Overdue update
Hello everyone,
I know that it’s been a minute since I last wrote! The first trimester has been a bit of a whirlwind for me. I’ll try to do some brief catching up:
TEACHING
I love my students. I have three groups of A1/elementary students, ages 18-24, and on the days that I don’t see them, they have class with a Turkish teacher. I generally do the speaking/writing/pronunciation activities in the class and leave the grammar/vocabulary/listening to the other instructor, but there’s some overlap. The classes generally follow the textbook very closely, which is a blessing and a curse: I don’t have to do any extensive lesson planning, but also the book can be boring with some ineffective activities. The first few weeks, I would carefully go through the material and create supplementary activities, which gradually drifted off into just winging it. I’m trying to come back to a balance now, because doing more original stuff can really pay off. After my first week of teaching, I was so drop-dead exhausted that I didn’t see how it would be possible to do this all year, but I’ve gotten more comfortable and built up some stamina by now. Our trimester is close to being over now, and I'll be so sad to see my current students go--I really love those kids!
Quick selfie with my Monday class.
There’s always lots of testing going on here as well, and our friends Tuğba and Aynur are part of the testing office, so I’ve sat in with them on some of the work. I proctored a session of the proficiency test for the Erasmus program, which lets students study in other European countries. It was an impossible test—part of Turkish culture is extremely difficult tests, especially the university entrance exam. I was involuntarily involved in exam writing in Alanya, but after seeing my students’ midterm exam, I’m trying to insinuate myself into the process because some questions are simply unfair.
The mania in the testing office during the Erasmus exam, with Aynur and Tuğba on the right:
TRAVEL
Summer is an avid traveller and blessed with a lot of energy, so she has been taking advantage of our location near an airport to visit somewhere new almost every weekend. I’ve joined her for three of the big trips — Cappadocia, Antalya/Alanya, and Istanbul — and a couple mini-trips in our area (including an overnight at a nice hotel nearby so she could break up with her long-distance boyfriend in luxury).
Cappadocia
We went to Cappadocia with four other Fulbright ETAs, and it was a lot of fun to hang out with a bunch of young Americans again. I’d been previously, but I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to, so I was glad to have a chance to go again. We did a day-long guided tour, and luckily Savanna is a semi-pro photographer, so we have lots of great pics.
The lot of us: L-R, Savanna, Lina, Zara, Summer, me, Murod
The clear highlight of the trip was a 2-hour horseback ride through one of the famous valleys, which we decided to do last minute after the others’ hot air balloon ride was cancelled.
Antalya/Alanya
Two weeks later, we flew down to Antalya to visit Murod, who’s in the province center, and Savanna, who has my old position in Alanya. Antalya is a big city, but we stuck mostly in the old city, which I had visited before with Mehmet. There are lots of bars and restaurants catering to tourists—Murod speaks Russian, which really comes in handy there. We enjoyed some good dinner, drinks, and dessert in the old city, and in the morning, we went for a swim at Konyaaltı beach, which has the most crystal-clear water I’ve ever seen.
Alanya was much as I left it, except somehow even more crowded. I had thought that late October would be clear of the tourist season, but it turns out that October is the perfect time to be in Alanya, because it’s still warm without the heat being murderous. We walked through Cleopatra Beach, which was still crammed full of European vacationers.
We happened to be visiting on Cumhuriyet Bayramı, or Republic Day. Everywhere was covered with flags, and there was a parade and concert in the city center (we did not attend). Savanna took us to her favorite restaurant, where the guitarist providing live music sang a ballad to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk which had much of the restaurant tearfully singing along.
The next morning we did the classic cable-car-to-Alanya-castle, followed by a late breakfast.
Our last evening, Mehmet and his friend Ali came over with Ali’s daughter Eylül, whom I adore. She was very shy with Summer and Savanna around, but we managed to carve a tiny jack-o-lantern (don’t worry, I did all the knife work).
Istanbul
After seven months of living in Turkey, I finally visited Istanbul itself! I’m not sure I sensed the magic of the city that so many other people talk about. It’s huge and crowded and the streets are (literally) Byzantine, making it almost impossible to get around sometimes. We stayed mostly on the European side, the central part of which is densely packed with historic sites—so much so that the grand mosque you see behind me in this photo is not actually an especially notable place. I don’t even know the name. We took a ferry to the Asian side and back, which I absolutely loved—sea birds fly behind the boat and passengers throw them bread, which they catch in their mouths. 
We visited Topkapı Palace, home of Ottoman sultans, which provides an emphatic affirmative answer to the question, “Is it possible to mosaic every surface of a structure?” Tickets for the palace are decently expensive, but only for foreigners—I got in on the 60TL museum pass I bought with my residence permit back in March.
From Topkapı it’s just a short walk to the Hagia Sofia/Ayasofya, which was controversially turned back into a functioning mosque from a museum several years ago. Most of the visitors now are still surely non-Muslim tourists, though, which makes for an interesting vibe inside. You must remove your shoes and follow a modest dress code. Our selfie outside shows the three options for women to cover their hair—bring your own headscarf, hood up, or buy a disposable scarf from a kiosk nearby.
I made one solo museum visit, to the Museum of Innocence, a museum in a house which was created by Turkish Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk in tandem with his novel of the same name. I finally finished the book, motivated by wanting to visit the museum, which is a catalogue of artifacts described in and describing the narrative of the novel. I didn’t have much time to look at everything closely, but the most striking part was the wall display of thousands of cigarette butts smoked by the protagonist’s lover.
Uzungöl
One of our local weekend trips was to Uzungöl, “long lake,” a picturesque lake that attracts a lot of Arab tourists. After lots of waiting for the bus in a parking lot full of men and a 2-hour ride, we were a little underwhelmed. Like, I’m from Minnesota. I’ve seen a lot of lakes. Certainly it was nice, but the town was very empty—apparently too cold for the Arabs this time of year—and there wasn’t a lot to do. We mostly walked around and laughed at the situation.
I’m actually in Ankara now—writing this on my phone on the bus from the airport so that maybe I can write a Thanksgiving update without the last nine weeks without an email weighing on me.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Netta