First day of work!

Merhaba!

That means hello in Turkish.  See, I’m learning!  And I can count to four!

Today was a pretty good day.  I got up pretty early, and I was able to go into work with a girl who lives in the same building.  She is apparently taking classes at the American Cultural Language Institute, aka. where I work.  It’s nice to be able to talk to someone in the morning… and work on my turkish while she practices her english.

Work today was fairly uneventful for the most part.  I spent a large portion of my day sitting around waiting for something to do.  They just started a summer program for children so everyone was really busy doing things related to that.  I helped out where I could, but quickly discovered it was best if I stayed out of the way until I was needed.

So, I hung around all day.  It was neat to see the way things worked.  I did get to help teach a class today, and that was definitely the highlight of my day.  They were just starting to learn english, but it was a lot of fun talking to them.  I was even invited to go drinking and clubbing with a couple of them.  I will take them up on that, but not until I’m over this jet-lag. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my maps of Canada, and Canadian memorabilia to show them where I lived.  Oh well, I’ll make sure I have that for tomorrow.

Also tomorrow I get to try my hand at helping to teach the children french as well.  I’m actually really looking forward to being able to play and teach kids again.  I’m also going to be getting my schedule of classes that I get to teach.  Again, I’m really excited to teach!

Anyway, after work I went out for dinner with one of my coworkers.  I really need to start writing down the names of the foods that I’m eating because it was really tasty and I’d like to be able to order it again.

I got home fairly late and I stopped along the way so that I could take pictures.  Some turned out better than others, but I’m experimenting with my camera and pushing myself.  I do see where I can improve upon some of my pictures though so that’s a start.

Well, I’m exhausted so I’m going to try and conquer this jet-lag and go to sleep now.

Cheers,

- Mike

Water, water everywhere…

Greetings from Yalova!

I’m writing this from my new dwelling for the next couple of months.  I am, and will be staying in the student dormitory for Yalova University.  I have two room mates, both of whom are, I’m told, sailors though I’ve only met one so far.  Thankfully he speaks english well enough that we’re able to communicate fairly well.

I’m now going to backtrack a little bit and talk about my arrival in Istanbul yesterday.  I was too exhausted to write about it when I got here so you’ll have to settle for getting the information a day late.

Well, I landed in Istanbul around 3pm on the afternoon of the 18th.  At the airport, there was a big crowd gathered around the entrance.  I had no idea what that was all about so I left via a different exit and got a taxi there.  I took the taxi to Yenikapi, the ferry dock, and from there I took the ferry across to Yalova.

There were a couple of things that went wrong on the way.  First, the money changer gave me what turned out to be a counterfeit 50TRL.  I didn’t find that out until I tried to pay the cab fare.  So, since I was a bit flustered, and I didn’t know the conversion rates off the top of my head, I’m pretty sure the cab driver took advantage of that and overcharged me for the ride.  That sucked a little bit.  And then after that, I had to wait a couple more hours for the ferry boat to show up, but the hardest part about that was staying awake to watch my stuff.

Now, when i got to Yalova I was supposed to call my supervisor to come and pick me up from the ferry docks.  The only problem with that was that I had no phone, and there was no pay-phone nearby.  So, I happened to chance upon a police station not too far away and was able to pantomime and speak in broken Turkish phrases, and short english and the very nice police officer with the big gun used his cell called him for me.

After that I went to the school and had dinner with some of the teachers and some of the students.  Then I went to a hotel room and crashed for the night.  Well, first I accidentally popped the electrical breaker for my room and lost all power.  Then I crashed.

Then this morning I got up and went back to the school.  I didn’t really get a “training” so much as I got there and just wandered around and hung out.  I saw a couple of classes and talked with some of the teachers and some of the students.  Apparently I have a strong accent that they can’t understand yet.  So, I have to speak slowly, which is an interesting experience and I occasionally forget that I have to do it.  I’m sure I’ll be getting better with practice though.

Anyway, since I had no lessons to teach, I was able to go for a little bit of a walk along the beach.  My goodness it’s beautiful here.  It’s also quite warm, but I was expecting that.  I’m very thankful that my job lets me wear shorts to work.

I’m finding the language barrier to be an interesting issue.  It’s been a long time since I’ve travelled somewhere that I don’t speak the language, and not constantly with someone who can translate for me.  I have decided that my project for the summer is to learn basic Turkish, and hopefully enough to be able to carry on a conversation by the end of the summer.  There, I’ve announced it to the world so I had better carry through.

Tomorrow is my day off, so I have decided I will be spending it walking around and taking pictures after sleeping long enough to feel rested, of course.  Hopefully there will be a lot of new pictures going up for tomorrow’s blog.

Until then, I’m going to be trying to be playing around with the settings of the blog to see what it can do.

Cheers!

Mike