I'm going home, really I am. Not reading slash. Oh no. *innocent grin*

* posted by nat 6:49 PM

Okay, I was going home to play Tetris and then I remembered I had forgotten to write my reports. Have just made them all up on the spot. Everybody is making reasonable progress, unless they are making good progress. Obviously none of them are not making any progress at all, because companies pay us to make the poor things make progress, even when they come in after a 60+ hour week looking like death warmed up and fall asleep with their head in a pile of bits of paper.

Then I got distracted by Fatih the computer guy, and was just about getting round to another bout of wheedling to try and get the chatroom unblocked when all of a sudden he gets called upstairs. Foiled again.

Am planning failure. Of course. In at 8am tomorrow...

* posted by nat 6:37 PM

I have got my new timetable. You can all line up now, because I have NO EVENING CLASSES, NO TRAVELLING and a TWO AND A HALF DAY WEEKEND!!!! I'm keeping my kids for at least a few more weeks, I'm getting Okan's sweet Late-Int class on Sat/Sun mornings (a level I've just taught, thus it's all planned already!), I have a Pre-Int 1-2-1 on Mon and Fri mornings, and a brand new Elementary class on Monday and Thursday mornings. The only downside is that my days off are Tuesday and Wednesday, which are the dates of the Christmas holidays. So no extra time off. Sulk.

Come and visit then, come on! It's cold but it's sunny here. Everyone's getting killed in piles up in the fog on the main roads in the middle of Turkey. We're not there yet.

And, and, this might mean I might actually have time in my new timetable to pootle down to the net cafe in Kadıköy on a more regular basis and do chat, and play DF, and Mush, and other things like that, because I have been missing a lot of fab people...

* posted by nat 5:41 PM

I wish I could tell you there have been no updates because, you see, we went to Carrefour and while in Carrefour we found ourselves in the electronics section and there were all these things saying PROMOSYON and it just didn't seem /fair/ to leave them there. I mean, who can resist a VCD player with karaoke functions, not to mention the fact you can play games on it. So Yasmin bought that. And then Fife thought we might as well have a new, good TV to go with it.

I bought some lavender to put under my pillow, and extra yummy fat-inducing double choc-chip cookies to use when watching the VCDs. Then we got home and got out the VCD player and there was a CD inside it that said '300 Game'

"300 Games!" squeaked Yasmin, who has lived in places like Kuala Lumpur and understands such labels.

"Or one game with the name 300," I suggested, because I am a cynic, or just silly.

Yasmin was correct, and, here we come to it, we scrolled though a few games until we found two player Tetris.

Not much has been achieved since.

However, as we only made all these purchases yesterday afternoon, I don't suppose that is a good enough excuse for not writing up this blog in so long. Last night we tried to watch Road to Perdition but the sound was a bit screwy, we eschewed Harry Potter, as it comes out here today and we're going to try to find it undubbed before we give in and watch the VCD of it, and we ended up watching The Mummy 2 because staring at Brendan Fraser is good.

* posted by nat 5:34 PM

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Stupid thing isn't working.

*aloofs*, just for CdM

* posted by nat 3:22 PM

So. There is confusion about classes changing over; my Eles are upset. "But we don't want another teacher!" (Am I teaching them anything?) But apparently after the Bayram, we're changing. Which means that we all have to be in next Monday lunchtime, which is annoying, as we'd planned to run off early. Holiday! Holiday!

Yay for Bayram. Yasmin has her car, but still no blue foreignified numberplates, and maybe insurance would be a good idea... Kevin is coming along as well, and there will be madness, food to eat, far too much sugar, bad music tapes, and we shall get stuck in silly strange places, and several trucks will try to kill us.

Then again, it's not always the trucks. The driver who brought Kevin and me back from Nestle today tried to undertake large trucks on at least three seperate corners. I squeaked a lot.

* posted by nat 3:17 PM

Saturday, November 23, 2002

Mother is here. The house is full of Turkish Delight. It is raining.

My kids and I have a little thing some lessons where they pull out stuff they've bought and we learn some vocab. Today it got a little confusing. Gökhan has progressed from bringing in a newspaper to a magazine and today he brought in a comic.

