A wedding in Ankara, real original!

The Prologue

Chapter I: The Wedding

When arguably my two best Turkish friends invited me to their wedding in Ankara with 4 months’ notice, I only swore at them for a second before I tripped over myself to change all my preexisting travel plans to the Faroe Islands for that weekend. I am generally obsessed with Turkey, so there was absolutely no way I was going to miss the chance to witness a Turkish wedding. Technically Ata and Serap had already gotten married in a Berlin courthouse, but thanks to the c-word none of us friends or family had been able to attend. Now, almost two years later, their parents were finally throwing them a reception with an open bar and we’d all been invited to come and help bankrupt them.

Before I’d even arrived in Turkey I’d been lumped into a WhatsApp group chat with “the foreigners,” and honestly, that was a pretty apt description. We were a motley crüe assembled from the four corners of the world who’d crossed paths in Freiburg, Germany circa 2015 A.D. and then come together again seven years later in Turkey. I already knew at least one half of every foreign couple present, but “knew” was a relative term based on uni-shenanigans. Most of us had been drinking buddies of the purest caliber, the kind where I could tell you their names and probable countries of origin but only ever saw them (maybe) sober in the wee hours of a party. Not a particularly conducive environment to building lasting friendships. Talking to them at 34, though, I was surprised to find how much I liked them as people. It’s hard to say if they’d always been this cool and I’d been too much of a dickhead to notice (probably), or if we’d just finally evolved into something like functional and intelligent adults (definitely, in my case).

Drinking buddy shenanigans. Top left was my first real night out in Freiburg, where I met with a group of Couchsurfers including some dude named Ata.

Ankara is not a foreign tourist destination per se, so we were a bunch of English-German-Spanish-speaking fish lost in a Turkish sea. Even the receptionists and baristas at our business-oriented hotel spoke about three words of English apiece. I’d started to think the long-suffering bartender would murder us all, but we surprised each other on the day of the wedding when I ordered my beyaz şarap in Turkish and she told me the bill amount in English (a number I’d long since memorized, but still, it’s the thought that counts). Look at us being part of a functioning global society.

Sitting by the pool with my pregame wine in one hand and a Turkish coffee in the other – balance is important at my age – I watched as the local guests started to arrive. Ata led over his gang of undergrad Turkish uni friends and introduced them to us en masse: “As you can see, all my friends are dudes.” I guess that means Shreya and Laura and I are chopped liver. It’s always a gamble when different friend-bubbles collide, especially cross-culturally – will we all get along because we all like the mutual friend, or does the mutual friend have split personalities? This time we all seamlessly merged into a giant mutant bubble. Finally some good news about Ata’s personality.

Probably the most stereotypical part about the whole wedding was our general foreign confusion about the procession. We were herded around like sheep, told when to assemble and smile and go up the mountain. This worked until we arrived at the reception hall unchaperoned and found a gauntlet of parents and grandparents waiting to welcome us into the wedding. Most of them didn’t speak any English and they just stood there staring at us. What were we supposed to do now – bow? Give cheek kisses? Finally I went Full American and just started shaking all their hands, including the grandmas in their hijabs. I was not arrested, so no harm no foul.

The reception was similar to Western ones at its core but embellished with unfamiliar flair. There was the ritualistic cake cutting and the gorgeous white dress and a bouquet toss where my fellow single lady Shreya tried to hide behind me until I swung us around and used her as a shield instead. Checkmate skinny people. Meanwhile there was also a seven-piece Turkish orchestra and gold coins being pinned to the groom’s suit and rakı in place of vodka and periods of dancing intercut with periods of eating. A hired personal attendant faithfully followed the bride Serap around all night, fixing her hair and bringing her water – where could I get one of my own? The grandparents, to their credit, all stayed until the very end.

