Selamat Pagi.....I mean: "Günaydın İstanbul!"

In my attempt to pick up some words of Turkish, I have discovered my fatal weakness – I keep thinking I’m in Malaysia or Indonesia. I kid you not, I have literally said “terima kasih” a hundred times, which stems from a combination of having no clue how to say “thank you” in Turkish and the fact that I continually pronounce written letters like they would be pronounced in Malaysian or Indonesian. Hopefully, today I will order çay instead of teh. (Tea)

The most interesting part of my linguistic adventure thus far has been, however, that I have, on multiple occasions, understood some words, not because they are English cognates, but because they are the same word in French. On my visa, it says that I am here for an internship or, in Turkish, a “staj,” pronounced exactly like “stage,” the French word for internship (not the thing that English actors act on). Last night again this happened when the language barrier was not between English and Turkish but between American and British English. I was helping my new Turkish roommate with a passage from his TOEFL book, and one statement was about a “lorry.” Now friends, I thought that it might be some kind of vehicle, but I really had no clue what in the world a lorry was. Guess how I found out. He google translated it from English to Turkish, and as soon as I saw the word in Turkish I knew what it was. A Turkish “kamyon” is certainly some relation to the French “camion” or what we in the US of A like to call a truck. Silly British English, making trucks sound pretentious…….

a glimpse of one of the back streets I found yesterday