick us up. Special taxis are people that like to make money but don’t want to be licensed taxi drivers. They are considerably cheaper, but illegal, and they look like any other driver. For the first week I was here I kept thinking that it wasn’t someone’s dad driving us to practice. Five minutes before the scheduled pick up I drag my bags down the hall into the coffin sized elevator and out onto the street where every passing car stares at me like I have two heads and every taxi tries to take me to the airport. I don’t know who I am waiting for, like I said, they look like every other car. But you know, how many blonde American women on the side of the street with luggage could there be, I’m pretty sure he’ll spot me. But I am still waiting. All I really know is that my assistant coach text messaged me that the special taxi is going to pick me up, then him, then we will go to the gym for practice. 20 minutes later my coach text messages me again, “where are you?”. Waiting on the side of the freaking road! To which I get no reply. Its now about 45 minutes until practice time which, in the current Turkish traffic exchange rate, is more like nothing. Finally a mini euro van type thing pulls up to the curb and a small Turkish man starts loading my luggage into the back like a man on a mission. I’m guessing this is the right guy. So I get in and he starts asking me things in Turkish. I answer with directions to my teammates’ apartment, hoping that’s what he wanted. Sure enough, they are sitting on their suitcases on the side of the road looking every bit as confused as I am. We load them up and continue driving, hoping that we are headed to our assistant coaches house. Fortunately the route seems familiar and we relax until we arrive at his apartment and he isn’t waiting outside. Meek text messages him that we are in the taxi waiting for him outside his building, he calls back saying he is in a special taxi headed for her house. Apparently the first taxi drove by my apartment early, didn’t see me, and left. So then our assistant got another taxi without telling us and decided to come pick us up instead. But then the first taxi decided to give it another go, doesn’t tell our coach, and comes to pick us up like he was supposed to the first time around. The blind leading the blind. Our coach tells us to get out of the
taxi. So after paying the guy that f-ed it all up, we unload our luggage onto the pavement, drag them behind a car and sit out in the side of the street and watch cars go in reverse down the one way street and laugh. At this point there is nothing left to do but laugh. What is going on? And why does this stuff keep happening to us? Because this is Turkey and this is how things get done, with the most complications as possible. So there we are, a blonde American, a black American, and a 6’5” Australian, stranded on a random street in Istanbul, late for practice, packed for a trip to central Turkey, laughing hysterically and shaking our heads. How ridiculous do we look? Talk about incongruous. Then an old man from the coiffeur in the basement comes out and starts speaking to us in Turkish. We communicate that we play basketball for Istanbul University and yes please we would love some chai. So we chill out in the barber shop for a good 15 minutes, drinking chai, and trying to ask if they give manicures before our coach finally shows up with two special taxis and we load all our crap in one and cram ourselves in another and make our way to practice. This was just getting to the gym, mind you, something that we do every single day. Warning flags all over the place and yet we still had no idea what we were in for…..
After practice we turn the cold showers on and let them run for 10 minutes hoping that like some days, the water just needs time to warm up. Some of our teammates seem to be dressing to leave however and its then we realize that everyone else is going home, for a hot shower, to gather their things, and to get some home cooked food from mom. We are standing in a cold locker room naked, with clothes from our suitcases strewn all over, waiting for the water to warm up before a long bus ride. So now we realize we are leaving at 10 pm. ETA: 6 a.m. Even better.
After 15 minutes the water still hasn’t warmed up a degree and word comes from someone that the bus service wants us to hurry. I politely tell them to tell them to f off and get some hot water. So Meek, Marita and I jump in the cold showers screaming, rinse off the soap and dry off shivering the whole time. We change and gather our things. Mind you this is a week trip with five games and no hope for laundry. So, needless to say there is an excessive amount of things to manage, three uniforms, underwear, socks and everything else that goes with it. Plus, with a long bus ride there is the necessary books and laptap, ipods and dvd players. There is a lot of crap we are lugging down the hallway and down the street, and up the curb, and across the arterial, and over the grass median, down the cobblestone street, through the mini park, down the hill, and up the stairs to our club. Yeah, they decided to have us walk in the dark, across streets filled with crazy Turkish drivers, with our roller bags going over two foot curbs and cracked sidewalks. This in itself, not so bad. Kind of ridiculous, kind of humorous, but looking back, just a hint of what was to come.
So we wait at our club for the bus, my trainer and yelling at me for having wet hair and how I am going to get sick even though it is 65 degrees outside and its not like I had a choice anyway. We had practice so I am going to get my hair wet, I can’t go home, and wouldn’t have time to blow dry my hair at the gym even if I had brought a dryer since they were yelling at us to hurry up. Plus, I felt like saying “shut the hell up and get some hot water at the gym.” I hate when they talk to me like I am 10 years old. Especially when I am older than ! Plus when my trainer tells me, after our bus ride that the reason my neck is stiff is because my hair was wet, I have a hard time listening to anything he says after that.
