A Romantic Pick From Turkey: Winter 2004-2005

I have traveled to the country of Turkey five times. Thrice I have resided there and worked as an English teacher teaching the language as a second language. When I tell people that I have lived and worked in Turkey as an English teacher, some ask me what language do the citizens of Turkey speak. Most have never heard of the Turkish language.

I had an intense love affair with the country from 2003 until this year. I never thought my love could be so fickle, but it receded into the mists. Now I have just both fond, perplexed, and exasperated feelings for the place.

When I was working in Turkey's largest city Istanbul, during the winter of 2004-2005, the school where I was employed had put me up in a cheap but clean hotel. Often my room's heater did not give out enough heat, so on the two days when I was not working and the weather was too bad to go out I would look at a music video station named KRAL. Kral in Turkish means "king." This video by Cuneyt Tek is called 'Gidersen' which means "If you go..." I would sit in my hotel room or lie in bed and wait for it to come on. The hotel where I stayed for 3 months only carried about eight television stations, all of which were in Turkish. Since at the time I knew almost no Turkish, I would watch KRAL since "music," as someone once said "is the universal language." Later when I bought Tek's CD containing the song, "Gidersen" I played it for my best friend Hanife, and using the liner notes containing the lyrics, we sang the song together one day during my one of my breaks. Hanife told me that "Gidersen" is a love song which I had already gathered from the video. She also told me that she thinks Cuneyt Tek is very cute. He is, and rather remains me of a very young, teenage Burt Reynolds. I also knew that the word, "askim" means "my love," a word that the song contains.

When I watched this video that winter on TV I was really touched by how Romantic it was. The story that the video tells of a boy and a girl falling in love as children and going through life together is what many of us would like even if we have too much pride to admit it. I had one student, Aylin, who married her sweet heart from middle school, but she divorced her husband while I was her teacher in Turkey because he came over to America and abandoned her for another much older woman with kids, so Aylin's love story went awry. I wish it could have ended differently. She recently wrote me that she still is alone. I learned from her experience and from my own there that love and Romance is just as uneasy in Turkey as here and everywhere else. Wouldn't it be nice if it were easy?

Enjoy "Gidersen." :))