How old am I?

How old am I? Now you wouldn’t think that would be a difficult question. Only it turns out that Turks don’t calculate age the same way that we do. According to us I’m 27 because I haven’t had my birthday yet this year and I was born in 1979. According to them, that makes me 28. As far as I can tell they don’t care when you’re born in a year, you count the present year no matter what. What this means is that there is no way to differentiate between someone born January 1, 2007 and someone born December 30, 2007. When you’re born you are a year old. As soon as it turns to 2008 both of these people will be 2. Is it a life shattering idea? No. Is it an interesting twist to what you always thought was a straight forward question? Definitely. It does make it a bit more difficult to figure out how our department members compare to each other age-wise – turns out there’s not as big of a gap between me and some of the younger Turkish teachers…it only took me 8 months to figure out we weren’t starting from the same assumptions.