Well, Turkey lost the volleyball, but Poland won, so it's not all bad. We being a household of from-Poland-toTurkey teachers didn't quite know who to cheer for - yesterday was better for that - and the games were a lot better, too!

On the subject of sport Fife has been combing the Eurosport website and it looks like they are not going to be showing any of the rugby. How the heck are we going to watch the rugby? Argh. I wonder if we can get a Georgian TV channel...

This morning I had the Early Pre-Ints - I've never taught the level before so it's all a bit wierd, nice class though, I have Hakan the DJ and a few other lovely people who I know and a few other lovely people who are new so it's all lovely - and I caught up with Inci and Özlem who are most upset that I'm not teaching them again - but still, there must be time for plenty of socialising there!

We are sitting around in the teacher's room trying to remember the story of the Billy Goats Gruff (after a bad start, we seem to have cobbled it together) - there are kids upstairs, and we're back in full swing! Woohoo! (I popped upstairs and they all looked at me as if I were a ghost for a split second and then thought of hurling themselves on me and then all thought better of it and just said "Hi, teacher!" and went back to trying to spy on each other in the toilets.)

Yasmin is complaining that she never sees me any more. I told her that was entirely her fault for going off and living in her own house! (And also very mismatched timetables, but such is life.)

Katka has still not made it to Lhasa, but shows no signs of giving up. And tomorrow is my weekend, and on Wednesday it's PayDay! Always a good thing.

* posted by nat 3:19 PM

Saturday, September 27, 2003

So as of Monday I'm off on a full timetable: Monday and Thursday mornings Early Pre-Ints; Monday afternoons workshops, Thursday afternoons Turkish; Monday and Thursday evenings Late Eles. Saturday and Sunday mornings the Early Eles, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons a loud bunch of 7-9 year old beginners (mostly boys - could be interesting).

I therefore confidently predict that I will lose the ability to speak fluent English by the end of November! Argh. You are all required to write me e-mails full of mixed conditionals, correct uses of the Present Perfect ('I am living in Istanbul for one year now' almost sounds correct to me...), future perfect continuous - in fact any perfective tenses at all, participle phrases and plenty of idiomatic language. Also please use articles, and don't fall into that trap of thinking that 'any' is only used in negative sentences. Thank you.

Having just taught two hours of make-up this afternoon for some latecomers into my Early Ele class, I'm now going to go home and drink my way quietly through a bottle of Kavaklidere. Oh yes.

* posted by nat 2:14 PM

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Ooooh, Lauren Child. My favourite is still You Pesky Rat. So there.

I had a busy Wednesday. Over to Taksim to fulfil my shopping needs (new top from OXXO, it is orange, hurrah!) and then back to Fenerbahce where I loitered on the corner until Yasmin picked me up and we went and sat on big cushions in an outdoor cafe by the sea - or as near to the sea as you can get, as there is a car park right by the sea, it's all wrong - and I comprehensively thrashed Yasmin at tavla and we made friends with a little cat and then I had a nasty allergy attack. Stupid cat. And pine trees. So we went and paid a man to clean Yasmin's car (inside and out, very exciting to watch, even more exciting to stand around and comment on the Bagdat-types who seem to bring a perfectly clean car in to be washed and then moan about tiny bits that aren't sparkling, evil boring people), then I went home and fell asleep. Wouldn't you?

So then I had to get up again - well, I didn't have to, and frankly it would have been a lot better if I hadn't and went up to Kadıköy for a drink with Oguz in Karga. Which turned into two drinks. And I hadn't had dinner. And that is my excuse and I'm sticking to it. I dimly remember learning the word for cufflink, which is something like kollunmese.

He walked me down to the dolmus and someone threw water on us from one of the flats up on this side street (we had stopped walking at the time, obviously, but I'm impressed - we hadn't been stopped long enough for someone to actually go and get some water to chuck at us!)

Oguz was, of course, mortified (goodness knows why, he started it). I was having hysterics and he had to drag me round the corner.

