WHY:

After seven years working in the City of Toronto Clerk’s Department I took a secondment to ICLEI, an international environmental NGO. A year later I was finally able to take advantage of the ‘international’ part of ICLEI. My first trip was to a board meeting in Bursa, Turkey.

WHEN:

It was March 1998, not the most appealing season to land first in Frankfurt to change planes and then in Istanbul. I arrived early morning in 12 degrees Celsius, warmer than the -5 I’d left behind but still not balmy. But the good news about going to a tourist destination in the off season is the streets are clear of travellers. At least it seemed like a good thing.

WHO:

ICLEI’s board was composed of mayors and other senior municipal politicians and bureaucrats from around the globe. The Mayor of Bursa, a mountain town a two hour drive from Istanbul, was our local host, and a lovely man. On that trip I also met the mayors of other cities that would later host us, including Margaret Evans of Hamilton, New Zealand who I remember being particularly warm to me on that trip, despite me being at least 10 years younger than everyone else and in some cases, 35 years younger.   

MEMORABLE MOMENTS:

As the junior staff person on the trip, I was responsible for helping our delegation get to Bursa and so I arrived a day early so I could manage my jet lag to my best for the dignitaries. I assumed this was on my own dime so I booked myself a hotel. I don’t recall telling our local hosts I was arriving early so imagine my shock when I walked out of the secure area in the airport to find someone holding a sign with my name on it! Bewildered and unnerved, I nevertheless got into his car and was taken to the Kalyon, a 4 star hotel on the waterfront, and not the one I’d paid for. My driver spoke no English and my Turkish is non-existent, so, flummoxed, I took my luggage and checked into the room that apparently my local hosts had arranged and paid for.

Thus began one of the weirdest and most unnerving mornings I’ve had. After orienting myself to the room and showering, I decided to walk the kilometre up a hill to the Blue Mosque, one of Istanbul’s most famous historic sites. Clearly the men of Istanbul have not seen a lot of North American women out on the streets alone. I was one of one on this March morning. I was bombarded by unwanted attention. Mostly in Turkish of course, but at one point someone hurled the English word “vegetarian” at me which still makes no sense. I didn’t get far on my site-seeing before returning to the Kalyon. I spent the day in bed watching BBC World News. An inauspicious start. (After our Bursa meetings, I returned to Istanbul with the group and we did a tour of all the major sites including the spectacular Blue Mosque)

While that unpleasantness unfortunately holds the top spot for memorability, I enjoyed many other more pleasant times, including a trip by coach from Bursa to a seaside town for a remarkable seafood dinner with entertainment and the good company of our delegation.

WHAT DID I LEARN:

A woman traveling alone is a mark - or was 25 years ago. That failed first attempt to see the Blue Mosque has stuck with me.

While in Bursa, I had to fix some numbers in our financial statements before board review. No laptops in those days - I was working on the computer of one of our local hosts. Excel was already pretty universal but the language of the commands varies. I looked to click “OK” to accept my changes and guessed that Tamam was the right choice. I was able to dredge this tiny bit of Turkish from the memory bank last summer when my first tenants, the Turkish couple, arrived. To my delight!

I was on our coach in Istanbul sitting beside the head of our European office. Environmentalists can be a quirky bunch and Konrad is no exception. And, well, it takes quirky to know quirky:-) We were stopped at a traffic light and out the window we could saw a word emblazoned on the minivan in the lane beside us: Emenunu.* It was pre-cellphone and so we were left to our own interpretation of what this beautiful word might mean. Not quite palindromic (I’m a big fan) but balanced in its own way. Flooring, delivery service, plumber, sign painter, bread. We threw out potential meanings and marvelled together at the word that day and for the five years of working together that followed. If I landed in Freiburg, Germany today and looked Konrad up, we’d soon be chuckling over Emenunu together over a kaffee. The message? In-jokes develop in the strangest circumstances and the love of language is not language-bound. The lesson was hammered home in my nine years with my Polish-speaking husband, Jack, as I wrote about in a blog called A Bidiot and a Smart-Panties Fall in Love.

It was a great trip to Turkey. One day I may return to visit the first family who lived in my rental home. You can read about them in my blog, What some do to be Canadian.

*Wikipedia tells me Emenunu is an area in Istanbul.

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