Besides a few cover songs, I knew absolutely none of the music, but it didn’t matter. A full dance floor and a groovy beat is all I ever need to be on my feet more than in my seat. The local uni friends were kind enough to snag us whenever a traditional dance was coming up and did their best to show us how it worked – everyone crouching before the bride or linking pinkies and following the leader into a tightening coil around her. The only reminder that we weren’t quite free of covid times was the cold stop of music precisely at midnight. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. Fortunately the uni friends took charge again and asked us the pivotal question: did we want to continue dancing elsewhere, or quit and get some soup?

A rhetorical question if ever I’d heard one.

Chapter II: The Kite and The Soup

Sometimes when I dance to techno in the dark, I lose track of who I am and which planet I’m on and where the boundaries of myself are. I often shut my eyes to further the effect of this lovely drug that’s free of any hangover besides maybe some sore muscles or muffled eardrums the next day. 

In other words, I kept forgetting there were other people around me in this club called Kite until a tall dark shadow came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and yelled something in Turkish. Over the soul-shattering beat, I somehow made him understand that I didn’t understand, so he switched to broken English and yelled “I like you dance…” he trailed off and grabbed his phone. Up came Google Translate (how did people flirt across languages before this app existed, carry around paper dictionaries?). He held the blinding screen in front of me and I read this flawless translation:

“I desire start relationship.”

Call me new-fashioned, but I don’t generally sign relationship contracts with people I’ve never spoken to and can’t even really see through the strobe lights, so I said no. However, with Turkish men, saying “no” is about as effective as lighting a citronella candle to ward off a mosquito that’s already buried face-deep in one of your veins. 

Unfortunately it’s culturally ingrained in me to smile at strangers even when I’m rejecting them; talk about shooting myself in the foot. Clearly emboldened, he went to hand me his phone and said, “you try.” I try what? I chicken-pecked “no” into the keyboard and smiled again in sheepish apology. Dammit! As he started typing again, the realization hit that I should’ve just been ignoring him and now any form of reply was being taken as encouragement. Life is short and men are dumb, so it was time to be direct. I went for the most idiot-proof method I could think of: the Fake Boyfriend.

If “no” is a citronella candle, a Fake Boyfriend is a flamethrower.

Of course, with flamethrowers there’s always a risk of getting burned. No one could hear a word I said, so I had to choose my accomplice very carefully – touching the wrong person might just get me two hovering mosquitos instead of one. I was surrounded by foreign male friends, but they were all spoken for and probably wouldn’t have taken well to being manhandled without explanation. Simon, who as my lawyer is contractually obligated to help me with such matters, was nowhere to be found. Then I saw one of the Turkish uni friends I barely knew, a gregarious type who would reflexively side-hug anyone without bothering to ask questions and also happened to be easy on the eyes just in case I was, in fact, choosing poorly. Perfect. In a split second I’d flown over and taken shelter under his outstretched arm. It worked like a charm: Google Translate Mosquito Guy materialised at my elbow, apologised, and disintegrated back into the gloom.

Incidentally, this encounter charted the course for the rest of the night. I’d accosted my partner-in-crime just as he was headed out for some “fresh air,” and Shreya and I tagged along to rest our weary feet. That was the last we’d see of our other 15 friends; as we lingered on the pavement outside, every single one of them would Irish exit on us, slipping out of the club and into cabs while our backs were turned. Unbelievable…who would do such a thing?

Like any first conversation among strangers, we three started with lighthearted topics like foreign politics and the choking ennui of being over 30. A parade of people marched around us as the cigarettes grew short – clubgoers needing a light or a guy ineffably selling mussels at 3 a.m. or bouncers shushing us because there were students living nearby who had an important exam the next day. Shreya and I were borrowed to human-traffic a pair of men into the club, since the bouncers wouldn’t let them in without a member of the fairer sex on each of their arms. I guess the Fake Girlfriend ploy has its uses too. We shook them off inside the club and finally discovered both that we’d been abandoned and that the techno had taken on a decidedly harder edge. No worries – we had other important drunk people things to do anyway. 

The time, you see, had finally come for The Soup.

