Turkish Norms and Culture

Wow, I clearly had no idea what I was signing up for when I chose to do my exchange program in Turkey. I think it was a combination of seeking adventure and being naive that brought me here. 

Turkish norms and culture are very different from the U.S. For starters, the U.S. is a very developed, westernized country and Turkey is a developing, trying-to-be-westernized country. Also, the U.S. is a highly individualistic country and Turkey is a collective society. Just these differences alone have huge implications and make daily life for me challenging because differences come out in even the smallest of events. 

The language barrier is by far the thing that makes living here difficult. By not being able to read or speak Turkish, I am essentially illiterate. Living independently and trying to accomplish mundane tasks when you cannot read or speak the language is a tremendous challenge. For example, I went to the grocery store the other day and made the mistake of not taking my Turkish phrase book with me. I needed a shopping cart but did not know where they were so I did hand signals with a guy for about 5mins before he realized what I wanted. I usually make pasta because the foods sold in grocery stores are very different from the U.S. so I make pasta often because that's a food that I actually recognize and know how to make (and don't need to be able to read the cooking instructions on the back). I do my food shopping by examining packaging and looking at pictures. Yogurt milk is very popular here and it is packaged exactly like milk so I accidentally bought yogurt milk instead of milk. The next morning I had it with cereal and was convinced I had bought sour milk until I looked up the words for milk and yogurt milk and realized I bought the wrong thing. I didn't want to waste food so I ended up eating the cereal with sour yogurt milk. I obviously quickly learned the Turkish word for milk. 

Turkey and the US are very different in the way people think about things and the way things are done here. The ideas of discipline and structure are not part of Turkish culture. So the idea that someone would create a schedule, stick to it and successfully accomplish what was supposed to be done just doesn't exist here. The reason this doesn't happen is because if a person doesn't stick to the schedule or do what they were supposed to do, there is no one to hold them accountable and the person never feels that it was important anyway. The ideas of accountability and responsibility are completely absent here. This was very difficult for me to grasp when I first started school here because I actually assumed that the people in the administrative offices at school would actually do what they told me they were going to do. I realized I was making assumptions that people feel a sense of responsibility to get my request done; they don't. I was also making the assumption that people enjoy their jobs and are self-motivated to work; they aren't. These were assumptions I had brought with me from the U.S.

People think and operate in completely different ways than they do in the U.S. When someone tells me they are going to do something I just assume that its not going to be done or it will take on average 5 days longer than they originally said it would be completed. There is no trust in transactions between people and so I still wonder to this day how this society manages to operate when the idea of trust does not exist? All the things I've mentioned is part of the reason why things in society either don't operate or they operate with much lower standards for quality and time than they do in the U.S. There is tremendous bureaucracy and inefficiency in the way pretty much everything is done here. From the bus system, to the school registration process to the way people think. It is completely engrained in society.

Since I am a person that thinks logically and tries to do things in an efficient manner, life was very frustrating, stressful and confusing for me during my first month. I can only laugh now at the difficult adjustment I went through and be proud at how much I have adapted. I am way lazier than I am in the U.S. and I don't have the ambition and drive that I do when I am at home. Its not that I want to be this way, its that in order for me to live successfully in this society I have to be this way or I will find myself unhappy all the time if I try to think and operate as if I'm in the U.S.

I have talked to some students here who have done exchange programs in the U.S. or western European countries and some of them loved it and some of them hated it. For those that hated it, they said they did not like all the rules and all the structure and the fact that people were punctual. They said they felt like they had to be a machine and they're not a machine; they're human!