Holiday Parties

Turks, like most Latin Americans, have a very busy social life that involves visits to friends for dinner, as well as going out to restaurants. Most people host others for dinner at least once every 1-2 weeks.


Here are some of the parties we went to between November 1st and December 5th. This is not a definitive list--just the ones I remembered to bring my camera too! In addition to these, we also have weekly dinner and cake at Sansal's mom's house. Yum!

My great Canadian friend, Natalie, and her room-mates from Berlitz housing had a get together. Casper came along, too, and was a big hit:





The next week was a Thanksgiving party for the organization "Professional American Women of Istanbul." I had just joined two days before this, so didn't know anybody there. It was held at the VERY swanky apartment of one of the members:




Next was a surprise birthday party for Sansal, held at the homes of our friends Sarah (English) and Levent (Turkish). Levent cooked up a ton of wonderful dishes, and everybody else brought something to share:





Then Natalie and I went to the annual Christmas party and bazaar thrown by the International Women of Istanbul. At this, you buy food tickets, and they have an international food court where you can choose different things and pay with the tickets. We also entered a $4 raffle. Natalie won a $50 gift certificate to IKEA and a beautiful silver ring; I got a spa treatment valued at about $75-100.




A few days later, we had my birthday dinner and cake at Sansal's mom's house:



Next was my birthday coffee get-together at Kahve Dunyasi (Coffee World):



The next occasion was our friend Rachel's wedding to her Turkish fiance, Aykut: