A Very Merry-ish Christmas: The Middle

Part two of our ‘adventure’ was to occur in Marmaris.  We left Izmir without incedent to the otogar (the handy shuttle bus offered by the company was a wonderful bonus), and despite the persistent feeling of the start of a winter cold, the journey passed pleasantly enough.  We arrived to rainy Marmaris by about 3pm, caught our second handy shuttle bus down to the hotel (he was kind enough to take us all the way there) checked in- pleasantly surprised by the size after the shoebox in Izmir- and then went in search of food.  We found delicious burgers and beer (other than breakfast, we did not eat Turkish food once- it is nice to have a break) after a lovely seaside jaunt.  Marmaris is very much a tourist town as you can tell by three main factors 1. The amount of restaurants serving alcohol, 2. The location of the many many tattoo shops within stumbling distance of said restaurants and 3. The availability of diet coke.

Marmaris Castle

Since Marmaris is a tourist town, most of the hotels and shops and tours were closed for the winter months, which wasn’t a huge concern.  After a four hour bus ride with a cold, my muscles were pretty stiff and I had a wicked headache (stupid cold) so we headed back to the hotel decently early, although we were sidetracked by a lone Turk sitting in a bar.  It turned out to be his bar, and he had the cheapest beer we were to find all trip, so naturally we stopped.  He was a really interesting guy- in Marmaris they don’t consider English  a ‘foreign language’ because everyone speaks it for the tourists, and he had worked as a translator for the UN in Belgium for a year.  He also had one can of IrnBru left from tourist season (much to Joe’s delight.) For you Canadian folk, IrnBru is a sickeningly sweet orange soft drink that is near and dear to many a Scot, although I have yet to find a non-Scottish person who enjoys it.   Although this lengthened our evening, it was an enjoyable side trip.  

Views from the castle

This hotel also didn’t have central heating, so we alternated between hot and cold with the AC alternating between off, and cranked up to 30 to warm us up.  That was really the only downfall of this hotel though- we even had a balcony.  Needless to say, neither of us slept well, and we were down for breakfast shortly after it opened at 8am, and out and about the city by 930.  We headed down by the sea- beautiful promenade- and into the old town.  We went up to Marmaris castle-  which was really good- and despite the nagging rain (on/off, on/off) it was really enjoyable. We wandered slowly back through the bazaar (or what was open of it) and attempted to find a pharmacy, as my muscle aches were worsening.  We found about twenty- but not one was open.  We ended up stopping for a hot chocolate on the way back to the hotel, and then had a wee afternoon siesta as the rain continued.  We left again for dinner, debating between a few options, although eventually choosing one that was close to our hotel.  Joe had Indian and I had Chinese, so it was a lovely change of flavour for the palate. 

Deep-Fried Ice Cream

Joe ordered dessert- deep fried ice cream- and the waiter brought us free coffee while we waited.  It was perhaps the longest we have ever waited for food, but as we were in no rush, it was a very relaxed evening out.

Sunday morning we awoke to sunny skies (a pleasant change) and after breakfast, headed once more into town.  We spent the morning wandering, browsing through shops and winding streets, heading to the marina, eventually stopping for a meal, afternoon beers, and people watching on the promenade.  We got back to the hotel for a rest and then went out for another walk before calling it a day and repacking the suitcase.  We were leaving again on the ‘morrow.

                

A Merry-ish Christmas Beginning

After teaching a weekend straight, Joe and I deposed of our books at the schools, grabbed some snacks and our suitcase (dragged in to work that morning by Joe- who apparently forgot it was on wheels and sent it flying halfway across the bus, much to the amusement of the other passengers) and headed for the bus station to catch our 7 o’clock bus to Izmir.  It passed without incident, the watching on an action film (this time the Matrix) , the discomfort of the old woman in front of me keeping her seat back all trip and the painful snores of the man behind us.  (music was quickly put on).  Other than that it was a normal eighteen hour journey, some pretty scenery (including snow in the higher elevated locations) and the arrival in Izmir.  Now, I had carefully asked around before we left to find out if there was a metro station at the bus station (as there is in Istanbul) and had been told yes.  This turned out to be a bold faced lie, as Joe and I attempted to find it.  Eventually (as we were on the verge of spending too much money to take a taxi) I asked a nice looking security woman (using my limited, albeit practiced Turkish to the test) and with her minuscule amount of English and my slightly better Turkish, I discovered that we had to first take the bus to the metro station and then from there to our hotel.  Fine.  We bought our city bus cards and found it quite easily.

Izmir Clock Tower

We checked our stuff in to Guzel Izmir Hotel (Beautiful Izmir Hotel- not bad although a bit on the small side) where our friendly receptionist had marvelous English.  We dropped off our stuff and headed to the sea to find somewhere to eat- almost twenty-four hours with no food tends to make one a little cranky.  We settled on a restaurant overlooking the water for a late lunch and a beer and then continued on a lovely promenade walk, stopping for coffee overlooking the water.  It was a very pretty sight.  We were back to the hotel by 7pm, exhausted and stiff from our journey, looking up things to do in Izmir, ensuring we were rested to explore the next day.