So we rush down the street to get kebap with our coaches, who are stressed and hurried and make it back to the bus with fresh chicken wraps and settle onto the bus, waving at the junior players and teammate’s families as they watch the bus roll down the street. Finally we are on our way, about 11 pm, with a good 8 hour bus ride. I start braiding hair and practicing my Turkish with teammates when a movie gets put on. “She’s All That” which I watched for about 10 minutes until I realized that I just can’t do American teenage movies anymore. It was making me nauseas, feel old, and generally embarrassed to be American. It wasn’t 30 minutes into the ride before we pulled up to a gas station so everyone could use the one toilet stall that didn’t flush and buy snacks and tea. A good hour after that stop it was time to stop again. Us import players stayed on the bus until 15 minutes passed and by that time really did have to pee. So we go pay our 50 lira cents and use the loo. As we come out, its now 1 in the morning, and we still don’t see a soul from our team until we look up on the balcony and see our bus driver chilling with a cigarette and chai. So we make our way up to the restaurant where our whole team and coaches are sitting around a table talking and ordering chai. Meek and Marita
and I just stare at them in disbelief. I’m not really shocked, I had already warned the rookies of the road trip stops, the frequency, the duration, and the ultimate elongation of our journey. So now ETA is 7 am. Basically we are on a red eye. And we aren’t on our way home for Christmas…
30 minutes later we are back on the bus and everyone settles in to sleep a bit. I am in the back of the bus with a few teammates that also find it difficult to relax on the seats that rise up the in the middle, little peaks that dig right into your back if you try to lay down. At about two a.m I put my eye mask on and try to get some shut eye but I can’t get comfortable. Finally I end up laying on the floor, caked with muddy shoe tracks, waking up often from freezing next to the air conditioner, someone stepping on my leg on their way to the bathroom, or because I smell smoke in the air, tobacco from our coaches smoking a pipe in the front seats. The floor was cold and I could feel every crack in the road on my spine, every gear shift in my bones. We were swerving on the road as usual and all I could think of was we were sure to get in an accident, just to top everything off. When I am finally asleep for good I wake with a throat sore from the air conditioner and tobacco smoke to the sun shining, the bus stopped, and extremely loud mosque prayers blasting from none other than are very own radio. It was all I could do to not scream at the “Allah Allah” moaning with a big fat “SHUT THE F UP.” Thought that might be a little disrespectful although I am sure even the Muslims on the bus felt the same way. It was the worst wake up you could possibly imagine after the worst night sleep. But at 8:30 the following morning, at least we had finally arrived. Then it was into the hotel for more waiting, followed by breakfast, followed by slow realization (because we don’t get actually told anything) that our rooms weren’t quite ready yet so we were welcome to go sleep back on the bus. Riiiiight, so we drove overnight to get to a tournament the day before we actually play without arranging for the hotel rooms to be ready early. I mean seriously, the rooms were $20 a night, pay the freaking extra so we can just sleep and stop this nightmare. So its back to the bus where Meek and I can’t seem to find our travel pillows anywhere. Soon we realize that our bus driver sleeping in the back has bogarted every pillow and blanket in sight.
Finally we go to our hotel rooms, about as nice as you would expect $20 a night to be, and laid down for a short rest before our 1 o’clock practice. It was tourist school/hotel where the students, in their school uniforms were working in the hotel, cleaning rooms, serving food, working the front desk. On the second floor you could literally walk into the school. We watched film in a classroom one morning. It was the strangest thing. Anyway, we get to the gym at 12:45 at exactly the time another team is walking up. And of course, we both had practice scheduled at the same time. So we have a 45 minute break where Meek and I go in frantic search of some coffee or tea. I am seriously struggling at this point and my throat keeps reminding me of how little rest I got. So we start walking, and walking, and asking every business owner, from a restaurant to a bakery to a hair salon where we can possibly get chai. But its Ramazan and the whole city is fasting until 7 pm and we can’t find anything with caffeine. This just doesn’t happen in Turkey, chai and Nescafe are sold on the street and in every shop you can imagine; from carpet shops to travel agencies. Finally we find an upscale café and sit and drink some instant energy. It doesn’t work and I go into practice feeling like I was run over by a truck.