In Germany, the traditional end-of-night-out meal is a Turkish döner kebap. Ironically, in Turkey, they opt for lentil soup. It was 4 a.m. when we arrived at Devrez, but even so it was overflowing with people dressed to the nines. We managed to elbow our way to a table where a gang of waiters in sky-blue shirts buzzed around us. One put down a plastic sheet and heaped fresh salad directly atop it. Another slung around bowls of beige soup. A third brought some weird black lumps made from beans and a fourth carried bottles of water, since the tap water isn’t potable. Last came a round of the ubiquitous black tea, which is extremely bad manners to refuse regardless of the hour. Nothing like an infusion of jetfuel-strength caffeine right before going to sleep.

Except that wasn’t in the cards yet either. It seemed none of us three wanted the night to end, so instead of hailing cabs to our repsective homes we took a hike through the streets of Ankara under the pre-dawn sky. The route under our feet was far more direct than the path of our collective thoughts. I didn’t know where we were headed in either case, but it didn’t matter. We’d finally made it to the good deep topics – existential crises and the nature of human morality and the definition of love – each of us talking our own path even as we walked three abreast on a sidewalk that narrowed and broke and widened again. The red-thread question of the night, the question of the weekend really, was whether any of us are actually achieving our shared millennial dream of making the world a better place. Judging by the laughter, I like to think we managed something along those lines during that night on the town, even if only for a few hours, even if only for each other.

Chapter III: Ankara 

Taking a taxi in Turkey is an adrenaline sport. Any lines painted on the road are purely decorative and all speed limits are user-defined. You’ll either get a driver who can glance once at an address on the opposite side of the city and take a direct backroad route, or a driver who starts Google navigation on your phone and holds it in his lap and then still can’t get there without four U-turns and a dead stop on the highway so he can reverse to take a missed exit while a police car with its lights flashing just sails on by. There is no in-between. And yet it’s all calibrated chaos. Drivers have the defense-offense balance of the Packers’ 1996 Super Bowl team and each one knows the exact boundaries of his car down to the millimeter. Regardless of which driver type we got, I’d roll down the window and bask in the Middle Eastern sun, always looking sideways out the window rather than straight down the road. I’d prefer to be blindsided by my death than watch it come head-on.

The first driver we got was a Type I who smoothly delivered us to Junk Vegan restaurant on his first attempt. It was single ladies’ brunch time, all three of us having woken up too late for the hotel breakfast and in desperate need of grease. Gloria and Shreya are veg[etari]ans who’d been having a hell of a time finding suitable food in Ankara, and I wasn’t picky as long as there was also salt and caffeine involved.

The second driver could barely see the map on my phone, but after he put on his cheaters and squinted at the address, he got us to Hamamönü district unscathed. We spilled out onto the baking street and then it was my turn to get lost while following navigation, although to be fair it was a moving target created by Simon and Laura’s live location as they moseyed around, just far enough ahead of us that we could never quite catch up. At least our tame goose chase led us through a cute post-stamp-sized tourist quarter filled with shops selling random assortments of things and youths having dance-offs to wild drums. I finally heard some other Statesider accents and decided it was time to leave. As we crossed into the castle district Shreya noted how weird it was to be wandering the streets that had shaped our mutual friend, although we’d all met him after he’d left that strange metropolis and it was hard to see him in those chaotic streets.

The third driver back to our hotel-home was the textbook definition of Type II. But it was fine; my death remained at a respectable distance and even taking the scenic route only cost us about 4 Euro. And really, we were only in our 30s. We had all the time in the world.

All excellent things must come to an end and on Monday I finally had to leave this fantasy world. Sitting on the plane to Germany and somewhere over Romanian airspace, I was choked with unexpected gratitude that, seven years prior, I’d put myself first and taken the great leap forward onto this continent. There’s no telling who I’d have been if I’d stayed in the United States, but I am damn sure that the person I’ve become since meeting all these excellent people and living all these experiences is finally someone I like. Someone who can make the best of split-second decisions and handle their repercussions for better or worse. Someone who doesn’t hold back from plunging deep into whatever culture or discussion or new friendship I find myself faced with.

Someone who isn’t nearly done yet.