Holiday Season

Besides the horribly long parents meetings I've been in all week and the illness that the stress has been bringing on me, this week has been fairly good, especially the weekend. Namely I got to do some major-league celebrating.

On Friday Hazal came over and we made potato pancakes, just as we were supposed to before the snow ruined our plans. Unfortunately I have no pictures, but we lit a candle and I sang a prayer and we ate. Plus I think I got her to fall in love with my cat, which I hope her to do more of because then maybe she can keep him after I leave. I'm only about 75% kidding here. We were both very tired and spent most of the time listening to music.


Taksim dressed up for the holidays (I've found that many Turkish people don't know the difference between Christmas and New Years)

Then on Christmas Day, Can's mother was celebrating the opening of her new acupuncture clinic, so I went into the city to Kadıköy to celebrate with them. I was supposed to stay the night, but I'm feeling a little too under the weather. I got to meet his father, who's in the military, and congratulate his mother on the opening. It looks nice - apparently Can and his sister have been fixing the place up all week, which would explain why Can was so tired. We both went to bed earlier than planned that night.


Can and Damla on one of the patient beds

Every time I see the Bosporus I feel like I've made a good decision to live here, my only regret being that I can't be closer to it more often. Today as I made my way to the ferry from Taksim, I was actually giddy with excitement, peering around the corners of the side streets in search of the body of water. Here was my first look:



It was, sadly, a little disappointing - it was grayer than I remembered, and a little smaller as well. It's that time of year, I suppose, when the blue fades from the water and a winter haze sets in over the city. When the Bosporus is gray, it feels like all of Istanbul has lost its color.


Seagulls followed the ferry as it made its way from Beşiktaş to Kadıköy

But stepping onto the ferry and boating alongside Dolmabahçe Palace, being actually on the Bosporus, the beauty floated back in with the orange glow of the sunset.

Taksim One Week Later

Yesterday me and my friend Hazal had dinner in Taksim. We met by the square, where a week ago a suicide bomber blew himself up, injuring 32 people. It happened to be in the week I couldn't muster the energy to drag myself to Taksim, even though I wanted to see my friends.



Being back in Taksim after the incident, you'd have a hard time telling anything happened besides the police barricade, which was somehow less noticeable than the ever-abundant crowds. And once we got off the square and onto the main street, it was as crowded and happening as I'd ever seen it.

Life goes on.


Hazal

The Beach, A Cat, And My 100th Post

Well, everyone, it seems like I've made 100 posts on this blog since its creation in Florence nearly 3 years ago. Just another reminder that I love to talk a lot.

Moving on!

Life has been crazy busy since the last time I wrote, which is funny since I'm supposed to be on a week-long vacation for Bayram, the concept of which I'm admittedly a little unclear. (It has something to do with the end of Ramazan?) But between getting my classroom organized, my lessons planned, the school rules learned, the Turkish language learned, my Internet working, my apartment cleaned and moved into, and all sorts of other seemingly little things, I've had very little time to write or even take pictures (which is the only reason you read this blog, right?). Suffice to say that in Turkey you learn of things like week-long holidays, extracurricular obligations, and housing fees at the last possible minute.

But enough whining about how hard my life is, because it's really not all that hard yet! Just wait until I'm in the classroom... which brings me to point #1 of what I want to tell you about today:

1) My Classroom Rocks! One of the semi-last minute excitements was learning that I will have my very own classroom, a luxury I definitely did not expect. And it's huge. When I first saw it I couldn't really find the words to describe how excited I was. There's basically a library in there, plus group work tables, computers for CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning), a couple carpets and cushions, English learning games, and tons and tons of space. I am going to have the best drama games ever, and free time will be epic!


My giant and currently messy classroom

Of course, the space comes with responsibility, and I learned quickly that decorating it, cleaning it, and thinking about how to organize the books is going to be quite a rough time. Hence one of the reasons I've been working when I'm supposed to be on vacation. But it's all worth it. This classroom is the best. I'm very surprised they were willing to give a young native teacher like myself such a great facility.


My classroom's welcome board

2) My Cat Rocks! I've also managed to inherit a young cat from an English teacher who's leaving. His name's Socrates, and he and I have become quick friends, ie. he's become so hopelessly clingy to me, ie. he's trying to jump into my lap right now and I'm pushing him away, but, like most guys, he's a little pushy and won't give up. He's a cute little guy and he purrs so loud I can hear it through my headphones. He was rescued after he was hit by a car as a kitten, so one of his back legs doesn't work properly and he can't jump as high as you'd expect a 1-year-old cat to, and sometimes he sits weirdly on it. But now he has a home! It's really great to have someone to come home to. I just have to make sure I don't leave the windows open or he might fall. I live on the 8th floor, after all.



