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Published: September 18th 2008
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Well, don’t know where to begin. Turkey is taking getting used to, to say the least. I’ve met some great people, though, and I know that this year will be rewarding in many ways.
The school I’m working for is, let’s just put it, interesting. Very, very interesting. Actually, it is so interesting that one of my roommates and I seriously want to make a documentary about it or write a book about it someday. There’s no way to compare the school to any other educational system in the world that I have either seen or heard of. This school has eighteen campuses all over Istanbul. I got lucky and was placed at a campus pretty close to my apartment, teaching well-behaved (well, so far) four-year-olds. My principal is very sweet and asks me how I’m doing every day, and she even has decided to let me and my fellow English teacher in the kindergarten (who’s from Finland, is awesome, and … yeah. That sums up the other English teacher) leave an hour and a half early every day from now on, because the meetings that are held every day after school are all in Turkish.
My roommates, on
the other hand, have had some pretty ridiculous, horrible experiences this past week and a half. Like I said, I am not going to go into detail on here. I’ll need about two hours or so to write down every detail, anyway, and will do so at some point, and can email you if you’re interested.
Let’s focus on the positive aspects of my experience, specifically:
First off, I've realized that, since the kids I'm teaching are all four years old, that means that they were born the year that I was in Turkey for the first time. Little did I know, at that time, that I would be coming back and getting to know all these kids who were being born that year. It's kind of cool to think about.
As I said above, I got really lucky because my campus is close to where I live, and there is a bus that the school sends around the area in the mornings to pick up the teachers. In the afternoons I will be leaving with the student bus because of the English teachers being allowed to leave early.
The kids in the class I’m co-teaching
(we get paired up with a Turkish teacher) are very smart. They’re smart enough that they have already figured out that I don’t speak Turkish, so they have learned to use gestures with whatever they’re saying. If they ask me a question, I’ll just shrug and answer, “I’m sorry but I don’t understand,” and they’ll either come up and kiss me on the cheek or climb into my lap, or both. It’s funny. One little boy has decided that he absolutely loves when I sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” just to him. So, for the past three days, he has been coming up to me, pointing to the computer, and then to his head. This means that he wants to sit in my lap, have me play the recorded song, sing along, and point to his body parts during the song, especially his nose.
Since this school is for really rich kids (depending on what campus the kids go to, the price per year is $14,000 and $20,000, I was kind of nervous that the kids would be all snotty and rich-acting, but they're really not. Istanbul is made up of 81 districts. the campus I teach at
is in the richest district of Istanbul, which I could tell right away by the houses. As it turns out, I have recently been told that it is the richest area in all of TURKEY, not just Istanbul. So that really freaked me out. But as I said, for the most part, the kids are pretty good.
So, as I said, there are positive things about this already. The apartments provided to the English teachers by the school are really nice and big, and we have a great view. It is easy to catch a bus by our street and take it over to the European side or to the more interesting parts of the Asian side (well, pretty much any part that’s by the river bank.)
The reason I’m so homesick is because of the cultural differences, the fact that I don’t have many friends here yet, and, mainly, the fact that I speak no Turkish. Okay, so I can count to 20 and say things like “hello” and “thank you.” That does help when I have to buy something or take a bus somewhere, but that’s the extent of my communication with the general public.
Well, guess my stress level really will change over time, just like in any new place. My roommates and our friend from downstairs have nightly venting sessions in our apartment, and that helps a lot to have a group who really understands what this is like. The rest of the people who I have met are either, of course, Turkish, or people from other places who have lived here for at least a year. They are all great, but I guess it has really helped to have a few people around who are going through the exact same thing. I’m sad though because it looks like both of my roommates AND our friend from downstairs are not sure about staying with this job much longer, so pretty soon, I may have none of them around. They all have a lot harder things going on than I do, so it would be understandable. I just lucked out with my particular campus. Even if they do decide to stay for the year, they are all searching for apartments that are closer to their campuses (because they have at least a 2 hour commute each way, and have no buses provided for them,
so it would take up to 3 hours if they took public transport.) So it could get really lonely here really quickly. We’ll all do our best to hang out a lot, though.
What else… something else great is that we met a girl from California who has been living in Turkey for a year and a half now. She knows a lot about the school and a lot about Istanbul. We hung out with her and her boyfriend twice last week, and she has been so helpful and so, so kind to us. She took us around the city and introduced us to some great, inexpensive hang-out places (restaurants, tea houses, etc.) On Sunday, we were with her all day - we met her in the area she lives in, which is really pretty. We started out at a café and met other English teachers or ex-English teachers, then we all walked around for a long time, stopped in a few places she wanted us to see, took a 2-hour cruise around the Bosphorus River (totally worth it - only $7 and made me feel a lot better about Istanbul in general) and then ended at a Ramadan
celebration at Sulten Ahmed (where the Blue Mosque and the Haglia Sophia are.) That’s where lots of booths were set up, and tons of families waiting to break their fasts were all sitting on the grass; it was really crowded and really exciting. The call to prayer was blasted from all the mosques after sundown, and everyone immediately started eating. We had baked potatoes with a bunch of toppings, and then for dessert we had what was recommended to us - it was some kind of pastry soaked in rose water, then stuffed with pistachio paste and topped with pomegranate seeds. Needless to say, hadn’t had anything like that before.
Hmm, this turned out to be way longer than I intended. I guess I really needed to get some of this out there. There’s so much more I could talk about, but I am going to end this here for now.
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Teaching rich kids
You never know if one of "your kids" might end up being the president of Turkey in the future! Or someone famous.