Tuesday morning we awoke and had a lovely Turkish buffet breakfast.  I cannot stress enough my love of Turkish breakfasts.  We had decided on a few things to do (Izmir is usually used as a base to get to touristy places, not so much touristy in itself) and headed to the famous clock tower in Konak Square (apparently the birthplace of the Turkish revolution that took place afterWWI) to feed the pigeons- surprisingly more fun than I thought it would be.  Then we headed into Kemeralti Market- a sprawling maze of streets and food.  We were cornered by an older man, who took us down all the streets to his shops, showed us pictures of his daughter and gave us apple tea whilst we were looking.  Beware of Turkish persistence- it is considerably more subtle than that of say Mexico, they play on you until you feel obligated to buy something because of their friendliness.  Even though you know the trap exists, you get caught in it.  If you don’t want anything, don’t say anything.  Not a hello, good morning, anything.  Anyways, by the time we got out of that mess (yes with purchases in hand) we had been completely turned in the wrong direction and had to leave the market to find the signs to the Agora once again.  After much searching, we managed to find the Agora (not overly impressive, but interesting none the less) and after careful exploration we headed back into the market for lunch.

The Agora in Izmir

We decided to take a much needed rest for an hour and then left again to buy bus tickets to Marmaris (again I had to do it in Turkish- after Istanbul, I am a bit surprised by the lack of English here- none of the menus are translated or anything) before being shameful tourists and going to see the Hobbit in 3D.  We had a long and expensive day ahead of us in Ephesus approaching.

The statue of Nike in Ephesus

Our tour guide picked us up at 9:30am, and along with another pair of friends (a Chinese woman and a Pakistani man- they own an import/export company) we headed off to Ephesus.  Our first stop was at the Virgin Mary’s house (or what is believed to be her house, there is no archaeological proof) and then headed on to Ephesus.  Our tour guide was very knowledgeable (he has been leading tours to Ephesus for 20 years and says he has been over 3,000 times) and the history of the place was fascinating.  He would give us the history on different buildings and then time to explore and take photos and such.  It was a really good trip.  We went for lunch afterwards at a carpet making factory, where after a tasty Turkish lunch we got to see how the carpets are made (and thus why they are so expensive) and they are stunning.  I have desperately wanted one for a long time, and this did not help that urge.  Neither did watching the Chinese woman plunk down US $1500 in cash to buy one spur of the moment.  I definitely picked the wrong career.  After the factory we went to the archaeological museum, which was ok, but not great, followed by the leather factory where we saw a really awkward fashion show (complete with just us four observers- even the models looked awkward- they kept laughing to each other, although our guide said it is a good opportunity for the villagers to get jobs) and then had to watch the Chinese woman plunk down another $400 (at least) for a jacket. 

The library in Ephesus.

All in all it was good, but I was a bit disappointed as rather than spend the day shopping for things I cant afford, I would have much rather gone to the Temple of Artemis or Sirince, but alas.  That is the pitfall of a tour I suppose.  Anyways, it was about 5:30 by the time we got back to Izmir, and the pair invited us for dinner.  We had no reason not to go, so on we went to a lovely fish restaurant on the water, where we proceeded to have a really good time.  Both of them were well travelled, with interesting life perspectives.  The Pakistani man came from quite a wealthy family, and his brother had left America because “he had to make his own tea.”  They seemed to be doing quite well for themselves, so when they pulled out their credit card to pay for dinner, it was only with half an effort that Joe and I argued about letting us pay our share.  We walked them back to their hotel, commenting on what a strangely good Christmas Eve it was.

Joe and his Xmas waffle.

Christmas day itself was a letdown.  Since Turkey is the least Christmas informed country I have ever been too (we were even thinking there might be something, as Izmir at least has a few more expats, but we were wrong) and so we spent the day skyping families, and trying to make the day feel like Christmas.  We put on Christmas music while we walked along the water, ate waffles covered in chocolate and strawberry, and went to the top of the Asencor for a view of the city.  We gave up our efforts by the time we had an everyday kebap for dinner, came back to the hotel room to watch Scrooged and pack (as we are leaving the next day).  All in all it was a mediocre Christmas- which I suppose was to be expected.

