Gas bottle ordering, second time around

About 3 weeks after we moved to Turkey, J and I left L assembling Ikea furniture in our new flat one morning and set off on a quest to get a gas bottle for our oven and a big container of drinking water. I managed to get both ordered, from the gas shop and the drinking water shop respectively, and they were delivered to the flat not long after.

I was so proud of myself that day. It was probably the first major-ish task I'd undertaken by myself. Neither the man in the gas shop nor the man in the water shop spoke any English and my Turkish was incredibly basic as we hadn't started our courses yet. I remember standing in the gas shop, trying to communicate, as the man there asked me whether I wanted a big or a small bottle. And I could just about piece together what he was asking me, but I had no idea which one I needed and couldn't even remember the word for 'oven'. I had to resort to looking up words in my pocket dictionary while the shopkeeper waited patiently for me. And then I had to give our address in Turkish when I still wasn't completely confident with my Turkish numbers. So when someone turned up at our flat door with a gas bottle, I viewed this as a major achievement.

In fact, if you'd have asked me at the end of our first month here what I was most proud of, it would have been a toss up between successfully ordering the gas bottle and surviving 3 Ikea trips in 3 days.

Earlier this week, our gas bottle ran out and so J and I called in on the way back from the park to order a replacement. (I could have phoned, but it's a bit harder to make not-quite-correctly-accented-Turkish understood on the phone so I'll leave that for next time.)

I walked into the shop, I knew what I needed and what to ask for, I made my request and gave our address. When I was asked if we had an empty bottle, I understood the question and could confirm that our old bottle was finished. And I walked out. It took all of 2 minutes and was no big deal, just one of those things on my Monday morning to-do list.

Sometimes it feels like we've come a really long way since we arrived!

August goings-on

We're most of the way through August now! To be honest, August feels like a month just to be 'got through', mainly due to the temperature/humidity.. Here's a quick snapshot of some of the things we've been doing the last few weeks:

• L has been getting his head round causative verbs, conditional forms, some relative clauses, must/should/need/can, various other bits of Turkish grammar and more vocab.

• Now that J is walking, he and I are becoming regulars at the local playground. Most days we head off there at 8am-ish, just as L's leaving for school. 

• I miserably failed to explain to my language helper the set up of the United Kingdom and how England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are different countries, but they are all part of the UK, which is also a country, but how Welsh and Scottish people will get very offended if you suggest that they are English, even though they carry UK passports and the capital of the UK is London, which is in England. Slightly inconveniently, the most commonly used word here for British is İngiliz, which sounds suspiciously like 'English'. I usually try and write a page of Turkish each week for my language helper to correct, so this week I think I'll be writing about the UK.  

• We've been making some new friends and meeting up with others... with a mixture of English and Turkish spoken. (But probably a bit more English than Turkish to be honest.)

• We had our residence permit (ikamet) appointments this week, which ending up taking over most of the day before and the day after as well due to various tasks that were necessary.

• We went out one Saturday morning to Belgrad Forest, which is a little outside Istanbul. Riding the metro to the end of the line, taking a bus and then walking a little gets you to the forest entrance, but as we discovered, it is then quite a way to get to the forest paths etc.

• I've been celebrating the imminent return of the Great British Bake Off (even though I will be unable to watch it on iPlayer) by making English muffins, cinnamon rolls and doughnuts.

Language fails - part one

I think language fails must be a rite of passage for language learners. At the very least, they provide some amusing anecdotes - and so here's a selection of some of our finest blunders to date. I've titled this 'part one' in the full expectation that there will be subsequent parts to follow over the next months.

• In Turkish, the verb 'to talk' is konuşmak and the verb 'to run' is koşmak. My language helper had just told me that she'd been running in the park that morning. So I, instead of asking if she did a lot of running in the park, asked if she did a lot of talking in the park.

• A traditional Turkish snack is a simit, which is a bagel-shaped, crusty, sesame seed covered bread snack, and there are usually lots of street vendors selling them. There is also a softer, more doughy version, which is called açma. And the word for uncle (father's brother, to be precise. There's a different word for mother's brother but that is beside the point) is amca. When feeling peckish on the walk to language school one morning, L completely confused a simitçi (simit seller) by asking for 'one uncle please'.

• A few weeks back, a couple of Greek friends needed a bed for the night in Istanbul and stayed at ours. Now, the word for a Greek person is Yunan and the word for Greece is Yunanistan. But, if you accidentally shift an 's' in place of an 'n' and duplicate the 'u' instead of using an 'a' (which, in my head at least, is a perfectly understandable thing to do), you end up saying yunus instead. So I thought I was explaining to my language helper that we'd had two Greeks stay the previous night. What I actually said was we'd had two dolphins stay the previous night. 

And these are just some of the ones we know about! What worries me more is what I've inadvertently said to some poor, unsuspecting person without ever realising my mistake...