3) My Istanbul Friends Rock! I've done a little sight-seeing and friend-seeing to keep my mind sharp, though not as much as I'd like. A friend who came with me and NYU to Istanbul back in March, Suzanne, paid the city another visit about a week ago, and together with our mutual Istanbul friends we had a few fun times.


From left to right: Pınar, Mina, Suzanne, and Hazal

In particular we spent a weekend together that started in Kadıköy, took us to Moda, then to Üsküdar for a concert, and to the Princes Islands the next day for swimming. As is the case with Istanbul, the company was the hi-light over the sights. I got to see my friend Pınar, Hazal and her sister, and I spent the night with my Turkish brother Can, not nearly enough time. On top of that I got to finally meet Hazal's friend Elif, who I'd talked to online off and on for about a year without having actually met her face-to-face ("My Dear" is dedicated to her). Together we saw her father play a concert of traditional Ottoman 17th-century music with renovated instruments.


Top left: Hazal, Me, Suzanne. Bottom left: Elif, Mina

After spending the night with Can staying up deep into the night (4:00 am deep), watching the Emmy's, talking about love and life, and playing the guitar (I don't have any pictures, sorry), I met with Hazal, Mina, Suzanne, and Pınar on one of the Princes Islands, and we went swimming. I had a great time but got hungry because of the sea and because of not sleeping the night before, and tired and hungry Sam = grouchy Sam. We were all feeling it, though, and eventually we all stopped talking to each other until we had some food in our hands: ekmek balik (fish sandwiches). The water was kind of dirty, too, though I've heard that the island I went to, the third one, is the dirtiest of all. But I can't stress enough how wonderful it was to see my friends. It's so fulfilling to be wanting to see someone for a year and then finally being reunited, with all the time you could ask for. It really feels welcoming, like a home.


That beach be ourz

And I really need to make the time to see everyone I've missed so far and everyone I haven't missed all over again.

4) Istanbul Rocks! Today's the first day of the actual Bayram holiday, so even though I took a trek into the city I couldn't meet with any of my friends because they were busy with their families. So I did the most touristy thing you could do in Istanbul - since my friends take me to the "cool" places that tourists don't usually hear about - I went to Sultanahmet, the site of the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sofia, the beautiful underground Cistern, and Topkapı Palace.


The nearly-autumn shade of the leaves blends in well with the Hagia Sofia

However, I've seen all that, and I've seen it less crowded, less hot, and overly more enjoyable, too. I needed to see something I missed the last time I was here, and that was the Archeology Museum: Home of the Treaty of Kadesh and the Alexander Sarcophagus, which, disappointingly, isn't Alexander the Great's sarcophagus as I'd thought but instead that of some other famous ancient ruler (but it was still pretty). The Treaty of Kadesh is the oldest existing peace treaty between nations, an agreement between the Egyptians and the Hittites. It was unbelievably cool. Like the Mona Lisa, a tiny display that you'd most likely miss without being careful. But this one didn't have people swarmed around it, unlike the rest of Sultanahmet, and I got to look at its ancient lettering as close-up as I wanted for as long as I wanted.


Treaty of Kadesh

As it turned out, though, I don't like being a museum tourist as much as I used to, and I soon left knowing I'd come back on a colder, less crowded day. But I took advantage of this hot summer day and ate a special style of ice cream whose name I've forgotten, where they mash the ice cream deep into its container until it gets so condensed it's almost rubbery. So delicious!

Orientation week starts Monday, September 13. The rest of my life, here we come!


The Bahçeşehir Mosque. I walk by it very day on the way to school

Welcome (back) to Turkey

Merhaba!

Two weeks ago I arrived back in Istanbul, ready and eager to start a year of having my own classroom, getting kids excited about the nature of foreign language, and immersing myself in another culture for an obscene and refreshing amount of time. Let me do some explaining:

I am a native English communications skills (= speaking and listening) teacher at Bahçeşehir Koleji in Istanbul and will be for at least this year. Bahçeşehir is located in a suburb of Istanbul, so far from the city center that many Istanbulus don't consider it to actually be a part of the city. Istanbul has grown something like %1,200 in the last 60 years to about 13 million people, so I have the feeling a lot of Istanbul isn't "really" in Istanbul. It takes me an hour to get to Taksim, which is more or less in the city center, and if I can't catch the express train... then don't ask. I will be teaching grades 5, 6, and 7, roughly the age group I worked with in Florence two and a half years ago.



