Tea Time

Drinking tea is an integral part of culture here and we love it. You have tea at breakfast, in the afternoon, after meals, while you're shopping and while you're playing tavla (backgammon), etc. Basically, you drink it all day long. Men too...they drink tea out of these small dainty tea glasses, which is pretty funny if you're not used to seeing it.

Hosting people for tea or çay here is really important. Women here take hospitality to a whole new level. One afternoon soon after we got here, our neighbor came to our door and mentioned something about having tea. I thought she asked if I wanted to have tea at her place at 2pm and I said yes. Well 2pm comes around and I'm leaving my apartment when I run into four of our female neighbors right outside our door. It turns out she was inviting all of them over to OUR house for tea. I invited them on in, Russ gave me a "See ya and good luck" and was out of there fast. Guess who hadn't cleaned or gone shopping that day and had a nearly empty fridge? Luckily, I did have tea and they brought over a few gifts for us: a coffee maker, coffee, and thankfully some sweets, which I could share with them. It is polite here to invite yourself over to someone's house or to just show up, which I now know. This was our neighbors' way of welcoming us to our apartment building.

Making çay is different here, you use a special double boiler pot, which thankfully I had just bought a few days earlier. I asked my neighbor to show me how to make it and I survived the afternoon in tact. I love my neighbors, they are very sweet, but also very direct. They told me Russ had better language than me, told me I needed to study more, and then they checked my homework. But they also said that Russ and I were very warm and they were glad to meet us. Lesson learned: always be prepared to have guests...and study more!

These are our new çay tables we just got. The top is just a regular end table, but the four tables below pull out for serving tea and food when people come over.