"Teacher, what is it?"
"It's a comic."
"Yes, çok komik*, ama what is it?"
"It's a comic."
"Komik magazine?"
"Well, sort of, it's a comic."
"Noooooooo! Çok komik, ama BU NE?!?!?"

*It's very funny.

* posted by nat 3:15 PM

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

Oooh, a photo! The Usual Suspects (at Ulus Park a couple of weeks ago).

* posted by nat 1:34 PM

Monday, November 18, 2002

Wah! Fix the photocopier! Wah! How long can it take? He's been here over two hours and pulled the thing apart and back together again several times, and I've magically managed to plan all my lessons and I want to go home but I need the phocopies done, bother!

Too much Çorba plus sitting outside to plan your lessons just makes you over-excited. And it is such a gorgeous day today - after a very misty start, with clouds nestled down inbetween all the smaller hills on the European side, and it was go thick over the Bosphorous that the drop underneath the bridge might have been bottomless, for all we could tell. but by the time we came back, just after 10am, there wasn't a cloud in the sky and there was nothing but blue above and blue below.

I think I shall go away and come back later...

* posted by nat 2:03 PM

Sunday, November 17, 2002

So today I pulled out my pictures of Harry Potter and we did the describing people lesson and it went down a storm. Afterwards, we played let's ship Harry Potter. The whole class seems to be vehemently Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione - although the concept of Ginny/Draco really seemed to intrigue them (Harry/Draco was considered and given the thumbs down). I have finally managed to persuade them that Ron is my favourite and that Harry Potter is not the forthcoming father of my children. They're also still busy trying to tell me that Dumbledore is dead (make cutting motion of hand across throat then pretend to go to sleep).

And apparently the film's not out till the 28th according to their magazines. Bah.

In terms of babies, they still want to know why I'm not pregnant. I don't think they'd be up to a talk on the facts of life in English.
Gözde also told me, in all seriousness, with half a bar of chocolate in her hand, that I shouldn't eat chocolate because chocolate causes cancer. If I didn't already know she has two teenage sisters and a fashion-victim mother, I'd have known at that.

* posted by nat 3:17 PM

Saturday, November 16, 2002

The car's been test driven, checked out by a mechanic, and it's looking good! Yasmin's going to have a car! Woo! Road trip! *runs off home to read guide book and plan Seker Bayram trip*.

* posted by nat 3:05 PM

"Who was that on the phone last night?" Fife asked at school this morning.

"Well, duh," I said. "Didn't you hear the door opening after that? And the conversation on the balcony? And the banging and bumping around? And the LARGE PAIR OF SHOES sitting by the front door this morning?

"No," said Fife, looking clueless.

Then the penny dropped.

* posted by nat 3:04 PM

Friday, November 15, 2002

I got through the door last night, "I just walked up to Kadıköy," and Yasmin said "What?" and fife came running out and said "Ooooooh, does your computer play VCDs," and I said, "Oooooooh, I bet it doesn't, it's ickle and slow but have a go anyway," so we let Ercan play with it for a few moments and it turns out that it DOES! Yay! Lots of excitement!

Well, it sort of does. It crashes once per CD and a couple of the worse copies it won't play, but we ate curry, made sahlep, put the lights out and watched Spider-Man with crash and reboot breaks doubling up as cigarette breaks, just like any Turkish film. then I showed Yasmin GoodSol. Double Freecell. I don't think I will ever get the computer back into my room again.

This morning was solving evil nasty crosswords time out on the balcony, and then Yasmin got a phonecall from Sedat: "I've seen an Uno for sale! It looks good! It's 6.2 billion!" Yay! Lots of excitement! We got Ercan to phone and inquire and they're off up there now to view. Oooooh.

* posted by nat 11:14 AM

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Warm and sunny - breakfast on the balcony, walk up by the sea to Kadıköy - bliss.