I woke up this morning and thought 'argh!' Which I am pretty much still thinking. Oh well. I was thinking 'Whoops' most of last night, but we shall see.

* posted by nat 2:22 PM

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Raspberry cheesecake is the new ambrosia.

Also I have given into commercialism and acquired a Migros Club Card. And Çankaya Kavaklidere is on special offer in said supermarket. This could well be the beginning of the end.

Hurrah!

* posted by nat 5:37 PM

Monday, September 22, 2003

An update email from Katka: "I'm going with the disguise 'Pregnant woman on the run'... either that or I'll look like an Afghan refugee." I have glued my thumbs to my palms.

I have discovered a new fruit seller round the corner who is cool and smiley and asks if I want my erik sert or yumusak. I don't think my answer makes much difference but it is nice to be asked! Also the gas man cometh this morning and was smiley and lovely and said Thank You in English even though I didn't give him much of a tip.

Last night I upgraded 'crap tv' to 'vaguely cerebral tv' by turning over at 9:10pm and watching a strange man talk about circles and squares in the architecture of Durham Cathedral. I didn't understand most of it (brain dead, painting toe nails, drinking wine, eating plums) but I was utterly transfixed through the whole thing.

Young Learners are coming, and soon! Have just shot self in foot with timetable but never mind.

* posted by nat 12:41 PM

Sunday, September 21, 2003

On Saturday the boys go and play football.

Now that we have a group of girls who do not live all in the same house (Heather had virtually moved in by the end, after all), we decided it was about time the girls did something with their Saturday nights as well.

So off we went to Kadıköy, where we had dinner in Salad Street (copious amounts of helping ourselves to seconds) and then retired to a nargile cafe where we surrounded ourselves with an apple nargile, copious amounts of tea and a very pretty tavla set, and proceeded to play lots of games, and Katherine finally managed to get smoke to come out of her nose (which I seem to manage to do without trying, but this is probably because I am part-dragon). Quite exciting as I've never smoked nargile before. The cappucino flavour sounds interesting...

I get a text message from Ben when the boys finish playing "What are you up to?" to which, after conferring, I reply "Shoe shopping."

We met up with just Jeremy in the end, in Karga, where we told him we'd been buying nail polish and matching hair ribbons.

"Oh," he said, "I thought you were going to smoke nargile."

"No," we said, and then Heather got out the Harry Potter quiz book and we did all the questions for Book 1, and between us we got almost all of them right. Reasonably scary.

Other things I have done this week for the first time is let Loni lure me into Dunkin' Donuts for Coolatas and one-doughnut-comes-free. Oh dear. I might be hooked on that, too.

Somewhere along the line I caught a horrid cold so now I am going to go and lie in the sun.

* posted by nat 11:41 AM

Friday, September 19, 2003

Being awake at 5am is so, so wrong I don't even know where to start, especially when I didn't get bed until after midnight because I fell asleep in front of Simon Schama. Not surprising really.

So I read through Katka's email and got the dictionary out for the more obscure words; my Czech is slipping. I should have known when we were rolling round on the grass in Place des Vosges in June and Katka said she thought she might go to China in a month or two, this was no idle threat...

Katka, having blazed a trail through Tajikistan, is now vegetating in the wilds of Western China, having managed to get across the border at a place where strange independent travellers (such as her) are not supposed to go. Katka does not let little problems like this stop her. As far as I can work out she keeps being almost trampled at night by marauding camels and spends the day weeping over Communist 'improvements' which consists of knocking everything old and/or ethnic down in pretty little towns. Plus ca change. She is now meandering south with the thought of trying to disguise herself in order to get into Tibet.

My life is so dull! Must travel.

