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

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.