Last night I had a row with one of my students (which has been brewing for a while, she seems to think I don't like her cos she's always talking in Turkish when I'm trying to give instructions etc and then gets snitty when I ask her to stop... according to her "everyone else does it"... so I tried to have a word with her after the lesson and she just stalked off (!)) so I went down the pub and sulked, and was just thinking I would have to go in to school the next day and talk to Ben, when Ben appeared round the corner to the pillar and joined us!

Now, I know he's a good DoS, but responding to my thoughts - that's really impressive!

* posted by nat 2:10 PM

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

*goes in for weekly kicking of Lycos*

* posted by nat 4:36 PM

I spent a very productive hour or two this morning printing out decent screenshots from the CoS movie to use when teaching the kids physical descriptions at the weekend.

However, it's occurred to me that as the movie opens this weekend here in Turkey (at least I think it does, there's posters up all over the place) they'll probably all force their parents to take them to see it.

Maybe I should take them to see it. Class outing!

Three hours of the past perfect versus the past simple to go - but senza photos of Caernarfon Castle and recipes for Welsh Rarebit today - and then it's the weekend! Yay! Getting up five mornings a week is killing me... how does the rest of the world do it? (Granted, most of the rest of the world doesn't work split shifts, but still...

* posted by nat 4:28 PM

Monday, November 11, 2002

It's the first day there's been a winter chill in the air, that crisp kind of smell and feeling that makes you want to get the gloves and the scarf out. I got home from BAT and instantly went to work on making soup. Vast quantities of Leek and Potato - milk provided by the lactose-free milk, so we'll see how that affects me - so it should be enough for us all for a couple of days!

Yasmin and I got hungry at 4:30 and went down to Lokanta. All the food was piping hot and I got Çorba (barley soup - definite taste of chicken but never mind) and yummy filled borek (Ramazan special). We sat down and started eating - and then remembered what the time was. So we ate and watched the restaurant fill up with hungry looking people who had to wait until two minutes to five until they could eat. Their soup arrived, and they all stirred paprika and salt and lemon juice into it, and started to look more and more unhappy - mostly because they were watching us. Then the radio was cranked up, the muezzin started, and everyone dug in more or less in unison.
At that point we'd finished and there was a queue so we got up and left, much to the consternation of one old man sitting there waiting. "Why are they leaving?"
The waiter said helpfully, "They've eaten!"
"What? How?!"

* posted by nat 3:20 PM

Sunday, November 10, 2002

I got home last night just as the heavens opened, and the lightning and thunder started to move closer together. The lights dipped once, and Fife got the candles out. Every crash of thunder set all the car alarms in the street off, and then there was a part�cularly cloud clap of thunder together with a huge burst of lightning and all the lights in Suadiye went out.

It was quite spectacular to see all the lights go out at once, although the amount of traffic aquaplaning under the bridge below meant that there was plenty of light on the street. And one by one, we saw all the candles come on, and we lit ours up too, and every so often there would be another long flash of lightning and the whole sky would be half as light as day for almost a second.

We sat there and watched all the lights come back on - over the other side of the bridge, over the other side of the road, and we sat there in the darkness and lamented the fact that we had lost the art of conversation (being Saturday night, we had an excuse.) We tried playing I Spy but that came to nothing; we were too good for each other.

'I spy with my little eye something beginning with N'
'No light.'
'Ok, come on then,' said Yasmin, 'I Spy with my litte eye something beginning with A-B-N.'
'Absolutely bloody nothing!' Fife and I said in chorus.

Fife went to peer out of the window on the landing and found that the lights were on behind us too - so just our strip. We sat and waited and watched for an hour or so, until about an hour later the lights flickered and coughed and came back on, and the television fuzzily worked its way back into existence - just in time for us to see the last minute of The Simpsons.

But at least it stayed on for my fix of Buffy.

*

I got to school this morning later than normal - just after 8:30 - but by fifteen minutes of chopping up bits of paper (I'm a real TEFL teacher, so I am!) I was ready for a hot chocolate, so at 9 o'clock I popped upstairs to see Ersin.

I got my hot chocolate and was told in no uncertain terms to go outside, so I did, just as the air raid sirens started.

Looking down onto the street below was like looking at a picture, a tableau in which nothing was moving. People were standing in the middle of the street, just where they'd got to at that moment, others were standing at attention next to the doors of their cars, absolutely still, apart from one small poodle who hadn't quite got the hang of it.

After a minute, the sirens stopped, the policemen blew on their whistles, and the whole scene sprang back into life again as suddenly as it had stopped.

And that's what happens every year on this day at 9:05am, the exact moment that Atatürk died in 1938. It's an exceedingly eerie event - a visual reminder of exactly how much of a grip this one man still has on the entire Turkish nation. (Poodles, obviously, unaffected.)

* posted by nat 3:20 PM

Saturday, November 09, 2002

Wednesday: Fenerbahçe beat Galatasaray 6-0. Mwhahahahaha! My mainly pro-Galasaray class were a touch unimpressed, but Melis and I were quite happy. Metin sank into the depths of despair in the corner. But he turned up! And they started using the past perfect naturally! Whoa! I should have tried teaching without explaining earlier!

Thursday: we Carrefoured. We spent nearly two hours in there. We bought about twenty bags of shopping. Yasmin and I were sitting outside the checkouts waiting for Fife and Ercan, and we were so hungry, and about to lunge for the pide, and then we remembered that it was Ramazan (and it's rude to eat in public when others are fasting). So we had to sit there and gaze longingly at it until we got in the car. Then we stuck our heads down and stuffed ourselves...

Getting twenty-odd bags of shopping up to the sixth floor is a major expedition - chain from the car to the railings, then through the railings, then up into the lobby, then pile it all in the lift around Yasmin, then the rest of us run up the stairs and unpack her at the other end. Then one at a time in the kitchen trying to find somewhere to put it all. We cleared out a cupboardful of teacups! We found old money - a 50,000 note!

In the evening Yasmin introduced us to the wonders of sahlep - instant sahlep, made with hot water. It was delicious. Except I think realy sahlep is going to kill me, as I didn't feel so good after it. (Sahlep is a bit like custard... only better.)

Friday: Yasmin got her boots! They are very cool. I think we are all going to commission boots from the boot-maker now. And we ALL bought stripy socks. See? I live with people who understand the value of stripy socks! My kind of people. Now for odd striped socks...
And we ate künefe. Yum!

Saturday: We all wear our stripy socks to school. Baturay brings his new slinky to class and gets it all tangled up. I mend it and show the whole class how to get a slinky to walk downstairs during their breaktime. Turkish Toefl class in room 2 apparently unimpressed. Huh. I agree to show the class after class except Baturay manages to then break his slinky irretrievably. Thirteen people trying to mend a slinky is a little excessive. But we did learn ordinal numbers at the same time. And I cut animal words in half and they had to match them up. Then we started to create new animals, but we ran out of time before I could get them all to draw an eleroo etc. (head of an elephant, body of a kangaroo... maybe it's better that we didn't...)

But guess what? Nazlı dropped the ball, the boys went for the dictionary and said "Teacher, clumsy." Then they said, "Teacher, she is clumsy!" Then I dropped the ball and they said, "Teacher, YOU are clumsy!" No prompting whatsoever! Most adults don't come up with that! (they just parrot the word clumsy or say you - clumsy) So yay my kids! Also worthy of an honourable mention is Ezgi's mime of Selin being ill: "Selin not here!" ::cough splutter retch fake vomiting::

* posted by nat 4:05 PM

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

Ramazan began last night, and I was feeling all good-intentioned and thought I might try a day or two.

And then I woke up and realised I was thirsty.

So that idea went out the window.

And Fife did exactly the same!

* posted by nat 1:22 PM

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

Nat comes over all weak at the knees!

* posted by nat 2:07 PM

So I get out of the taxi and say to Huseyin "Yarın görüsürüz,"* and he says "Inshallah!"**

Inshallah what exactly? Which one of us is more likely to get run over by a bus before tomorrow?

*See you tomorrow!
**If God wills it!

