the dilettante's guide to life

these ways are not my ways
2003-10-31 @ 6:20 p.m.

This is the second part of a two-part essay. You may want to read the first part first, if you haven't already.

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Ramadan is called Ramazan in Turkey, and Eid al-Fitr is called Şeker Bayrami, or Sugar Festival. The Sugar Festival is the three day festival (public holidays in Turkey) marking the end of Ramadan. This made a sort of sense to me, as I had been mentally equating Ramadan with Lent.

I do that often-- drawing analogies between my own culture and experiences in an attempt to understand another's. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. In Turkey, I constantly found myself comparing and contrasting Islam with my own Catholicism. In a lot of ways, I think, Lent and Ramadan are similar. Both are times of reflection, self-denial and devotion to God. However, the purpose of Lent is to prepare oneself for Easter, whereas Ramadan is an observance in and of itself. Still, at the end of both there is a party of some sort: Easter dinner (and whatever the Easter Bunny brought, if you're a child); versus the Sugar Festival, which I assumed was pretty much three days of partying and pigging out. Three days to Easter's one, but since Ramadan is so much more strict than Lent, it seemed pretty reasonable to me.

On the first day of the Sugar Festival, I opened the door to our apartment to two young boys, asking for-- or rather, demanding-- sugar. I thought that was pretty rude, but as the Turks are quite indugent with their children, and because my Turkish is so bad, I didn't tell them to ask again, and politely this time. It wasn't my place anyway. So I just asked them how much their mother wanted. One glass? Two?

Mama, I soon found out, didn't want any sugar. THEY wanted sugar.

I was pretty confused at the time. They could see that, because one of them helpfully started shouting out the names of popular chocolate bars, while the other rummaged around in his pocket and came up with piece of candy. That's when I got it. Not sugar. Sweets.

This is where the Halloween element comes in: apparently, the Sugar Festival involved an element of Trick-or-Treating, only without the costumes and (I hoped), without the tricks. Why didn't somebody warn me? Or were they just playing "let's mess with the foreigner"? I didn't have any candy to give them, so I gave them money instead. I was pretty sure they liked that better, anyway, and was positive they did when the older boy showed up a while later, two other mates in tow, demanding more "sugar".

Even so, I decided to buy some candy when I went to the grocery store later. We were never short of small change in Turkey, but the festival was three days long and I had no idea if I'd have kids showing up at my door for all of them. In any case, I had to go out anyway, to buy catfood and milk.

Which is when I got my second suprise of the festival: the grocery store was closed. That, I did not expect. True, it was a holiday, but the grocery had been open all during Ramadan. What about all those Turkish women preparing their holiday feasts and running out of a critical ingredient in the middle, as you do. What were they supposed to do?

Plan well in advance, apparently.

Luckily, across the street from our building was a little store that was open, if only for a few hours. They sold nuts, candy, cigarettes and beverages, including milk. I bought a bag of candy, too-- the same kind as the guy ahead of me bought. What they didn't sell, however, was catfood.

I cursed myself for not buying catfood the day before. We hadn't had Calliope that long, and even though I had had cats before, I simply wasn't used to having it on my list. The grocery kept it tucked away in the corner, by some other stuff I never needed, so I had no visual reminders, either. I went home and tried to feed Calliope tuna.

Calliope, it turned out, doesn't like tuna.

She still doesn't. She is quite possibly the only cat in the world who won't come running for a bowl of tuna water. Once I gave her some mixed fish catfood that had some tuna in it (bought by mistake), and she ate it, although it gave her the runs, so maybe that's it. Whatever the reason, though, Calliope was not going to eat that tuna. She planted herself in front of me and stared until I cooked her a chicken chicken breast, since that was the only suitable thing I had in the fridge.

She still wasn't happy. She was used to the nice, soft, smelly Whiskas kitten formula. We'd had her two or three weeks, and already she was spoiled rotten. She ate it though, eventually. These days, she loves it, and whenever Elvis has a rotisserie chicken for dinner she sits on the floor, staring up at him, waiting for her cut. If he's not eating fast enough, she'll hop up onto a chair so he can see her better, or onto the table until she's shooed off.

I spent the next days going into whatever shop was open-- and there weren't many, especially until day three-- asking if they carried catfood. None did. One guy sent me to the pharmacy, which I thought was strange. Still, I went in and asked, and the guy behind the counter didn't have any, and laughed at me to boot.

On the last day of the Sugar Festival, we went spent the day with L., a Turkish friend we had made, who took us up to a pretty little village on the Bosphorus. I saw a little general store sort of place, and asked L. if he would mind if we stopped in. I had my routine down pat at this point. Go in, take a quick look around, and when I failed to see any catfood, ask. Which I did, which is when L. started laughing. Hysterically. He was a big guy--and, unusually for a Turk, as tall as Elvis-- and he had a big, booming laugh. The guy who I'd asked hadn't answered, and stared at me for a bit, and then he started laughing, too.

Apparently, I'd spent the last three days, going into shops all over Istanbul, telling anyone who would listen that I want to eat cats.

Turns out, the Turkish words for people food and animal food are different. Who knew? L. got a lot of mileage out of the story, though. Calliope got another chicken breast. I enlarged my vocabulary, although it would have been better had I done so before going shopping.

The tuna remained untouched. It went brown around the edges and, the next morning, it was thrown away.

As was the candy. Only one more set of kids turned up. The looked disappointed at the candy, and I figured they had heard that the stupid foreign lady was handing out free cash.

Until, that is, I ate some. I don't know who the guy in front of me at the store was buying it for, but it was truly nasty stuff. Evidently, it was for someone he didn't like very much.

The following day, it was business as usual. I bought some catfood.

I went to the grocery store, so I didn't have to ask.

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