While strolling the streets of my city I stumbled upon a beautifully decrepit apartment building from the 1700s.
While we photographed gleefully, some of the inhabitants came out, genially pointed out some of the more appealing views, and invited us to wander around inside to continue our artistic endeavors. When we returned to the street, they offered us tea, which we happily accepted, and we settled in to chat.
"Perfect!" I thought. My first interview with the fabled Arab street. Except we're in Turkey. The Turkish street, maybe? Whatever.
The guys we were talking to turned out to speak only slightly more English than I spoke of Turkish, and after a flurry of introductions and a rudimentary explanation of what I was doing in Istanbul we had more or less exhausted our vocabularies.
Or at least, I'd exhausted mine. One of the Turks, perhaps feeling he needed to return the compliment after I'd said that I liked Istanbul and Turks, said "I like Americans, but I no like American foreign policy... I like you, but George Bush is motherfucker."
Well gosh.
Now I'm aware that this is what foreigners always supposedly say, but I'd never actually heard someone say it. After a little more idle chatter and small talk we went our separate ways, but I'd kind of been struck by the only meaty result of our discussion. Should we be glad that people in the Middle East (as much as Istanbullus can be considered people in the Middle East) are differentiating between Americans traveling abroad and the American military and foreign policy, or should we be concerned that 'American foreign policy' are three of the 20 English words he knows?
"Perfect!" I thought. My first interview with the fabled Arab street. Except we're in Turkey. The Turkish street, maybe? Whatever.
The guys we were talking to turned out to speak only slightly more English than I spoke of Turkish, and after a flurry of introductions and a rudimentary explanation of what I was doing in Istanbul we had more or less exhausted our vocabularies.
Or at least, I'd exhausted mine. One of the Turks, perhaps feeling he needed to return the compliment after I'd said that I liked Istanbul and Turks, said "I like Americans, but I no like American foreign policy... I like you, but George Bush is motherfucker."
Well gosh.
Now I'm aware that this is what foreigners always supposedly say, but I'd never actually heard someone say it. After a little more idle chatter and small talk we went our separate ways, but I'd kind of been struck by the only meaty result of our discussion. Should we be glad that people in the Middle East (as much as Istanbullus can be considered people in the Middle East) are differentiating between Americans traveling abroad and the American military and foreign policy, or should we be concerned that 'American foreign policy' are three of the 20 English words he knows?
No comments:
Post a Comment