questions: what was the first thing you did in turkey? the last?

I was just a baby when we moved to Turkey-- my memories are very few. I have no idea what the first or the last thing I did was, but it probably wasn't all that exciting. How much does a baby know about traveling? I probably didn't even understant what it meant to be in another country.

Here's what I do remember about Turkey: I remember standing on the edge of a curb and looking down, and thinking that the curb was frighteningly high, so I must have been very small. The whole memory is sort of yellow like an old photograph. I remember the sound of prayer calls-- not anything specific, but when I hear them or something like them (like Cheb Mami in that song Desert Rose), they have that deep and comforting sense of familiarity that only things from childhood ever really have. We heard them five times a day, every day for two years, so it's bound to be ingrained. I sort of remember the food-smells; I went to a Turkish restaurant once in London, and no matter how weird it sounded on the menu, none of it seemed strange in person.

Here's what I know from later conversations: We lived in Istanbul first, and later moved to Ankara before Lin was born. Most of mom's nurses didn't speak English, and Lin was the only blonde baby in the hospital. The smog was bad enough that in the winter, the cloth diapers would come in off the line dirtier than they went out, and sometimes it'd creep in like something from a horror movie and fill up buildings with fumes. Coal was the source of most fires at the time. Dad liked the bread, and sometimes a liquor that changed color when poured over ice (I think that was in Turkey). We lived not far from the Libyan Embassy, and near a market where mom shopped and people would give her a seat and feed us while she learned to haggle. The rug she got at one of the markets stayed in our livingroom until we came back to the states, and the prayer rug still hangs on the wall in their house. Mom used to have a set of shiny black prayer beads from there, and when it broke, all the beads were left in a drawer of the hutch; I used to open the drawer and play with them. Dad learned a little Turkish, and mom knew the words that helped with shopping and child-rearing at least. Our landlord was named Zeki-bey, and his wife Nerhan used to babysit us and would let me watch Bewitched on her little TV. On the holy days, people in the neighborhood would sacrifice animals on their front steps, and mom tried to stop us from seeing it, but we'd sneak to the window and ask questions anyway.