The next five days were a bit of a blur. I got pretty sick with a sore throat and runny nose and we played every day in the morning or mid afternoon. So I sucked it up in the morning, wore my body down every afternoon, and slept the rest of the day. They don’t seem to have Nyquil here so I drank hot lemon tea from a pharmacy to help me sleep. It was miserable. Every morning I woke up and we all ate breakfast together in the hotel, bread with butter and honey, tomatoes and cucumbers, Turkish cheese and salami, boiled eggs, and coffee or tea. And for the next two meals we ate at the same Turkish restaurant. Five days, 10 meals, all at the same place. It seemed like every four hours we were back on the bus going to a feast of food at the same restaurant. Great food, wonderful people working there who actually started coming to our games. Gifts were exchanged when we left, t shirts for them, cheese for us. We ate Turkish soup (which is now my favorite), kebap, Turkish pizza, flat bread, rice and baked meat, yoghurt, and pickled vegetables. Every meal was excellent. But it was just overkill. By the fifth meal I didn’t want to see food again. I felt like I was on a cruise.
On the fourth day in Kayseri, however, my brother Jordan arrives which made everything seem better. He came to every game, walked around the city, found a Turkish bath, and ate with our team at the Turkish restaurant. It was so nice to have him there but he soon realized that I was a bit of a prisoner to our team. He kept saying it was like I was in the military and how the inmates were running the asylum. By the second day he stopped himself every time he began to ask me what was going on, what the schedule was, what the plan was for the rest of the day. I barely knew what time our game was the next day or had the game and opponent wrong because someone told me the wrong thing. Every night we met with our coaches and watched film, of us, of the next opponent and talked about what we need to improve on and scouted for the next game. Then we met in the morning before we left the hotel in case the two hours of film the night before wasn’t enough. One night he seriously has us in the auditorium of the hotel until 11 o’clock at night with wake up calls at 7:30 the next morning, stopping at literally each offensive and defensive possession and telling us what we did wrong. And I was sick so I wanted to punch him in the face I was so tired.
The tournament was fine, we went 2-3 but with a young team, we seem to be improving a lot. Our first league game is this next weekend so it will be nice to finally be playing for something that counts. The refs were beyond terrible again but our captain keeps telling me I haven’t seen anything until we play away games outside of Istanbul where the games are more like boxing matches. My favorite memory was running out for a game with fifty 9 year old boys in the stands from the nearby school yelling and heckling us. Little crazed futbol fans in the making no doubt. Give them a couple of years and they will be the adolescent males with their shirts off in the cold, waving flags, and banging drums. I don’t know what they were saying but they were clearly cheering for the other team. So cute.
We finished our final game on Sunday afternoon at 2 o’clock. We had wisely checked out of the hotel, so after showering at the gym there was plenty of time to get back to Istanbul at a reasonable hour. I couldn’t wait to get on the bus and relax and get home. But we all knew it wouldn’t be that easy. My brother was traveling with us now and was well aware from his experience and our stories of what he was in for…. Sort of.
We started putting bets on how many times we would stop. The import players and my brother that is. I don’t think the Turkish players thought there was anything unusual about the whole trip. Anyway, we put the over/under at 5 stops. I chose over. Sure enough there were almost 5 stops before we even left Kayseri. We went to eat one last time at our favorite restaurant and watched the rain pour down outside, eating Turkish soup and chicken kebap. Then we puddle jumped our way to the bus, two young Turkish boys screaming at us from an upstairs apartment window, bored from being forced inside from the rain. Then it was time to stop at a pastrami shop, cured beef being the regional specialty. Everyone unloaded the bus and crammed into small shops with sausages hanging in the window, sampling meats and buying gifts for their families. Jordan and I bought some and made our way back to the bus where we waited for a good 30 minutes for our coaches, teammates, managers and bus drivers. What they
were doing for 45 minutes in a meat shop I’ll never know. Then it was back to the gym where we had to pick up our captains bag because….. I don’t have a clue. That’s three stops.
Its pouring outside and our coaches decide that we are going to stop in Cappedocia where caves are carved out of 30 million year old volcanic rock. Its supposed to be a must see in Turkey and I did want to see it. So we make our way to Cappedocia while our coach puts the game film from that afternoon, we lost obviously, in the bus dvd player and gets on the microphone to dissect every play. There we are driving through the Turkish countryside, seeing fields of gold and yellows, small villages of shacks, and strange plants I have never seen before, while our coach stops and rewinds, criticizes and rewinds over the microphone. It was my idea of hell.
Finally we arrive in Cappedocia and stop at a cave viewing area. The museum is closed so we all
start climbing around the caves, taking pictures and watching stray puppies run down steeps hills playing in the fading day light. It got dark pretty quickly but we got to see a fair amount of caves, carved into the cliffs or built into mushroom shaped cones of rock. After a bit it was time to load onto the bus. I decided there was no way our coach could possibly put the film back on after jumping out from behind the caves trying to scare people. Thank god I was right.
