The first 3 or so weeks in a nutshell or a kebab wrap...


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Middle East » Turkey » Marmara » Bursa
May 1st 2011
Published: May 3rd 2011
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So it's been over 3 weeks since we've been in Turkey and a lot has happened!

We arrived in Istanbul on Tuesday 5th April and after A LOT of waiting around we were picked up by some people from the English Time branch and taken to our hostel! As Mika likes to say a Turks' 10 minutes is about 1 hour in our time! It was all pretty stressful and all we wanted was to get some food and relax!!

Anyway we spent 2 nights in Istanbul walking around, eating plenty of kebabs, getting lost, discovering the Bazaar, paying ridiculous amounts for a Turkish tea but then discovering a cheaper place where the locals go, paying to pee, eating at Burger Turk and of course finding somewhere to watch the Man U game where we met Paul...Mika's new best friend!

All in all it was a good few days in the big city but we will back to do a bit more sight seeing!

On that Thursday we made our (long) way to the ferry port! A lot of moaning and whining from yours truely! It took around 90 minutes to get to the port at Bursa and the headteacher of the English Time branch here collected us and took us to the hotel! We got to the hotel and went in search of some food...more kebabs surprise surprise!
And so the 6 months in Bursa has started!

We have slowly been settling in both at work and to general day to day life in Bursa! We have discovered the delights of Salep, Halka (a type of sticky sweet treat), pickles, and of course more and more kebabs! We have also recently started cooking (if heating soups and pasta sauces count as cooking) with the aid of a propane tank! We're going way back in time! The weather has been far from perfect which has annoyed me as I didn't pack accordingly to this! It did'nt for one second cross my mind that I would need coats and scarfs in April in Turkey! It has been getting better recently though which is a nice change! Fingers crossed it will stay like this! Especially for the sake of our clothes that are drying on the balcony!

In relation to work...we’ve just finished our third week, can't believe how quickly it's gone by! It was stressful at first especially having to teach grammar! Felt like we we're learning our own language all over again! Can't understand why they teach half the stuff they do when as native speakers we never even use them! OUGHT TO? TOO FEW? It can only get better though!

The first week of teaching was pretty stressful as Asli said. It didn’t help that the first class that we got to share have been a real problem class and have had something negative to say about every single teacher at the school...they love a complaint. I think the problem is that they're a bunch of rich kids who’s parents send them to learn English so there’s really no value to the course for them. The lack of respect has got to me a few times and I’ve definately let them know about it. The language school definately threw us, two new teachers, in at the deep end with this class. Asli and I also share a conversation class in the evenings. It's really easy and pretty fun really. People just sign up for two weeks to come and have conversations in English with us. We ask them questions about a range of topics and just correct them if they get any part of their speech wrong. It’s good and we’ve met some good people there too. I went to play football with one of the students and his friends which was really good and we’ve been invited to 2 weddings, a dinner, a day trip to Mudanya and hopefully we're getting a cake on Monday!!! They’re actually like free tour guides; really keen to tell us where to go in Bursa and Turkey. 2 or 3 mornings a week I have a morning class as well. They’re really good to teach, a bit older than the other class and have a really good work ethic so its a pleasure. In a week Asli and I will start a couple of new classes which are both at Level 1 of English. This should be pretty easy because the grammar we’ll be teaching will be so simple but at the same time it will be difficult to get things across sometimes as they have such a basic understanding of the language and Asli (or Ashley as the students know her) isn’t allowed to speak Turkish or even let any students know she’s Turkish. Im looking forward to those classes though. All my classes have said I look like a Turkish actor named Engin Altan Düzyatan, I'll try to find a decent picture of him to put on the blog, I can kind of see what they mean. He also hosts Turkey's version of 'Million Pound Drop' which is so annoying...you know when game shows do a pause to build suspense before a result or answer? Well the pause on this game show is literally about 2 minutes, I can't believe people watch it, it kills me! Everyone thinks I'm Turkish here and just chat to me normally as if I understand what they're going about! Its like when I met Asli's dad for the first time and he asked if I was sure I wasn't Turkish!!!

Now for the most important part of the blog...we went to a Bursaspor match last weekend; Bursaspor vs Manisaspor. It was amazing! It was the best atmosphere I have ever experienced...and the tickets cost us 5tl each which is about £2!!! The stadium is small as they're building a new massive state of the art stadium at the moment but the atmosphere was incredible. The match had everything; a goal in the opening 3 minutes, a 2-1 Bursaspor win, a red card, fights in the stands, riot police storming the away fans, explosions, away fans trying to climb the fence to our end...it was more of a dramatical production than just a football match which was obviously good for Asli; I think most of the time she was looking at other things going on in the stadium rather than watching the football!!! We also got the classic sunflower seeds or ‘spits’ before the game which always brings me back to the Canada days. The football itself was good too. Two players I really like are Volken Sen who reminds me of myself and Sercan Yildirim who was supose to be moving to Moscow this summer but failed a medical I think. He’s definately one to look out for, I know a couple years ago Man U were looking at him. Anyway, I loved the football and I’m hoping to get tickets for Bursaspor vs Besiktas next weekend, although that one I think I’ll go alone even though I’ve heard the Besiktas fans are banned because of the trouble when Bursaspor went to Istanbul.