* posted by nat 11:43 AM

Monday, November 04, 2002

Monday is my do-nothing day, my blog catching-up day, my marking homework day, my drinking too much hot chocolate day, my brain dead day, my procrastinating day. It's my get-up-at-6am day, my make-conversation-with-the-security-guard day, my Burger-King day, my play-Spider day, my reading day, my remembering-my-Czech day, my cutting-up-little-pieces-of-paper day, my printing-out-crosswords day, my practice-my-Turkish-tenses-with-Ersin day, my-reading-the-paper day...

Monday is a very busy day.

(All I was going to say was I have about three weeks' worth of blog entries to read. But I did a quiz instead. Cha-cha-cha.)

Which Personality Disorder Do You Have?
brought to you by Quizilla

I have a grip on reality? News to me!

* posted by nat 4:22 PM

Ah, the morning after the night before, the stocks go up and the lira goes down (and then up, and then down, and then up again), the army sits there and mutters and Ecevit still carries on blaming everyone else around him...

No-one's exactly surprised that the AKP won, mind you. No-one's even very surprised that they won by a big margin. But what's annoying a lot lot of people, and probably the majority of my students, is that only two parties made it over the 10% threshold - and those two aren't the ones that the people round this happy cushy area of Istanbul voted for. (Mr Erdogan was over here on Repbulic Day, but I've certainly never seen the AKP milk float wandering down Bagdat Cad. - why would they, after all, this is the party that has its very own social welfare program, and Bagdat shoppers certainly don't have a problem with getting fed.)

Anyhow, when one party gets 9.7 percent of the vote and another gets 8.4 (and then there's the Genç Partesi, which doesn't seem to stand for anything except 'vote for us if you don't like anyone else, we have a pretty catchy theme tune...') - see one idea of the share of votes here - you can see some discontented mumblings coming. Sit tight, and teach several ways of saying "The election system in Turkey is crap," - which I think counts as criticising the state so I'd better check that out before I go saying it in the classroom with the picture of Atatürk hanging over my head...

On one hand there'll be no coalition which means there should be less political in-fighting which seems to be such a major problem, but on the other hand the powers-that-be (which would be the army and the judiciary) have sepnt most of the past three months trying to ban the AKP (or postpone the elections) - they managed to ban Erdogan on the grounds he was convicted of sedition (for sedition read 'read an Islamist poem out in public while acting in a political capacity') though he's served the sentence for that. And to be fair, they didn't just ban him, they banned a few other Islamic politicians, a few Kurdish politicians, and Turkey's leading human rights activist whose name I can never remember...

The latest bright idea is trying to ban the AKP on the grounds they have a leader who is banned. It's really not helpful. What's really making people jittery is this party has enough seats in Parliament to change the constitution - and when headscarves are the major issue they are there might just be fireworks ahead.

Last time Turkey tried electing a vaguely Islamic linked party the army just rolled the tanks out and banned the party (they keep banning the parties, which is why the AKP is a "new" party). So we shall see what happens this time. One thing's for sure this morning, the traffic's as bad as ever, and the neighbours upstairs were yelling at the TV all last night, so nothing's going to change. All the different TV stations had slightly different election predictions last night, and there were a lot of confused-looking anchormen and women about, and I burnt the coriander to the bottom of the non-stick saucepan... great.

But no more buses with loudspeakers! Yay! And workshops full of talking about interlanguage and acquisition versus learning... far more interesting!

* posted by nat 2:00 PM

Sunday, November 03, 2002

Small children on English overload:

"Teacher, Old MacDonald has a zoo and Bingo is his name-o!"

* posted by nat 3:11 PM

Yesterday all the children dragged their parents in to show them the writing we'd got up on the wall and all the parents turned to me and said "It's hot in here!"

I said, "Yes, there are thirteen small children in a not very large room. That's what happens."

Then they go and complain to reception because their little darling is all sweaty. And the children sat and sulked because mummy only cared about the temperature of the room and their clothes and not the fact that they had produced a VAST amount of written English, all in full sentences (Baturay still doesn't know when his birthday is, but he CAN produce the sentence "My birthday is the I-don't-know of I-don't-know"), and drawn some absolutely gorgeous pictures.

I sulked too.