* posted by nat 1:02 PM

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Lamentations:

kat: went to a school reunion at the weekend
nat: Oh crikey how was it?
nat: You KNOW you're old when you start oging to reunions!
kat: it was so scarey! all the girls are getting married and buying houses and getting landscape gardeners!
kat: well exactly!
nat: bloody hell!
kat: i know! landscape gardeners!
nat: those poor little things having no life and no intersting fun.
nat: well, unless the gardener is sexy...
kat: lol!
kat: i know - oone of them designs chicken dishes.... jees
nat: ?!?!?!?????!
nat: kill me now
nat: *vows never to go to a reunion*
kat: i know, and this was only a small portion of hte people from school. god i'm glad i left the midlands
nat: Amen sister.

* posted by nat 6:40 PM

Sunday, September 14, 2003

I hate my sinuses. Wah. Sniffle. Moan. Sniffle. Sniffle. Also, guillotines are bad for your hands. Especially if you're me.

Still, an evening of thoroughly good crap TV awaits. (I think I might have foolishly made plans to go out, but I am unmaking those right now.)

I have to run away, as there are too many mobiles in this school playing the Fenerbahçe anthem right now.

* posted by nat 2:17 PM

Saturday, September 13, 2003

A quick run to Nezih's to get pritt-stik (because Uhu is frankly useless) turns out to be a visit to the sixth level of hell, with small bawling children all over the place, and I ran into a huge pile of books - the Turkish translation of Order of the Phoenix - which came out a day or two ago, straight into paperback, fifteen million (I will probably be back to pick it up before the day has finished, even though I'm only halfway through book 3 in Turkish...)

I doubt the translators have managed to sleep, and I'm also dreading the amount of mistakes and oversights there are going to be. Though it is nice to read cleaned up punctuation, but sometimes the translators do things that leave me going "Why? Why? Why?" - well, that can't be helped.

I did, however, sad as I am, look into Chapter 8 to check the phone number for the Ministry of Magic. And, surprise surprise, they hadn't translated it - it's still 62442. It should be 74447 in Turkish. This is admittedly not as bad as the Czech translator of book 1 failing to translate the writing over the top of the mirror of Erised, but it's not that difficult to notice, surely?

* posted by nat 2:26 PM

My soul is worth �59174..

I might as well give up now, then!

* posted by nat 12:14 PM

Go me and my exciting cooking skills, otherwise known as 'oops my hand slipped when I was pouring out the chickpeas to soak, better do a vast amount of cooking'.

So I made hummus, lemon chickpeas and Mercimek soup, and I didn't have to scrape anything off the ceiling - although I got it pretty much everywhere else (especially the mercimek which was fairly swamplike)!

This morning, Early Eles, who were just the sweetest lot and really pretty strong for a beginner group. Poor Lale keeps getting mixed up between "I am single" and "I am a student", but she's getting there. Lots of board rushes and silly dice games, questions and answers, we learnt to count up to several hundred million and order some food from the cafe. Important stuff.

Right, must do standby and consider the important question of What I Want For My Birthday (aka How The Hell Should I Know?!)

* posted by nat 11:38 AM

Thursday, September 11, 2003

My DoS is an evil liar! I've got a class of Beginners at the weekend! Twelve of them! Argh! ARGH!

I have arranged to go out on Sunday night and get very drunk. I think this is the only way of dealing with it.

Yesterday was beautiful, Bosphorus-blue and sunny. I went to Besiktas as I wanted somewhere to go that involved a boat trip, so I sunned myself out on the side of the ferry, watched a helicopter landing on the back of one of the small warships that lurk around Dolmabahce Palace, and then walked up to the British Council, borrowed some books and then wandered around the market. I got a whole bunch of tiny hot chilli peppers. Yum.

Then I watched the sun on the sea and the coast back to Kad&$305;köy, met up with Oguz and two of his friends whose names I can never remember and we all went and played Okey and drank tea. Once I got the hang of it it was really quite easy, but I still lost. Oh well. It was fun!

* posted by nat 1:35 PM

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

I live in a fast-talking household! Bad TV appreciation society! Group tooth-brushing sessions! Eating each other's food! Insanity!

