Yesterday evening when I returned home from my Turkish class, I was called into the living room where my grandparents were sitting on the couch and watching television. I kissed them as usual on the cheeks and sat down beside my grandfather, who was smiling profusely. "Yarın köye gideceğiz!" he told me - "Tomorrow we will go to the village!".
So this afternoon, after a long and leisurely morning of a late breakfast (delicious, as always), shower, and general laziness around the apartment, we (my aunt, grandmother, grandfather and I) set out for the village. We drove first by the tall apartment complexes in the area surrounding my apartment. Then we drove farther out, as the apartments began to thin and turn into smaller houses. The lake came into view - the giant lake that marks the boundary between urban and rural Adana. We crossed the bridge and looked out over the water, which stretched to the horizon in both directions. "Deniz gibi!" exclaimed my grandmother - "It's like the sea!". Indeed it did seem like we were crossing the sea, crossing over into a different world, for across the bridge tumbled out hills and valleys, green rolling fields of barely sprouting wheat, herds of cattle and packs of chickens and hordes of wild dogs that roamed beside and across the dirt, bumpy roads upon which we traveled. The early afternoon sunlight illuminated the colors: the blue of the water, the green of the grass, the bright but fading browns, reds, and yellows of the small houses we passed.
Finally as we rounded a bend, I glimpsed a minaret to the left, peeking out over the trees, and on my right I saw a small house with several people outside. My grandfather pulled over the car - we had arrived. A man came up to the car to greet us. "Selam aleykum!" called out my grandfather as he got out of the car. This isn't a greeting I hear used often in the city - a phrase that comes from Arabic that means basically "Peace be with you". One woman was perched on a stool by an fire pit, frying chunks of fish in a pan. Everyone was wearing şalvar, pants that the more traditional people, both men and women, wear here. All the women had their heads covered with beautifully colorful, floral scarves. They smiled, greeted us, and kissed us as we walked up and introduced ourselves. They immediately sat us down outside in plastic chairs around a wooden table they had set up and covered with a red cotton tablecloth. A woman brought over a giant platter filled with freshly caught and freshly fried fish, thin tortilla-like bread, tomatoes, onions, lemons, peppers, and a big pitcher of water. We sat at the table and devoured our food, looking around as we ate at the chickens and roosters that bobbed around the table, the cow down the path who would occasionally look up at us, and the little girl who shyly smiled at us from the porch.
I was still confused as to who exactly these people were (all I knew was that they were friends of my grandfather's, and my grandmother and aunt had never met them before) and why exactly we were there, but that is one of those things I've learned to accept here: go with the flow. Accept hospitality. Eat when you're given food. Answer questions when asked, and follow the example of the others. Most importantly, relax. And I did. After our bellies were completely full from the fish, which we ate with our fingers after squeezing lemon on top, we walked up to the porch and washed our hands from a little faucet. Then a smiling woman came up to us and offered "kolonya", which is like a cross between hand sanitizer and its namesake, cologne. We sat back down outside, looking over the view of the grassy fields, hills, and the lake below, easing into the seasonally uncharacteristic, soporific, warm weather.
And then they served us tea. As I took the first sip of tea out of my curved, glass cup, a sensory overload overtook me. Has anyone seen that movie "French Kiss" with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline? Probably not, but I'll go for it anyway: there is a scene where they are at Kevin Kline's family's home in France, and he shows Meg Ryan a box filled with jars with different scents in them. He has her smell a scent, then have a sip of her wine. With each scent she smells, she tastes something different in the wine. That's sort of how it was for me with my tea - all of a sudden I became aware of the many, many scents I was smelling through the taste of my tea. First I just tasted the tea. No sugar, not strong, not weak, normal tea. On my next sip I tasted the grass, the grass that was growing everywhere around me as far as I could see. Then I tasted the fire, its slowly burning embers roasting only feet away from me. I tasted the the cows - the manure, the mud - I tasted the chickens. I tasted the dust. I tasted the frying fish that still lingered in the air. I tasted the fumes of exhaust from the tractor that started up. I tasted the women who surrounded me and the men that were speaking in a circle apart from us and the little girl who was sitting on the porch. I tasted the air.
I ended up drinking three cups of that tea. By the time I had finished the second one, I had become more aware of where I was and more comfortable with where I was. I was, if not an equal participant in the conversation, at least able to understand and insert a phrase or two when I thought necessary. Now I'm not exactly sure how it came up, but the decision was made, by the laughing and jolly women, that they would take me inside and have me put on şalvar and a headscarf myself. So I went for the first time into the actual house, a small, one story place covered with many rugs, and was taken into a back room, where a woman handed me a pair of floral şalvar. I shed my jeans and donned this pair of what I confirmed to be the most comfortable kind of pants I have ever worn. The woman came back in and selected a pink headscarf for me. She tied it gently around my head, and then she walked me out to the porch for my debut.
As I walked out, all the women let out a roar of genuine and warm-hearted laughter. My aunt snapped photos of me with my camera, whose slick silver exterior seemed so out of place amongst the wood and grass and colorful fabrics. I walked down the front stairs and over to the chickens, who were clucking about on the ground and perching in a tree, and my aunt took another photo of me standing with them in the background, along with the lake and the hills behind them. The man who had greeted us at the car looked up from down a small hill, where he had been working, and exclaimed, "I thought she was a köylü!" - "I thought she was a villager!". I sat down beside the other women, dressed exactly like me (except I was still wearing my Converses) and had my third cup of tea, this time as one of them.
I finished that cup of tea and had a cup of Turkish coffee before my grandfather walked back up and said it was time to go. I walked back up the stairs and into the house and sadly took off my şalvar and headscarf and pulled my jeans back on. I walked out to see the women smile at me, say profuse good-byes, and wave as we pulled away, with promises of another visit. As we drove back through the hills, across the bridge, and back into the city, I marveled at the other world I had just visited. The sun set just as we were crossing the bridge. As dusk settled upon the windows of apartment buildings that were coming into view, as it settled its reflection upon the lake, as it settled over the villagers and the chickens and the cows, I leaned my head against my window, opened my eyes, and went along for the ride.
