To prepare myself for my trip I met up with a Turkish graduate student about a week and a half ago to learn some Turkish. Although this is my first time abroad, I feel that if you're going to a foreign country, the natives will be more inclined to help you if you at least try to communicate in their language. Considering that it'll be blazing hot out when I'm in Turkey, one of the most useful things I learned to say is "su istiyorum" which means I want water. [tangent: Going to a small school there are always odd connections and things just fall into place. In this case, my chemistry research advisor (Professor Turnbull) was playing volleyball and a student in the physics group we work with is dating a Turkish girl who he happened to bring along one day. A light-bulb went off in my advisor brain and he introduced us].
Some other useful words: evet (yes), hayir (no), lütfen (please), and teşekkur ederim (thank you).
This past week I was up in Vermont for the Northeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society (NERM). They set aside one afternoon for tours of the area and meeting/mingling. Professor Turnbull, Dave (another student in the lab), and I went down to Proctor, Vermont. Some of you might not know this, but there is a Marble Museum there. [There's also a Maple Museum nearby for those of you with a sweet tooth]. Seeing as how I'll hopefully be doing chemical analysis on marble, we ventured in that direction. It's interesting how many places calcium carbonate (the main component of marble) shows up: paper, toothpaste, plastic to name a few. I was able to pick up some marble samples to practice on. We also took a nice little walk over to the old marble quarry.
Allaha ısmarladık (goodbye)
P.S. The undotted 'i' is pronounce like "uh." I find that to be the hardest to get used to.
0 comments:
Post a Comment