Phillip and Rebecca Mefford

Yabancı Foreigner What do you do when you have a special guest coming to your home? You’ll probably tidy up a bit, make sure your house and body are groomed. Then you slave away on your best culinary specialty, and serve it steaming hot in perfect timing when said guest arrives…but what if they don’t like it? Is that a poor reflection on your cooking or on your guest’s tastes? What would you do if you were in their shoes? As foreigners and guests in this country, these are the types of questions we have to be prepared to answer. 1. How does one politely decline a food item that is seen as the pride of the host’s culinary efforts? Is it ever okay to decline? 2. Culturally driven protocol for being a guest is like learning to drive a car—there are a lot of little details to think about all at the same time. If you haven’t done it enough, it doesn’t come naturally. How does one know how to follow such protocol (for example, taking shoes off at the door, saying just the right phrases lik

Yemek Yemek To Eat Food Food is implicit in culture, giving cues about facets such as geography (the significant growth of olive trees explains why olive oil is used in almost every dish, as well as why olives are eaten at breakfast), daily living (dinner tends to be served later, maybe around 8pm—a cue to the fact that Turkey has a night-culture), and religion (similar to Kosher laws, Muslims have dietary restrictions. What that means practically: no bacon for breakfast). Just this last week Ramazan, the Muslim month of fasting, began. Many of our neighbors and friends are forgoing food and drink from sunrise to sunset, awaiting the evening familial feast that begins once the last call to prayer has been broadcast. Because of that food is on the collective mind quite a bit! One of our first contacts with Turkish cuisine came three hours after disembarking the long flight(s) from Denver, after navigating İstanbul’s rush hour traffic, when we were introduced to our new apartment, its

Yürümek Walking One of the goodbyes we had to make when moving to Turkey was to our cars. This was especially difficult for Phillip who had been driving his green, two-door, all leather interior, 1993 Mazda MX6 LS (3.1 Liter V6 engine) since October of 1999. He was very nostalgic as he sold his little buddy of 9 years. The good news is that İstanbul, a dense city of roughly 15-20 million people, has other ways for people to get around. Yes, many people in this city have cars, but when we see the frightful bridge traffic, we are happy to be cruising past in the metro-bus or sailing along in a ferry that rarely gets delayed. Life with public transportation does mean factoring in extra time to wait for the bus, risking your life crossing the street (pedestrians do not have the right-of-way), getting sweaty, and a lot more walking, but at least we don’t have to worry about getting parking tickets. And on top of that, we definitely get our daily exercise. Our favorite part of the commute

İstiklal Caddesi Independence Avenue Although we live on the Asian side of İstanbul, we go to school on the Europe side near an area of town called Taksim. Compared to the historical Sultan Ahmet district, where Aya Sofia and Sutlanahmet Camii are, Taksim is very new and much more European. The heart of the district, Taksim Square, displays a monument commemorating the founding of the Turkish Republic. In it Atatürk, the “Father of the Turks,” is seen in both his military garb as well as his civilian clothing, symbolizing the great strides that were made to make Turkey a nation, and a modern one at that. The main feature of Taksim is İstiklal Caddesi, or Independence Avenue . We have learned in our time here that Turks love to gez, or go for a stroll, window shop, get some fresh air…and İstiklal is the place for gez-ing. There are countless clothing stores, theaters, and coffee shops along this vast street, not to mention consolates as well as historical churches. Most of all, there a

Şimdilik Öğrenciyiz For Now, We are Students Our language school tends to teach in a very systematic, grammatical way. We’ve learned tenses, cases, infinitive, imperative, and so on. Fortunately we both learn best in a classroom-type setting, so this is working well for us. And yet other yabancı, or foreigners (in this context, non-Turks), we’ve met prefer having a personal tutor, or just being out-and-about and in doing so absorb the language. Some people care about communicating properly, and others only want to get their point across. While each person has to know their best-learning style—and do it that way—we’ve concluded that a synthesis of both the conversational and grammatical approach is necessary. And yet, we wonder… 1. Which approach is more important for today? Which approach is more effective in the long-run? 2. What motivates us to learn a second language? 3. How does it make you feel when someone has tried their best to learn English (by most standards, a very diffic