I also receive strange phone calls that go like this.
"Hi, where are you?"
"I'm at work."
"Huh?"
"At IH!"
"Oh.... goood! I am on a vapur."
"Lucky you!"
"Yes." *pause... runs out of English...* "Ok see you."

This morning I ate almost a whole jar of gherkins straight out of the jar. For breakfast. I really must go to the supermarket!

* posted by nat 12:11 PM

Monday, September 08, 2003

Lost at Tavla. Marzed and Marzed and Marzed. Oh well.

So I finished Salamander last night. I have a lot to work out about it. I think Pica was actually the Salamander, but it could have been so many of the characters. The story was just divine, it went where it should have while always detouring where it was least expected, filling out on a larger and larger scale whilst subdividing into smaller and smaller stories, and then the small comments, especially inbetween the chapters, that just left me gasping and going - that's exactly what it feels like when I'm reading, exactly the thoughts that run through my head, and certain passages folding out of the book actually do, and certain plot points draw you in and drown you, just as they do.

I don't often submerge in text. I tend to skim along the surface, sometimes dip a finger in, sometimes float along airily, tumble off, be carried along or pushed back by the current of words. But this tipped me in over my head from the start, and it was glorious. You come up at the end wondering what time it is, and where the heck you actually are, when you have to put it down it's dreadfully difficult to drag yourself away. It is what a book ought to be like, and while it is nothing like the book which the book is about, at times it is not so far away either, for you are not so far away from that perfect neverending book yourself. Precisely what all those shorter interlinked interspersed stories illustrate.

I am also prepared to lay down large sums of money that said author has read a heck of a lot of Central European literature (in particular, that would be, as so many traditions go into this book). It felt like a lot of the stuff I used to read at Uni, and a lot of the folk tales. Especially the castle. Mmmm.

I"m just baffled as to why I had to go to the Young Adult section of the bookshop to find it. It seems bizarre. Just because it's a fantastic fantasy of a story...?

* posted by nat 4:39 PM

Yes! My intensive course has finished! Hurrah! My weekends are less argh again! (actually, this weekend coming up is totally free, so if anyone wants to do a last-minute weekend in Istanbul, I'm available! Ooh!)

Going to play Tavla on the balcony now...

* posted by nat 3:36 PM

Thursday, September 04, 2003

So here I am checking out the net cafe up on the corner of Minibus Yolu, which is about a five minute walk, a little on the expensive side, and mostly full of strange, but quiet, uni-type boys playing Doom. Never mind, it seems to do everything I want it to do. I have had one of those days where you achieve nothing very much, I put some chickpeas into soak, spent a long time with the pestle and mortar crushing black peppercorns (writes pepper grinder on shopping list-from-England), unblocked the sink and slept for three hours. Which is all you can really do when it is raining horribly all day. But I have redeemed myself by making exciting salads and eating them with lavash bread. Yum!

Yesterday I met a very nice man in conversation who just got married this summer, though he'd been living with his wife for two years before he got married! I was so bowled over by this I went running downstairs to inform the teachers' room, and there was much cheering. He's the first Turk I've ever met who has done this, and by all accounts it wasn't easy. Go him all the same!

* posted by nat 6:07 PM

Tuesday, September 02, 2003

You know your life has got incredibly surreal when you're chatting to one person on YM and texting someone else in one three way conversation.

Also, on the way to Agva, we saw a tortoise crossing the road. (But I keep forgetting to post that.)

* posted by nat 1:00 PM

Monday, September 01, 2003

So last night we all (teachers, staff, from both of the schools) went on a boat cruise on the Bosphorus, and I got very, very drunk (but happily drunk) and I'm sure I made a fool out of myself several times. I definitely broke a table, and probably caused a few other major accidents as well. Fife is still suprised I didn't go overboard! But there was much wine, much dancing, much Mars-gazing and much general chatter.

Today, work. Work. Work. They have taken my morning ele class away, moo! Just as I'd got my legs all nice and tanned so I could wear a short skirt into class and see the effect it had on them. Drat it!

* posted by nat 2:59 PM