Life of An Amerikish (American and Turkish)

Life Of An Amerikish (American and Turkish)
First of all, I want to clear up some stuff. No, making jokes about eating turkey in Turkey. It’s getting really old. Please don’t even try.

As a kid who grew up with only two (three when my sister was born) people living with you within a radius of more than 4,000 miles, I wasn’t exactly being exposed to the culture or language of Turkey. My mom and dad were both born in Turkey, I was born right next door to Catlin at St Vincent Hospital. I don’t really remember or know how, but I just learned English and Turkish about at the same time.

Me, Dad, Mom, and Sister

At the time, my dad and mom were 20 years old. My dad went to graduate school and so did my mom. Back then, my dads and moms families did not make a crazy amount of money. Both of them came straight from Turkey to the USA for college and did not have a place to live. They both had to get full scholarships so they could study and live in the USA. In college, my dad and mom were lucky enough to meet each other and got married. My dad decided that he wanted to work at Intel and studies and designs future cpu’s, and so he moved to Portland. My mom got a job at Pacific Foods and later on (like 8 years) got a job at Tillamook Dairy Factory.

I was later born on July 5, 2006, at St. Vincents. When I was about three, my sister was born on May 13, 2009. At first, I didn’t really understand how far away my cousins and grandparents lived, so I didn’t usually recognize them. When I started growing up and learned how to speak pretty well for a kindergartener though, I started face timing them. I had always gone to Turkey to visit my grandparents and they had always come to visit us, too. Once I had really started to interact with them, we would always play card games and do math together.

My sister, dad, and Grandparents

My grandma and grandpa both are math teachers, and luckily for me, numbers and operations in Turkish are the same in English. My grandma already knows a little bit of English, but my grandpa has a very hard time. We can all easily communicate even if it means it is harder for me to talk Turkish.

I started to have lots of connections with the people around me. We had lots of Turkish families that we had to know for a while. The closest one was the Kaval Family. They had two kids who were at the time (2015) 5 and 4 years old. We would go to their house and they would come to ours like every two weeks. Every year all of the close Turkish families would have a new year, Thanksgiving, or special occasion parties at someone's house (50 percent of the time it would be at ours). Now just this Thanksgiving, I had my first real turkey Thanksgiving dinner WITH the Ozlam family!

Speaking of food, I love it! Sunflower seeds are very popular in Turkey. I don’t know this is hard to believe, but I actually had to stop eating snacks because I was getting overweight from SUNFLOWER SEEDS! I love them! I also really like food called shakshuka. It is a mix of tomato-y sauce, eggplant, and potatoes. It is delicious! I think that food makes a difference between turkey and the USA for me.

So yeah, my life is not exactly a super rollercoaster ride. I thought that this might be a good thing to write about because of the different culture. If you enjoyed please consider leaving a comment, and if you didn’t, please also consider leaving a comment. Thank you!