This is part 1 of a 3 part series on buying a car in Turkey as a foreigner. Click to see part 2 and part 3.
This post is a bit different than the normal ones we usually feature at CaptivatingCappadocia.com. Instead of highlighting the incredible people and sites to visit, I want to share a comical event that may ring true with many other foreigners’ general experience who have lived in Turkey for any amount of time.
Let me just say this straight away: I love Turkey. If I didn’t, I would have left many years ago. Also, I need to say that instead of interpreting this post as a complaint, I encourage you to see this as an apology for why I love living in a land of the unpredictable. I laughed several times throughout the experience that I am setting before you. I merely want to see if I can turn the experience of a foreigner attempting to follow protocol into something that is “captivating”, peeling back the veneer of a two part process that we all have had to go through: the purchase and the selling of automobiles. My experience, however, was in another culture, carried out in another language, undergirded by another value system that at times still caught me by surprise even after 10 years of living in this great land.
Archives For Life & Culture
SOUP FOR BREAKFAST!?”
“It’s not right or wrong, it’s not good or bad…it’s just different”
I remember that phrase from my preparations for cross cultural living.
The differences would be numerous but my judgments on those differences could be less so.
Of course, one of the most basic differences one experiences cross-culturally is food.
For example, when we first moved here, I went to a café for breakfast. Breakfast? Breakfast in my culture means Denny’s Grand Slam: two pancakes, two eggs, two bacon, two sausage (although of course there would be no bacon or sausage in this Muslim country). At the very least, it would be an omelet with hashbrowns and a fruit cup. You get the point. The word breakfast paints a picture.
And that picture certainly did not include soup! Continue Reading…
Music
What is your favorite genre?
Why do you listen to it, and
Why do you love it so much?
Here is one man’s reason why he loves music:
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[Note: We are not giving away a book this month but rather you will need to tune in Monday to see this month's special giveaway, especially if you are planning on visiting Cappadocia in the next year.]
Told in the Coffee House: Turkish Tales by Cyrus Adler & Allan Ramsay was first published in 1898 and the Kindle edition is now available for FREE on Amazon. (Just click, and you will be taken to the Amazon page. If you do not have a US account, I am not sure it will work?)
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1980.*
Turkey was a decade into political chaos between opposing parties including Socialist leftists and pro-working class Trade Unions, Conservative religious parties and Ultra Nationalist parties.
Leftist idealists and right-wing conservatives clashed in the streets from ’71 to ‘80 bringing the death toll to nearly 5,000.
On September 12th, 1980 in response to the political unrest, the armed forces intervened in a brutal military coup.
One of those leftist idealists was seventeen-year old Mustafa Akbel.
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