Doing the cultural dance

Greetings: Take greetings, for example. I was OK with the hello, how are you, welcome, thank you, and other greetings. But I have to say that the kissing threw me off a bit. I mean who kissed whom? When? Why? How? It was a bit unnerving to have my new best bud lean in for a peck on the cheek. I think, though, I've figured it out:

1. Kissing is a sign of affection. It says, “I like you.” Nothing more. Really.

2. Kissing is done among good friends, not casual acquaintances.

3. Cheeks touch (or heads butt -- a rather new development that reminds me of young bucks rubbing horns together), a kissing sound is made. No lips actually touch the other person.

4. When two men kiss it's customary to grasp hands and then move in for the kiss. Women may or may not extend their hand when kissing their friends.

5. Business associates and some friends tend to keep to handshakes with a foreigner and may or may not kiss if there is a foreigner present.

Goodbyes: Saying goodbye was another confusing thing for me. I would hear different things depending on whether I or the other person was the one leaving and also depending on how religious my friend was. If I was leaving, they would say “güle güle” to me (I looked it up, it means smiling, smiling). If they were leaving I would hear hoşçakal or allaha ısmarladık. In the Nışantaşı area, I heard a lot of “hadi bye-bye.”

But once the basic goodbyes were figured out there were a couple of other dance steps that popped up at the end of the conversations. When leaving stores and some friends' houses they said, ‘Seni/sizi her zaman bekliyoruz.’ I looked it up. “We are waiting for you all the time.” Huh? I have since figured out that it roughly translates to, “You are welcome (back) any time.” A truly nice way to end a visit.

Another little dance step that caught me off guard was the, “Bir isteğin var mı?” that many use at the end of a conversation or a visit. “Do you want anything?” Literally, do you have a need? How could I answer that? I would have to think about it. What do I need, hmmm. Just like as with “How are you?” in English, you are expected to answer “Fine,” a “Bir isteğin var mı?” requires a “no” answer. You should lift up your eyebrows, tilt your head and say, “Teşekkür ederim.”

Weddings: Like in all cultures, people may choose to tie the knot in many ways. However, one thing I noticed at all the weddings I've gone to is the lack of presents. No piles of boxes containing irons or mixers or china. So what do people bring? They bring gold for the most part. If you go to any jewelers and tell them you need gold for a wedding, they will sell you a piece of gold attached to a ribbon that you can pin on the bride. At one wedding, I saw them actually pin money on the bride's gown. The gold becomes the property of the bride.

I've been to weddings in the East that are two and three-day affairs; I've been to sit-down dinner weddings and weddings on ships -- there is a vast difference in the way nuptials are celebrated here. But one consistency that I saw in all of them was the pinning of the gold onto the bride's gown.

Funerals: When a dear friend of mine passed away, I chose to go to his funeral dressed in the last thing he had seen me in -- light colored linen pants and a light, summer shirt. Imagine my surprise when I was surrounded by black. Everybody wore black to the funeral except me. So 40 days later when the special prayer session was held for him at his local mosque, I showed up in black -- only to see everybody in lighter colors -- some of the women were dressed in fashionable white dresses with white hats.

Another thing that might surprise you (it did me) is that if more people than your friend died on the same day and were sent to the same mosque for the service, then all three coffins will be lined up next to each other. When you get to the cemetery, the body is removed from the box (wrapped in a white sheet) and put directly into the ground. The male friends and relatives put heavy slabs of granite over the deepest part of the grave and then they use their feet and hands and shovels (if they have them) to fill in the hole.

The funerals typically happen fast. In the case of my friend, it happened within 14 hours of hearing of my friend's death, much different than the three day to week-long funerals of my grandparents.

Animal references: In English we have no emotional reaction to such expressions as “to work like a dog” or “you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.” And so imagine my surprise when I would use such expressions and my students, colleagues or friends would snap, “I'm not a dog (horse, etc.)!”

In fact, animal references and expressions in Turkey are used as insults. A stupid person is an “ox,” a person whose behavior you don't like becomes a “son of a donkey.” It's no wonder that when I taught an advanced class the signs of the Chinese zodiac that there was a lot of giggling in the class! My sister came to visit a couple of years ago and saw a little kid climbing a tree in the park. “He's quite the little monkey,” she said. The mother, who knew English, looked at her and said, “What?” My sister, bless her heart, quite innocently said, “He's climbing just like a little monkey.”

Learning the dance: If you don't know how you are expected to behave in certain situations, there are a couple of things you can do:

1. Ask -- before you go to a wedding or any significant celebration or event, ask somebody who is going about what you should wear and if there is something you should know to do or to say.

2. Observe -- watch your friends in action and pay attention to the body movements that come up again and again and the phrases that are uttered at various places in your interactions.

I believe that 95 percent of the time people are just being themselves -- considerate, kind friendly folks trying to get through another day. So when they get upset at something that we foreigners say or do, try to remember that those cultural expectations have been drummed into them since birth, apologize and then pull one of your friends aside later to try to figure out what happened. Once you know the steps, the dance gets easier and easier until you dance with the best of them without having to look at your feet.