I’m loving the food here. So many kebabs!!! The Iskender kebab is soooo good and Bursa is the home of it. There are other things too that I didn’t expect like really good jacket potatoes! You pick your fillings and the pototo is so creamy, almost like mashed potatoes. My favourite is russian salad, red cabbage, pickles and chicken sausages...so good. I love ‘tursu’ which is pretty much pickled cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower and peppers, reminds me of something Ukrainian, really good stuff. Like Asli said we’ve started cooking oursleves now, made some really good lamb burbers the other day...that's the other thing, oh my god the bread here is so good, I eat so much! Also they've got this drink here called 'ayran', its pretty much watered down yoghurt with a bit of salt...at first I hated it and the point of it eluded me but its really grown on me and I love it with a durum or kumru or something like that. Ok, so Turkish food is AMAZING, WONDERFUL, FANTASTIC, DELICIOUS and everything but naturally we do miss the home comforts! Last weekend we went on a holy pilgrimage to find KFC! We had to travel a little further out than the city centre just for some fried chicken! We found the holy chicken in a shopping mall and we probably ordered more chicken than we actually wanted! Impulse buy as soon as we saw the Colonel! I didn't finish my box of chicken goodies but Mika was more than happy to help! Also recently we have been really missing a good ol' curry! Unfortunately there are no Indian restaurants that we know of; it's definately not as common as in the UK. The shops around us don't even stock it but where we went for our KFC pilgrimage there's a big supermarket which our conversation students assured us that they would stock curry sauces. Unfortunately the range was minimal. Disappointing yet we picked out one to try and that night we attempted curry and rice! BIG FAIL! The sauce just didn't have any spice or taste. It was blander than a korma and because we didn't have a sieve the rice resembled a stodgy mess! We added a little bit of Turkish flavour to the curry by adding some Turkish sausages! All in all it was edible but not quite satisfying! The curry hunt continues! One of the students from our new conversation class has promised to get us some!

I had to travel to Istanbul last week to sort out my residence permit, it was so unorganised but I guess that's to be expected at immigrations offices. The ferry to Istanbul only takes about 90 minutes so it's good that it’s close for a weekend or something since we haven’t really done anything historical or touristy there. I have to go back on Friday to pick up my residence permit, bit of a hassle but needs to be done.

We had a day last weekend where we went to see some different parts of Bursa. The most historical mosque was called ‘Ulu Cami’, it was pretty impressive and there's a gorgeous picture of Asli in a head dress she had to wear to enter it. We also saw the green mosque or ‘Yesil Cami’ which turned out to be more of a tomb but still pretty incredible. We also climbed a lot of stairs to a historical, walled off part of Bursa. The best thing about that area was the panoramic views of the city, really nice. I really like how the city is surrounded by
The guys that own the cafe where I watch the footy!The guys that own the cafe where I watch the footy!The guys that own the cafe where I watch the footy!

I don't look out of place do I??!!
mountains, it looks great when the sun is out, which it hasn’t been enough but the weather should get better soon. Soon on our days off we hope to venture out of Bursa to see more of Turkey now we’re pretty much settled here, just waiting for our first payment in the middle of this month...really looking forward to that. It would be good as well if there are ferries that go across the Marmara sea to places other than Istanbul but I’m not sure there are. Next month we’ll hopefully be able to visit Asli’s family in Ankara, there’s a good bus and train journey so looking forward to that.

Even though we're enjoying living in Bursa one thing that has been annoying us is the amount of red tape in the country! Last week our phone stopped working obviously we couldn't get why! We went into a TURKCELL shop and they told us that our foreign phone had been deactivated. There's some stupid thing in Turkey that after 15 days any foreign phone is cut off and you have to get it registered using your passport and you need a signed address from the Muhtar 'elected village head' or better known by Mika as Mushmush . Mika and I had some pretty stressful moments with me trying to interpret and us trying to resolve this! To quote Mika 'there's no reasoning with these people'! How did we solve this problem...we took the easy route and avoided Turkish companies and went for a new sim card at Vodafone! Sorted.

We live on a pretty main street! It's always busy and noisy around the clock! Even at this moment there’s a huge protest outside that’s been going on all day so we’re going to take some pictures and videos...and then its time to find somewhere to watch Arsenal vs Man utd...Asli’s such a lucky girl!

I am a very lucky girl 😊 When Mika came back from Istanbul he suprised me at work with the most gorgeous bunch of flowers.




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5th May 2011

Awww
That was some long blog post hahahaha and I read it all...maybe skim read the football parts hahaha sorry Mika. Glad to hear you guys are having a good time :D All I've been having is curries and your photos have now made me crave a kebab, oh the irony hahahaaa! Lots of love, looking forward to reading your next entry xxxx

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