It's a strange language though, Turkish is. For one there is no word "is" in Turkish. Secondly it's agglutinative. So everything is just added as a suffix. For example: arkadas = friend; arkadasim = my friend; arkadaslarim = my friends; arkadaslarimla = with my friends. Talk about word economy, huh. Plus all the suffixes follow this vowel harmony rule which I am still to get my head around. It's difficult because the structure is so different from any other language I know. But its interesting as well because a lot of the words are the same or similar to Hindi/Urdu. Like friend can also be dost. Or kitap is book. Kara is black. Çay is tea and şeker is sugar. My favourite word is turuncu (the 'c' is pronounced as a 'j'). It means orange and I love the sound of it....I have no idea why. But I keep using it in the most random of sentences possible.
In other news, my mom mentioned that we could possibly visit Turkey in summer. This comes after two years of needling but I am really hoping something works out. She knows how much I want to visit, so I think it would be terribly mean for her to mention a trip to Türkiye, just casually. My cousin is visiting Istanbul (for the third time!) this month. She told me, "I'm visiting your favourite city again", "Paris?", I asked, "No. Your favourite city you have yet to visit - Istanbul." Sigh. I have a terrible rep because of this Turkey thing.
I am travelling to Cambodia and Vietnam in April, and am really looking forward to that, but Turkey - sigh, that's perpetually on my travel list. After more than two years of wanting to visit, I think I'll probably pass out from excitement when and if a trip there actually works out. It's so difficult to explain why certain things just appeal to you isn't it? Some people just have to visit India, because of whatever it represents - spirituality, madness, chaos, nirvana. For me wanting to visit Turkey is something like that.
My cousin sent me a link to some wonderful, wonderful photos of Turkey (probably as a small consolation in place of actually travelling there) by the film maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan (whose movie Uzak I saw about a year back and really liked). The photos are gorgeous (as attested to by the one I've put up here) - please do have a look. Till I get to visit Turkey, I have to be happy looking at the pictures. And before that I have my trip to Cambodia and Vietnam to plan for.