We drove for another 15 minutes into town where we stopped again. That is five stops and we haven’t gone 40 miles towards Istanbul. We unload the bus and everyone goes to the bathroom in the most disgusting public toilets I have seen and then convened outside. My brother and the other imports are there and we are all confused and looking at each other. Finally we get word that we are staying in this deserted tourist town for another hour and a half. Why? Not really sure. But its raining and cold and dark and now 8
o’clock at night and we aren’t on our way home. Plus all of us are wearing our team windbreakers, with all our other clothes in the damn bottom of the bus.
We are standing outside the bathroom in the dark after squatting over disgusting Turkish toilets and wondering what in the hell we are doing in a deserted tourist town. I try to ask my coaches but get different answers each time I ask. “The bus driver has to eat because he has been fasting for Ramazan.” As if it makes perfect sense for everyone to wait when we could have driven and then stopped when he had to eat. Plus, after digesting his ridiculous answer, Marita says that we saw him eating with us at lunch to which we all agree. “The bus driver wants to drive at night.” To which I reply ‘get a new bus driver’. At this point I am still slightly amused by the whole thing, not completely chilled to the bone yet and not as tired or irritated as I will be soon. So, I settle into the old man’s club and play cards with my teammates D and G and my brother as old men bring us chai. We aren’t really supposed to be in their special club but they didn’t seem to mind, they were busy smoking
water pipe, playing backgammon, and watching futbol. It was clearly the happening place in town. After teaching my teammates ‘hearts’ and drinking my limit of chai we take to the streets, convinced it has to be time to leave finally. We don’t know where anyone is, the bus is locked, and it is now raining and getting cold. This is the girl that was sick for a week because of their dumb idea to take an overnight bus ride and now I am out shivering in the cold with my brother’s arm around me trying to keep me warm. At this point my ability to see the good in people or laugh at cultural differences is expired and my patience has reached its limit. There are cultural differences, and then there is just plain stupid. So we walk around the shops, buying trinkets at a store where every centimeter of space is occupied by something old, the ceiling, all the walls, covered with jewelery, guns, antique
collectibles. Then it was into the carpet shops where old men were playing instruments and singing. We huddled around and looked at carpets, listened to music, and generally stayed because it was slightly warm.
Finally our coaches and the rest of the team show up looking like they were on vacation and just finished an exhilarating day of sightseeing. ‘What the hell are you so happy about’ I am thinking to myself. "Where's your coat?" they ask and I about lose it. “Its on the freaking BUS!” Finally after a good 6 hours of NOTHING but wasted time, we load the bus. After making a mile turn around and all of us joking that we are headed back to the gym, we circle through the town and get going on the road. Its now nearly 11 o’clock at night and I settled into my uncomfortable seat and watch the bootleg dvd that has constant digital issues until my eyes hurt.
At about 1 a.m we stop to eat because we haven’t eaten dinner. Jordan, Meek, Marita and I huddle over our Turkish food and wonder what idiot dreamed this whole trip up. I have never wanted to be home so badly, and by home I mean Istanbul. At this point I know for sure that I will never be making another overnight bus trip regardless of what the team plans. We could have flown to Kayseri for probably $150 dollars and saved ourselves from the misery. Of course then we wouldn’t have such a great story.
After eating we load the bus up again and I get on the floor, sleeping under peoples legs and once again feeling every crack in the road on my spine. It was a long, uncomfortable, and cold night. We road over the Bosphorus bridge early in the morning and made our way to our club house at about 8:00am. After unloading and watching our teammates walk away we stood on the curb with our coach and manager and waited. Our service bus doesn’t start working until 8:30 so we had to wait for them to arrive. I think that is one of the other idiotic reasons we left central Turkey so late, as if we can’t take a taxi home. At this point I can’t even look at anyone from our team’s management without feeling great feelings of contempt. I am SO tired and really don’t have patience for them roughhousing on the curb with energy to spare asking me if I slept well. “What the hell do you think? I slept on a freaking bus.”
Finally the service picks us up and I proceed to ask my other coach whose genius idea it was to drive overnight, hoping that there was at least some logical reason for all of our discomfort. No luck. Got the answer about the driver preferring it or something ridiculous. Finally we arrived home and Jord and I slept for hours before getting up and wandering around the city.
All in all it was the trip from hell and looking back I can laugh. In the midst of the madness however, I could hardly believe that any sane person could allow a trip to unfold how it did. This is when living overseas is not all at romantic and only serves to remind you that cultural norms run deep.....
