ev arkadaşları

I find myself with two female Turkish roommates. When I was here last summer, an American girl from my university crashed at the apartment for about a week before she found herself housing other than the $200 or so a night hotel she'd been staying at. Then I told the neighbors and local grocers that she was my wife, I'm not sure what to say now. Actually I suggested to the one Turkish girl who's in my Persian class and invited herself to live with me (people from Turkey can be refreshingly direct after the taarof maarof of Iranians) that I tell people they're both my wives, but she opposed the idea. Anyway the housekeeper and gardener are both new and the former is an Herati Afghan teenager who dotes on me because I took an interest in his life story, so I think I can get away with telling them the Turks are my relatives. I'm much more comfortable hosting them than Americans--both because of my general distaste for Americans abroad (label me as you will) and because the Iranian authorities don't particularly care about Turks in their country--they don't even need to apply for visas.

The deal is that they buy and cook me delicious Turkish food, and I let them stay for 6 weeks rent-free. Not a bad deal for me since I don't pay any rent here and had been putting off any attempts of my own at cooking as long as possible. Also I can practice my Turkish with them, though constantly switching between two foreign languages is incredible confusing for me.