Over the summer I had to deal with a bout of depression: I had earned my TESOL (Teaching English as a Second or Other Language) certificate and thought that after I sent my resume out to a few places I'd get a nice cushy job and a beautiful apartment in Kadiköy. Well, by the time July rolled around and I didn't have anything yet I was starting to panic. I felt that I would have to move back to New York, find some dumb pass-the-time job while I take the GRE's and apply for grad school. I'd even found a roommate when Bahçeşehir asked for an interview, then asked me to come out in less than a month. What a shift in gears! But it's hard to explain how desperate college graduates like myself can feel when confronted with this - ahem - wonderful job market as we still try to find out who we are. When I went to New York for the month of July, I found most of my friends were just as stressed out trying to find a way to gain financial independence as well as discovering what to do with the rest of their lives.


Playing with my camera in a Taksim park. Check it out: This city has more people than New York by about 5 million, but there's still green!

Truthfully, I still don't know how to answer that question. I know I don't want to be a musician anymore, but I'm not sure if teaching will be in my forever future. I love teaching and I love working with kids, but I don't know how to choose something to stick with all my life. Is it like choosing a girl, like in the fairy tales where you just know? Is it like choosing your friends, the people who happen to impact your life where you happen to be at some happenstance in your life? Is it like how you choose where to be, based on past experiences, work opportunities, or out of love? I hope that, through the course of this year, I'll be able to find some direction in my life. Living in Florence added new perspective and pointed me forward. Learning a new language and a new culture will hopefully help me see something I wouldn't be able to otherwise.


Bahçeşehir. Not exactly representative of the scenery, but I like this picture a lot.

Bahçeşehir itself is just what it sounds like: a suburb. There's one main street which takes two minutes to walk through, a couple of malls that sell little more than women's clothing and shoes, an express bus stop, and brick-laid hilly streets where the drivers routinely ignore one-way signs. I haven't had the chance to familiarize myself with Bahçeşehir and the surrounding regions (I've been too busy even to write! Such a contrast to last time I was here when I wrote hundreds of pages in a week), but that will come soon as I slowly but surely teach myself how to survive and communicate. I have to say, though, this quieter area is such a breath of fresh air after four years of Manhattan. Being far away from Taksim and my friends from Bahçeşehir University near the Bosporus is going to be a drag sometimes, but I know I'm going to like living outside the main city. I've been craving it for my entire University career! Plus Bahçeşehir is on a hill and gets some nice views of the countryside.


There's a big vote coming. That means this van drives around blasting all sorts of crappy and loud music.

Since I've been here I've done a few major things, though less than you'd expect from two weeks here:

1. Namely, I've been taking the Bahçeşehir Koleji-required teacher training course (CELTA, which stands for something I'm sure) for the past week. It's a 10-day course with a break on Sunday (yes, we work Saturdays) which is like a more specific version of the TESOL course I took in California, more specific to teaching English at this school. There are about 70 other first-year English teachers taking the course with me from Bahçeşehir Koleji campuses around the country. Some people came 15 or 16 hours for this course. About eight of the other teacher trainees are native English speakers, all American except one Turkish woman who lived a long time in England (that counts as native speaking). The rest are Turkish teachers who teach English, most likely teaching English language skills (= reading, writing, and grammar). Needless to say, I've been making lots of friends during this week of training, though sadly many of them work at campuses far away from Istanbul. Still, the Turkish hospitality, as they call it, is striking and deathly warm. In contrast, the Americans might have the misfortune of being too cold. I've heard that the biggest complaint about native teachers is that they're too cold: you're supposed to hug your students, put your hand on their backs, show you care about them through physical contact in ways that would have gotten me fired at El Cerrito or in Florence. The people I've met are so generous, even if they can't understand what I'm saying.


A Tatlı shop in Taksim. I get too hungry when I look at this picture.

Our main CELTA instructor, Gulfem, the woman who interviewed me, is a gifted woman. Proud of her shortness, plumpness ("Do I look like I like salad?!" she said once), and experience (let's not call it age), she has more love, energy, and passion than most of the young first-year teachers she's instructing. I can't say enough about this woman to show you how wonderful she is, and I'm not just saying this because she's my boss. She not only gets us on our feet for activities, she makes us want to get on our feet. When she tells stories she makes us taste in our minds the food she's describing, feel the weight of what she's pretending to carry, smell the atmosphere she's imagining for us. She's funny: when she was reading a favorite passage of hers called "God made the teacher," she said, "And God gave the teacher infinite patience and a caring, huge..." and as the class said in unison, "heart," she moved her hand to her rear end. But it's not just personality: there's something about the Bahçeşehir message she promotes that I can really get behind. Moving away from old, traditional teaching styles and engaging the students on all sorts of sensory levels. Finding out how the students in my particular classroom learn best and teaching to that. Complete immersion in language and student-led language discovery, the teacher acting as a guide and not a transmitter of information. Education is about the needs of each student; it's so simple!

