Phillip and Rebecca Mefford

Yılbaşı New Year’s Exchanging stories with other “foreigners” like us, our friend shared one of his faux pas when he first came to Turkey 19 years ago: excited about his newly acquired skill of making Turkish coffee, he took the first opportunity he could to impress his Turkish neighbors. Once one neighbor settled onto the couch after preliminary kisses on the cheek and talk about the weather, he gladly presented the small, steaming demitasse to which confusion was the main response. The neighbor had come, intending a nice long visit…why was this foreigner serving coffee ? Did he not want visitors? Had he already made plans? Thus we are introduced to a slight cultural nuance about visiting and coffee. The coffee most often comes at the end of the visit. Perhaps if you are meeting outside the home coffee means “let’s sit and chat,” but inside the home, when the host is preparing a hot drink for his guest, there is logic to the timeliness of coffee. You see, brewing Turkish tea in its

Noel Christmas As ordinary life goes about its business here in Turkey, we find ourselves a minority of Thanksgiving turkey eaters and Christmas tree decorators. Although we did have a hearty meal with American friends at the end of November we did not have a backyard in which to play football. And even though Thanksgiving has passed, we see no Salvation Army Santa’s ringing their bells for change in front of the malls. Although our holiday season has taken on a different form since moving here, we know that the heart of those special days is still with us. We remember two events that happened to us at the beginning of our time in Turkey. One week we got scammed by a shoe-shiner. He pretended to give us a free-shoe shine (not that our tennis shoes needed it), as a thanks for telling him about the polishing brush he “accidentally” dropped. After telling about his far-away home and starving children, he stole the equivalent of about $12 from Phillip’s wallet. Although that is not a lot

Aile Family With so many beautiful places and fascinating historical locations, Turkey has a budding tourist economy. As this year’s tourist season began to dwindle, in that brief gap when the weather is still nice but plane tickets are a little less expensive, we were happy to have Phillip’s family come and visit us. While the aspects of their visit we anticipated the most were playing board games, sharing meals together, and hearing all the details of Phillip’s sister’s upcoming wedding, we could not allow the Mefford family fly across the Atlantic Ocean to be cooped up in our apartment everyday. After the cursory tour of this great city of İstanbul (and a day or two of them sitting home while we went to school), we took advantage of a long weekend to go south to Antalya, a province of Turkey which hosts its most famous Mediterranean beaches, a 1st century Roman harbor, and one of the best preserved Roman theaters in the ancient city of Aspendos. Now with the tourist season long ret

Gözlük Glasses Ten months ago we came walking into Turkish culture with a type of glasses in front of our eyes. A ‘lens’ that has been shaped through our past experiences, programmed in our minds since childhood via family life, media, and the social norms of our home country. Layered on top of that are the expectations and presuppositions formed through reading, hearsay, and travel to different societies. Sometimes in culture-shock moments, like during the arm-chair fiasco, we find ourselves needing to dust of our cultural lenses a bit to re-examine the situation. Hypothetically looking at it, we are asking ourselves the following questions: 1. For us to live in this place and understand its people is it necessary for us to exchange our American glasses for Turkish ones? Is this even possible? 2. If this is possible, how long would it take to exchange lenses? After all, it has been a lifetime of developing our American glasses. Then what happens when we return to America with new T