rtw with lucy

Well everybody, here I am again after taking a, let me see, ah! yes, a 4 month break from blog writing. It’s such a stressful job, that sometimes you just have to take a sabbatical.
Today I shall be informing you about speech and food etiquette. Let’s start with the speech part. The absolutely correct way to say “thank you” in Turkish is “Tesekkur ederim” but this example is sadly lacking those little turkish symbols that tell you how to pronounce the s and the u. We must put up with our non-Turkish keyboards. So pretend that the “s” has that little symbol that sometimes goes on the end of a French “c”. It looks like a miniture, backwards “c”. So, if you put all of the little thingys in their correct places, “tesekkur ederim” should be pronounced “tay-shek-er-ay-der-im”, but I’m not expecting you to be able to pronounce it correctly, because I can’t pronounce it. No, the best way to learn to say “thank you” in Turkish, is to go to Turkey.
Now let’s move on to the food etiquette part. In Turkey, the law says that you must not leave the table until you have eaten every, last scrap of food.* People will think you’re still hungery, the cook might think you didn’t like her cooking, the world might end. So the best thing to do is to tuck in, and not think about how much butter is in the pilaf, or about those little pastries that were fried and then dipped in sugar syrup. If you gain 25 pounds, well, it’s Turkey’s fault.
*see Lucy’s article “A More In Depth Analysis Part I”
-Erin

Part I

Well, when we got to Istanbul, I really loved it.
The magnificent sight of the great Ayasofya rising from the buildings takes your breath away.
I was immedietly hooked.
After we had spent a couple of days there, we got in contact with some of our relatives here in turkey (my aunt’s cousin).
We talked to them over the phone, and they graciously invited us to and opera that our relative was preforming in.
The opera was great, and they invited us out for some very tradional turkish food. (delicious of course!)

The next day, Aunt Nerman, (as she is called,) cooked us up a great big dinner that she and her daughter Cagnur worked on all day.
Sadly, Cagnur could not eat with us, but Aunt Nerman was plenty of company.
We talked for a few minutes, and then she brought out the food.
I have never seen so much food!
And all of it was absolutely delicious. Aunt N kept trying to get us to eat it all, but it was not humanly possible.
We walked out of there waddling like stuffed ducks.

-Lucy Sappington

Well, we've been awful about keeping up with our blog, but when we get internet time, we tend to email folks. We've been in Turkey for ... [Continue reading this entry]