Love Letter: Old Turkish Men

For last six-ish months, since we moved here in October, I've been following a fairly regular yoga schedule. (Side note: Cihangir Yoga could get a love letter all its own, but there is just too much to love in Istanbul so it can only get a side note.) Which means I walk the same route at the same time every other day to get to my yoga studio. Which means I encounter the same people on this walk.

Right when I moved here, I noticed that at one of the corner mosques on my route there were three old men (70+) who sat on a corner with their dogs, rain or shine. They would often say things to me in Turkish, and I would just smile and say "Merhaba" (hello) and move right on along to yoga.

This continued for a couple months, and my vocabulary increased to such advanced phrases such as "Gunaydin" (good morning) and "Iyi Gunler" (good day). The men would always talk to me in full Turkish sentences, I never really understood what was going on, but I always enjoyed our encounters.

Over the last couple months, whenever I would see any of them around the neighborhood we would stop and do our chatting (which wasn't chatting at all since my Turkish is still pretty abysmal and their English is nonexistent.) It mostly just included a lot of smiling and nodding. Once I was sitting at a cafe drinking tea with Matt when one of them came up to us and gave me a bouquet of flowers out of a garbage bag. Matt was kind of weirded out by this but I explained he was just my old Turkish man friend, so no worries.

Then we were sitting drinking beer outside of a bar a couple weeks ago and one walked by us. He came back and gave me another bouquet of flowers that had clearly just come out of a garbage bag. He explained to Matt in Turkish that I was his friend from the Cihangir neighborhood so he wanted to give me flowers.

Finally, yesterday, on my last day of yoga in Istanbul, I said my goodbyes and was given another bouquet of flowers that had just come out of a garbage bag.

It's weird having friends who are fifty years older than you, don't speak your language, and like to give you gifts out of trash bags. Weird but good.

(Note: First two pictures are not mine, but from google image searching. I've never gotten up the guts to ask my friends for pictures.)