Esquire Theme by Matthew Buchanan
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28

Sep

Muhabbetkuşu

Living in a girls only dormitory in Çorum has its pros and cons. Before i made friends the biggest con was not being able to ask about things I didn’t understand. one day i was sitting in the common area reading my book when I heard a bird chirping “cik cik” (pronounced jeek jeek). I turned around, but could not find what had made the noise so I continued reading. Every hour or so I would hear the noise again and it was so timely that I decided it must be a clock of some sort. A couple days later I was in my friend’s apartment when I heard the same noise. I looked around and my friend got up and went to the door. When she came back she told me it was the doorbell. I was so relieved to find the source of the chirping and for the next week I forgot all about it as the sound dissolved into the sounds of the room around me. At breakfast one morning a couple of girls sat down with me. No one at the apart so far had been able to speak more than a handful of words in English so I had almost given up on trying to make friends. I was a bit lonely until I realized how many of the other girls were away from home for the first time and didn’t already have large friend groups. The girls who approached me at breakfast spoke a bit of English and were very interested in learning more. I took them under my wing and in return they took me under theirs. After dinner that night we met up to watch television in the common room. As we were sitting I heard the chirping again and one of the girls asked me if I had met the bird. I explained to her that I knew it was the doorbell. She looked at me with a dazed expression and asked again if I had met the bird. I said “yes, the doorbell,” I said with a dumb expression on my face.
“No, not the doorbell, the bird,” she replied.
She grabbed my hand and led me to the corner and sure enough in the corner was a bird cage and in it was a tiny parakeet.