Back to school shopping....in Turkey

The kids attended their first day of school at MEF International School here in Izmir and the stories are trickling out. It's a small cozy school that caters mostly to NATO families and K-12 has only 120 kids so it seems pretty manageable. Yesterday we did our back to school shopping at Kipa, the big Turkish department store chain, and by now none of us except maybe my 15 year old daughter Jasmine was self-conscious as we stood around the big bin of college ruled notebooks trying to figure out the ongoing puzzle of Turkey. We could tell just by the signs that notebooks were on special and we were determined to take advantage of the special but we really had absolutely no idea of what the special was or how it worked. At one stage we thought perhaps they might sell notebooks by weight, a theory which was eventually discarded as impractical, and at another stage we thought we were on to it for sure with the idea that it required a club card. No theory was too crazy since our pattern-matching skills were failing us. Finally, possibly with divine intervention since I think I saw Zach praying silently, perhaps that he could become part of another family, we got to the point where we figured out that in a bin of many types of notebooks only 2 types were on sale. Yes! We had beaten the system and bought only those notebooks that were on sale, thereby saving the family $3 maybe $4 US.