Holiday Trees

We have been surprised to see so many decorated trees in the shops, malls and even at school.   Somewhere down through time having a tree to put the New Year’s presents under has become a tradition in Turkey.  Haven’t found anyone who can tell me exactly why or when it started.  The town is all decorated and if we didn’t know they don’t celebrate Christmas you would think it was for Christmas. 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO EVERYONE

Nothing new to report from Turkey but we did want to send our wishes for everyone to have a happy holiday season and happy New Years.  New Years is big here.  People buy presents for family and friends.  We usually travel over the holidays; however, since we will be working that won’t happen this year.  The weather is actually not too bad.  It’s in the low 40’s during the day which makes it very nice to walk.  Enjoy your family and friends! Jerry and Carol

Winter has arrived

We’ve been talking about the approaching winter for awhile and we had a nice few weeks but it has arrived.  No snow but it’s in the forecast.  With the weather change comes a reduction in our blog postings due to a lack of new and interesting topics.  Those of you who check us regularly please keep checking in occasionally  but we probably will reduce (not stop) our postings until we experience some new and different cultural events that we think will entertain you.  Ibrahim is generous with his time and is still teaching us Turkish and we are spending more time on Netflix and Hulu where we watch current American TV shows.  We get to these sites through our VPN hook up.  A somewhat interesting tidbit is that sometimes the video streaming happens perfectly and it’s like watching a show on TV; however, at other times the streaming gets interrupted every few minutes.  There doesn’t seem to be any particular pattern to when it will work or when it doesn’t.  The fallback is our favorite DVD store where we can get almost any movie for 2.50 Turkish Lira which is about $1.75.  Please stay in touch with e-mail.   It’s always good to catch up on news from our friends. 

Turkish Lessons

The letters of Turkish alphabet and the sounds associated with these are in the following table...

Letter	Pronunciation
A, a	like the a in car
B, b	like the b in bet
C, c	like the g in gender
Ç, ç	like the ch in chance
D, d	like the d in debt
E, e	like the e in less
F, f	like the f in felony

We’ve been learning a few words of Turkish from our co-workers and friend Diane who is the other American we know in Turkey; however, our friend Ibrahim (he is fantastic just a sample of his work above) over Friday evening and gave us our first Turkish lesson.  He was very generous with his time and talents and put together some PowerPoint's with the Turkish sounds for the alphabet, words for greetings, and some words for restaurants.  He said on his Facebook page that we did well but I think we have a long way to go.   Jerry is going to use the PowerPoint with his classes to teach English.  Thanks very much Ibrahim. 

Another interesting discovery we have made is that Google has a translation service where it will take your language and change it into whatever language you want; however, it doesn’t work very well.  The translations are too literal and it ends up being really funny.  Jerry tried it with a letter to his students and they had a great laugh.  Then I got a report from one of my 6th graders about the Sahara Desert and she must have used the translation program because it made no sense.

Jerry did some substitute teaching today to help out Diane.  She had to make a trip back to the states to see her father who is ill.  He’ll be helping out next weekend as well.  She teaches at another private school in Eskisehir and then teaches on the weekends at the schools that just teach languages.  Too much for me, I love my weekends!