Again, I know it might sound like I'm saying this just because I work here, and there are some faults I'm sure - I'm not working in utopia. But this teaching style is something I can really believe in.

And we will never be able to make a teaching utopia anyway. One of the greatest tragedies of education is that our students deserve better than a teacher can humanly give them, and as teachers we are always disappointed at how far from perfect we can be for them. All we can do is our best.

2. I visited my friends Pınar and Hande, staying with them at their flat in Ortaköy, home of the world's best Kumpir! The day before I had met with the two of them and my Turkish brother Can in Taksim to buy a guitar and have the best lemonade in the world. For all you tourists out there: I have one rule about good places to get a food or have a drink. If you have to go downstairs it can't be bad. To get to the Limonbahçe (Lemon Garden) you have to go into what looks like a normal apartment building, go down some dirty-looking stairs that look like they lead to the basement of your mind, and follow a few chic signs to the outside. There you find a huge area, as big as a large restaurant, covered by friendly canvass, with couches and nice table and everything. It's almost like Soho, New York. Very peaceful, very hidden away, and it feels like we've found a secret. Plus the lemonade was the best lemonade I've ever had in my life. That's always a plus. Minty and delicious!


Hande, Pınar, and me in Taksim

The next day Hande and Pınar and I headed to Ortaköy for the Kumpir, which is like a baked potato with whatever you want inside, but somehow it tastes way better than a normal potato. We then had a drink at a café nearby with one of Hande's high school friends, Burak, and watched the sun go down as we sat next to the majestic Bosporus. After that we spent a long night learning traditional Turkish dance in 100-degree weather (yes, even at night it was that hot - how in the world do people fast for Ramadan in this weather?) and shared music, and I learned that Turkish iced tea actually has flavor! And, as always when I spend time with my Turkish friends, I learned some useful Turkish, like bebeşim (hint: that's not actually a useful word).


Me and Pınar eating Kumpir

There's not enough time in a day to write how at home I felt and yet how exciting it was to be in this foreign culture.



3. On Sunday I finally got to see Hazal's house and meet her family. Our mutual friend who was also part of the NYU group that came to Istanbul last March, Suzanne, is visiting this week and Hazal's family picked her up at the airport and is letting her stay with them for her week. Hazal lives in Malteppe, which is about as far away from Bahçeşehir as one can be, so when she and her father picked up Suzanne they took the opportunity to pick me up as well and take us to Malteppe. After an hour of driving and catching up and laughing about the peculiarities of life and language ("Hande taught you 'bebeşim?!'"), we arrived as her mother was preparing what turned out to be an amazing dinner. Hazal was the intermediary, the only one who could speak English well enough to communicate between we Americans and the rest of her family. They told us to feel at home, and a few times told me to stop saying "Thank you" so much. We were a part of the family before we even walked through the door. We played basketball into the night, then came back to watch Turkey beat up on Canada in a basketball tournament as we ate sweets and fruit, experimenting with my camera, Turkish words, and the mobility of their recently injured cat Susam. It was like we'd been family friends for ages, and the fact that we didn't speak the same language barely mattered at all.


Basketball at night

♡

Of course this is gross simplification of all that happened in the past 15 days. You can tell by how rosy my description is; in reality, the first few days I was here were almost crushing as I tried to get by in a shared dormitory (ie. not my own place) with a city of non-English speakers, jet lag, no way to contact friends, nothing on my itinerary, feeling bad for staying inside all day and feeling uncomfortable when I went out. But who wants to hear about that anyway? I'm going to be a teacher here. This is going to be my community, and my presence is going to make it a better place. Those little insecurities are just that: little.

P.S. I'm trying to think of a new name for this blog. Any ideas?

Group Therapy - A Reprise

Ciao, Tutti!

Here I am, once again, being a horrible person and fulfilling my promises I made in 21 to 21. I have, as of yesterday, made my first short story submission, complete with a cover letter that will probably disqualify me right away because I don't know how/if to write one.

On a completely unrelated note, you may or may not notice that "Group Therapy" has been removed from this blog. It was an old draft anyway. (I think that was draft 3 out of about 15. Yeah, I'm a freak about editing. Deal with it. Your lives will move on without it.

Ok, those weren't completely unrelated. Or even slightly unrelated. But don't worry: you'll get to see the story again soon enough for one of two reasons: 1) The Re:Write Review sends me my first ever rejection letter for a short story. This is probably most likely. 2) The Re:Write Review publishes the story, and you all buy it (right?) to read all the amazing work they publish from budding young writers.

All of this is simply to allay the panic in your hearts. You're welcome.

-Sam goldsmith

P.S. It's Hazal's birthday, everyone! And also the birthday of roughly 6.4 billion/365 other people you don't know! Yippee!