just go with the flow

These past few days in Turkey have required me to really put the brakes on the “J” part of myself – or for those of you not familiar with the MBTI, the part of me that feels so much comfort in planning and even if I can’t control my plans, I want to know what to expect.

It’s part of the culture and it’s part of this vacation, that we’re just having to go with the flow and really live day by day, without being able to make a lot of plans ahead of time.  There’s no itinerary, because so many things are up in the air that we’re waiting on – other people’s schedules and whims, what the embassy says, what the weather is like, how much sleep we got the night before, etc.  We tend to make some sort of general plan the day before or the day of, or sometimes someone tells us that something is happening at a certain time, but even these deceptively well-established plans could change if the weather changes or someone we made plans with feels tired or sick or something and someone decides to cancel the plans – as happened when our plans to go to a beach on Saturday were cancelled Friday afternoon because the weather was expected to be bad.  Which it only was for about 45 minutes.

I just moved to the second place I’ve been staying, and in a couple of days I’ll probably move to a third place, where I should stay for the rest of my time in Izmir, but even those plans weren’t nailed down until late this evening, and I almost spent the night with someone else because we wanted to stay out later and not worry about public transportation.

After a couple of days, I stopped looking at clocks when I’m out of the house.  There’s no point.  The only things that start and end on time here are soccer games.  I’ve yet to see any type of public transportation schedule posted anywhere, and even the digital signs on the metro stations that announce how many minutes until the next train arrives are apt to be underestimates of the actual time.

We’re likely going to Istanbul towards the end of this upcoming week, before that we’ll probably explore more sights of Izmir, then the following week we might go to Antalya or near there to enjoy some Mediterranean beaches, and sometime, don’t know when, I’m meeting the BF’s parents, but other than church things and hanging out with people, those are the extent of our “plans” for our time in Turkey.

Having described the planning part of my personality in the first paragraph, you might thing that all of this is really frustrating for me and that I wish things were better planned.  Honestly, though I prefer my travel plans to be well organized, I know that being in another country requires enormous flexibility, so I’m pretty good at just going with the flow.  I know that I’ll have a place to stay and food to eat and the BF and other people to hang out with and interesting things to do, so the details of how all that works out really don’t matter to me.  95% of the time, I’m happy to just take things as they come, as long as someone keeps me updated about the next plan, then I’m good.  Plus, it really lets me relax as I don’t have to worry about making too many decisions.  I really can truly vacation when I release my need to plan and control and just go with the flow and enjoy the people and experiences right in front of me.

But a couple of times, the lack of planning has frustrated me.  For example, 5 minutes before we were supposed to leave the house for church this morning, I was told that I should pack up my stuff because someone would take me straight from church to the second place, even though I’d asked the BF about this last night, and he told me we’d come back to the first house to pack up before I went to the second place.  This frustrated me, because I didn’t think I’d have time to pack everything, but we didn’t leave for another 45 minutes, so in the end, the lack of planning made up for the lack of planning.  Which is maybe the key to avoiding future frustration.  In American society, a lack of planning such as that actually would cause some (minor) problem because it would disrupt other plans.  But here, how can you disturb something that is so flimsy to begin with?  If you break or change a plan, it doesn’t really matter because any other plans depending on it were completely flexible as well.

Fortunately, we have found a lighthouse in the midst of this chaos – the “American dude” I mentioned in my last post, “C,” has lived here for several years, knows his way around the city well, and is an American, and therefore, much better at planning things and sticking with his plans and informing us of plans than any Turk I’ve met yet.  In the past few days, he has provided us with phones, metro cards, directions, places to stay, etc.  Tonight, we were wrapping up our late dinner and about to go to another cafe, when C informed all of us, “Wait, we can’t stay out past 11:30 because then we won’t have time to get Kelly back and then us back before the public transportation ends at 1.”  We might have just carried along with our whims and not kept track of the time, had it not been for C.  And even that would have been ok, because we could have taken a taxi, which we wound up doing anyway because it was faster and less confusing.  Later, as we were discussing our plans for tomorrow, at some point the BF just admitted, “I have no idea what’s happening.”  “It’s ok,” I reassured him, “Just listen to C.”