Phillip and Rebecca Mefford

Şubat February February has been a fairly calm and quiet month for the Mefford home. We’ve had a lot of snow days—İstanbul’s snowiest winter in the last 30 years! Lincoln is perfecting his mobile agility. And he can say “more” and “please” in baby sign! We’ve been able to spend time with some new Turkish friends, a couple our age. One day we braved the cold to go to an art exhibit with them.

Yedi 07 Antalya Marie & Erdem Ours is a bit of a love story, actually. Erdem came to England to work on his master’s degree. I worked at a local coffee shop. He loves tea and would come often. Soon he seemed to be coming for more than the tea. The summer after he left I convinced my family to go on holiday to the Mediterranean, to a lovely place called Antalya. Erdem met us there, and wooed my family with the same charm he used on me. At first our marriage was difficult. Two cultures clashing at full speed. Some of his relatives would not acknowledge our marriage, which was somewhat distressing to me. But then what became more distressing was the, shall we say, “attentiveness” of his mother and sisters—to how I cooked and cleaned and whether I was wearing slippers in the house and to why I put milk in my tea, and so on. They had good intentions I know, similar to the good intentions of my own relatives who warned me about the reputed infidelities of Turkish men. Sadly, over the yea

Altı 06 Ankara Zafer Hello, my name is Zafer. When I was a newborn my Great-Uncle Ahmet whispered this name into my right ear three times. Victory. Triumph. Zafer . Everyone said “may he grow to fulfill his name.” I have no doubt that I will. Already I have exceeded the education of most of my family, having just graduated from university. I have been studying English for almsot ten years now, which should make me a desirable applicant for any job. Maybe, even, I can go abroad for awhile. And yet, I’ve come to a juncture in life. İstanbul was my temporary home for the past four years while I studied engineering. It was bustling with youth and art and opportunity. Now, like all my university friends, I’m going back home to live with my parents. There is a sense of comfort in going home to Ankara—the dry air, the monuments to the fearless first leader of the nation who made Ankara Turkey’s capitol in 1923, old friends, family…Ankara is a stable place. Less hectic. But it is hard to love

Bir, İki, Üç… One, Two, Three… Her gün sayarsın bir şeyler, evde, dışarıda, oynarken. Say gözünüz ve burnunu, say parmaklarını! chimes Lincoln musical numbers book. In English, “Count things every day, when you’re at home, outside, while you’re playing. Count your eyes and nose, count your fingers!” So, in the spirit of counting, as of last week we can officially count one, two, three years that we have lived in Turkey. We have made many friends over the past three years and they have taught us much about the nuances of culture within Turkey. Now, allow us to introduce you to some of these friends. We will do it with numbers: Each car license plate is assigned a set of numbers and letters, the first of which are determined by the province in which the car was registered. All İstanbul license plates, for example, begin with the number 34. But even in İstanbul 02’s and 31’s and 63’s have driven across our path. And so we present you numbers, but not just numbers—cultures, but not just