The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

Elly and I just returned from a trip to Melbourne that was supposed to end with our leaving Australia. We knew a couple of months ago that we’d have to delay the international connections but we decided to go ahead with the trip to Melbourne – and use it as a “farewell tour” of friends and family in Victoria, as well as a final chance to relax before the frenzy of the next month.

Our nieces seemed particularly happy to see us!

Also of note is that we’re gearing up to start learning Turkish. We’ll probably be able to afford a private tutor in Bulgaria but for the mean time we’re familiarising ourselves with the alphabet, pronounciation and grammar. Not so much the grammar; we’ll find out how challenging that part of the language is once we have some words to put into sentences under our belts.

The Turkish alphabet is wonderful because it is 100% phonetic, meaning that each letter corresponds to one and only one sound, regardless of where it falls within a word. [I'm beginning to realise what a nightmare it would be to learn English as a second language!]

I like the fact that we have to spell our names (albeit slightly) differently in Turkish. Elly/Eloise would be Eli/Eloiz; Stu/Stuart would be Stü/Stüart. Of course, they might still be difficult names for Turks to get their tongues around, but we’ll see!

Tags: flights, language - Turkish

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.