Today we are all going to pretend to be wild animals and I'll see how many pieces of clothing we can wreck. Hopefully we'll all get hot and sticky again too. Mwhahahahahahaaaaaa!

Last night Yasmin made dhal. And curry. And raita. And it was gorgeous. Yum.

And there's an election today. Hurray! Hopefully this will mean an end to all the campaign buses driving round yelling out stuff with loudspeakers that are turned up so loud that when they go past the whole class has to come to a halt because no-one can hear what anyone else is saying. The UIs asked me yesterday who I was going to vote for. After some wranging about degrees of probability I said I'd vote for anyTHING that stopped the buses.

* posted by nat 7:16 AM

Saturday, November 02, 2002

When you soak chickpeas and then don't cook them immediately, they sprout.
At least this way I know they're fresh!

Much chocolate was consumed yesterday in order to counter the stress of dealing with money. Not to mention the fact that there's nothing on the TV. And we went to bed around 8:30. Ben phoned at 10 - "Why aren't you at the Halloween Party?" - "Because we're asleep." - "Oh. Er. All right then."

* posted by nat 7:06 AM

Friday, November 01, 2002

I surfaced late - I'm getting too used to waking up at 7am, so I had a long, long lie-in - and we all sat around and looked at each other for a while, and then we all piled in the car ("Family Outing!" said Fife. "Aaaaaw," said Yasmin, "Childproof the doors!" I said) and drove over to Ulus Park on the other side, where we sat and looked out at some amazing views over the Bosphorus, relaxed, drank coffee, made gentle conversation, stared, stared, stared, and enjoyed the view. We even took a few photos - so organised!

Then after some debate we went to Akmerkez - think Bluewater or other soulless shopping mall but very posh and full of victims (of the fashion variety). We couldn't even find anything to buy in OXXO. Most disappointing. However, there were several Americans and even some Germans in there, so it's obviously where the ex-pats hang out. Poor them.

We braved rush-hour traffic, going slowly over the bridge, which was fine by me as I got plenty of staring time in over down to Sultanahmet and the evening sky turning purpler, and the rush hour on the Bosphorus as well; boats everywhere. It also enabled me to engage in some happy inane text messaging with Néa: "I'm in Europe!" - "I'm on a bridge!" - "I'm in Anatolia!".

We stopped in Kadıköy for gözleme (gorgeous) and rice pudding (too sugary, but it felt like a good idea at the time). The evening's entertaining diners: American man not eating his food and wailing Turkish woman who burst into tears for a long time sniffling about how it had been an emotional week. Lucky her. So we left there, failed to pick up Yasmin's boots as they're still not ready, and Ercan fought us all off to pay for some kadayif. Then we tried to go home, but we got stuck around the Fenerbahçe stadium, pre-match, with a car behind belting out Fener anthems (have learnt a few) and competing with the radio playing Las Ketchup again. (All singing now.) So we crawled around for an hour or so getting scared by Fener fans (get up of choice: florescent yellow balaclava - who wouldn't be freaked out?), and Ercan singing the rude versions of the songs (as every good Galasaray man should...)

Then we got home and played backgammon, drank beer, stuffed ourselves with sticky sweets, etc. And whoever phoned at gone eleven, only to put down the phone just as I picked it up, will be murdered. 4 rings is not enough time to get to the phone! Let me demonstrate.

1 ring: groan, stick head under pillow, wait to see if it's a mistake or not.
2 rings: ok, it's not a mistake, someone wants one of us.
3 rings: get out of bed, open door, crash into one of other housemates who has done the same.
4 rings: walk down hall to phone.

Anyhow, phoning after 8:30pm GMT is generally a bad idea. We go to bed early in our place!

Anyhow, all this has been written in a desperate attempt to stave off going to the bank and sorting out this month's money issues (ie. changing EVERYTHING into pounds or dollars in case the election causes the bottom to fall out of the lira again). I tried doing sums this morning, total failure. Probably cos I thought sticking some formulae into Excel might make things quicker, but no, as ever, anything's quicker and makes more sense than using Excel. Did it all longhand instead, using the calculator on my mobile at vague moments. Much easier.

* posted by nat 11:19 AM