Frustration

I've been feeling frustrated this week.

The holiday is more than over and it's time to get back to life. Sometimes I find it hard to get my head around things and to accept them as a natural, normal part of life living in Turkey. And this week has been full of those kinds of thoughts.

I could rant and rave about all the hopeless things like dangerous ankle-breaking footpaths, half made roads and no street drains to drain the last four days of continual rain so that when a car goes past you don't get soaked, but I won't bore you with that.

I went out for dinner last night with a great group of mostly expat girls. It was a last minute hook up and we headed to Banyan in Nişantaşı for a "Thai" dinner. Now, I know Thai food, and I can easily say that this was more of an Asian mix as opposed to straight Thai, but certainly a nice change all the same.

It was six girls, some of whom are working in the same sector as myself, and another as a teacher. We shared the usual stories of the"lost in translation" communications we have with people, the general chaos that we struggle to get used to and the one question we seemed to all get asked: why are you here?

I must say, I get this question more often than not. The girls say they also get the question from people (Turks) who simply cannot understand why anyone would want to come and live here.

I guess my reason is most valid, being married to a Turk and all, along with one other girl, but for the others who are foreigners or Turks who have lived abroad for their whole lives and returned in the last year or two, Turkish people cannot understand why they would want to leave their great lands to come and live here.

We find the question strange. Because people ask us why we are here and not in our own countries, but they themselves who ask the question, ask it like they wish they weren't here either.

Do Turks get as fed up as the foreigners? Do they feel the same frustrations as us about the day-to-day challenges?

If you never lived anywhere else in the world, how would you know that your country is worse than mine if you have nothing to compare your own country to?

One of the girls reported that she was finding it hard to meet a decent man here. She said that every time she met one and they realised she was in fact Turkish, given her very strong American accent, they would ask if she has American and/or dual citizenship. She said that without fail this question was asked by all men.

So, the question is: Is it that Turks want to be elsewhere than here, or is it that they wished that we just stayed in our own countries?