Our experience so far has been that Turks are more upfront asking questions than Brits would be, to make a very general stereotype.
These are the most common questions I get on a regular basis:
1. Is your baby a boy or girl?
2. How old is your baby?
3. Where are you from?
4. Is your husband a Turk?
5. Do you live here?
6. What work does your husband do?
7. What do you think about Turkey?
8`. Why are you living here when you could be living in England?
To give an example of how this works out in practice, I was talking to a lady in the park this morning. I've seen this lady a few times recently but she's only just twigged that I can speak some Turkish. Her first question was whether my husband was Turkish, followed by asking what work he did. And then while walking home with S and J, an older lady walked past me on the street going in the opposite direction. After an initial exclamation of how sweet J was, she looked in the pushchair and asked if I had two boys. This was followed by asking where I was from and whether we were visitors here. She seemed quite gratified to hear that we actually lived here.
It's taken a bit of getting used to, but I'm starting to accept this as normal. What doesn't quite come so naturally, though, is asking similar questions in return! Maybe that's something I should be working more on. I'm quite used to asking how old a baby or child is in the park now, but I don't think I can bring myself to start quizzing people to quite the extent that is often normal here - yet!
