Yet one of the best things about living in a city and not having a car is that we feel like we have a real community of people that we know living close to us.
It's a 10 minute walk (at adult speed, more like 20-30 mins at toddler speed) to our nearest playground and our route there takes us directly past three different friends' apartments. And not just any friends, but all friends who very conveniently have similar aged children to J. As everyone walks everywhere in their immediate neighbourhood, we often end up bumping into friends in the street or on the way to or from the playground, which is lovely. In fact, I took J to the playground last Saturday morning and there were two other parents I knew and their respective children there.
There aren't really free/very cheap parent and toddler groups here like there are in the UK, so when we have rainy days (which has been quite a lot this winter) and the prospect of a long day trying to entertain a toddler beckons, I often end up getting together with friends at one of our houses for a rainy day play date - which is considerably easier when it's only a 5-15 minute walk between our houses.
Walking everywhere from our flat also means that we get to know and recognise some of the local people living around us. We go and get our bread most days from the little corner shop, and say hello when we meet the proprietors out on the street. There are a couple of small underground car parks further down our road, and the men who run it spend most of their days standing at the car park entrance on the street ready to bring customers' cars in and out of the car park. They will almost always wave or come and say hello to J (who they know by name now) when we pass. We end up going to our little supermarket 5 minutes walk away most days and some of the staff there invariably wave/say hello/exclaim "cok tatlı" (which means 'very sweet') to J.
Our weekly home group is also a community that we love. It currently alternates between our house and another family's house, who live about a 20 minute walk from us, and several of the other attendees live in the immediate area. Typically we have representation from at least 3 and usually 4 continents. We love eating dinner together first and - well, I was going to write 'sharing together what is going on in our lives' but probably a more accurate description of our conversations would be 'updating on what's going on in people's lives and developing a trans-cultural hodge podge of banter and jokes in a mixture of English and Turkish'.
Our weekly home group is also a community that we love. It currently alternates between our house and another family's house, who live about a 20 minute walk from us, and several of the other attendees live in the immediate area. Typically we have representation from at least 3 and usually 4 continents. We love eating dinner together first and - well, I was going to write 'sharing together what is going on in our lives' but probably a more accurate description of our conversations would be 'updating on what's going on in people's lives and developing a trans-cultural hodge podge of banter and jokes in a mixture of English and Turkish'.
There's also an online community of foreigners and foreign mums that I'm very grateful for. Facebook groups are wonderful things! I've learned many useful things about bringing up a child in Istanbul from these groups and they've proved to be very helpful in sourcing information about antenatal care here. There's something about being in the same boat together as foreigners here that makes people willing to freely share advice and experience with strangers.
We're so grateful for the friends and community we've found here :-)
We're so grateful for the friends and community we've found here :-)