                

Birthday Tidings

The snow still has yet to arrive, and it is beginning to warm up- about 11 degrees on average- so I don’t expect to see any anytime soon.  It is even beginning to melt off the mountains- although it is so foggy all the time it is hard to tell.   I met a lovely woman at the gym when we first started going. She speaks English quite well (she attended high school in Toronto) and we chat on and off whenever I see her at the gym.  On Tuesday as I was finishing up my workout, she asked if I would like to grab coffee with her at Malatya Park.  I am not in the habit of turning down invitations (although it did interfere slightly with how I had anticipated my day was going to go- I had some errands to run, but figured they could be done some other time), so naturally I said yes, went home, ate lunch and then headed out to meet her.  We wandered around a little, and she helped me buy Joe a birthday present and then we headed for coffee and to chat.  She is a very interesting woman, she was a chemical engineer for twenty five years and has recently retired.  Her husband is a chicken veterinarian (planning to retire next year) and their only son is a medical student in Vienna.  It was a lovely couple of hours (as is now normal in Turkey, she paid) with her informing me of the long list of places that I ‘must’ see before I left Turkey.  I am already fully aware of all of these places, however time and money as always will be the determining factors in these decisions.  

Our Christmas corner.

As the weather starts to get cold again (the warmth only lasted about a week), I am beginning to accept the fact that it will probably start to snow here as soon as we leave for holiday- a saddening and maddening fact.   As Christmas nears, a few shops have begun to look the part.  Of course they are all “New Years” decorations- Joe bought us a little Christmas tree and on the box, it clearly states that it is a New Year tree.  A bit odd, but it is nice to see some festivity regardless of what holiday it is apparently for.

The littlest "New Year" tree.

Other than slowly getting ready for holiday, Joe’s birthday is today, so last night I organized a small gathering at the pub in a small celebration.  I met Kubra, Ali and Buglem in the afternoon and we went to Malatya Park instead of to their house. There is a sand box there- so Kubra, Buglem and I went and played in there- after the inflatable snow globe experience.  It was a nice change of pace- although it is a little odd to leave the mall in December with snow in your socks. Not the most pleasant feeling in the world.  I went by the school and waited for Joe to get off work and then we headed to Melita.  We were the only ones there, and for a while I thought it was just going to be the two of us (Mustafa was sick, Ali’s wife is pregnant and he feels guilty leaving her at home- the smoking indoors is not good for a pregnant woman, and a couple others came up with various excuses) but eventually Gungor showed up, followed by Elif and eventually Mehmet.  All in all it turned out to be a highly enjoyable evening (albeit expensive- as I have mentioned, if you invite you pay, and they were there on my invitation) that concluded at midnight with Mehmet driving everyone home and Gungor gaily singing along to old Turkish folk songs.

Yes, the candle was bigger than the cake.

This morning was dull and grey as I headed in to work (the fact that they have started a class days before we go on holiday baffles me slightly) and then I picked up some groceries for Joe’s b-day dinner.  We were going to go see the Hobbit, but with the weather neither of us felt like moving.  We stayed in and watched Elf (Christmastime classic) and then I made Chicken Tikka Masala and garlic naan.  A very relaxing day which is needed as tomorrow when we get home it will be time to clean and pack and Sunday we are off on an adventure!  

Into the Classroom

There is of course a downside of being a ‘Native’ speaker in a city with very few of them.  People ask you to do ‘small’ favours for them, and naturally it is difficult to say no.  Last weekend, one of my co-workers (and co-owners) asked me to come into his local school on Thursday to give his students the opportunity to practice speaking English.  Now I like Gunger, so naturally I said yes, and bright and early on Thursday morning (far earlier than I am used to being awake on a Thursday) he came by and picked me up and drove me out to the village (about 15 minutes from my house) where he works.  It was a small school, and for that day I was the gangly giraffe being gaped at from all angles, never before seen in such a strange environment.  Or that’s what it felt like at least.  Minus the crude shouting I had flashbacks to life in Jakarta.

We sat in the teacher’s room and drank tea- he had told me not to prepare any lesson plans nor given me any topics on which to teach, so I sat there searching my brain for activities that I could do with 30 odd students for two hours.  Basics of course because I wasn’t expecting them to be very good, although I was pleasantly surprised at their level of English- still quite low for the most part, but better than I had anticipated.  It turned out to be a lot of fun, Gunger is an excellent teacher (he actually teaches them in English instead of in Turkish whenever possible) and his students were much better at English than I had been expecting after visiting Mustafa’s school a few weeks prior, and I ranged my topics from thing such as holidays (explaining Thanksgiving was a bit challenging- none in the least for his referral to Natives as ‘red Indians’, which I quickly shot down as highly offensive- my eyes fully widened in surprise) and appearance (although when asked to describe one student, they all said she was ‘fat’; I bit my tongue thinking how much trouble that student would have been in back in Canada) and other such spur of the moment topics.  I was not, however, expecting to teach all day, and by the time I had taught six hours of teenagers (with a nice lunch break in the middle where all the students brought in food from home) I was exhausted, and still had to go out to see Buglem that night.

Some of the school children.

I was all prepared with books that Dad had found and sent out from Canada for her but it turned out that she had just got a new trampoline (a little one for her room), so that was taking up most of her attention, and the books got a little sidelined- although Kubra was quite pleased with their arrival so that was good.  She is slowly beginning to understand me, although unless prompted, she won’t say much.  She has learned the song, “Rain, rain go away” and we are working on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” but “Head and Shoulders” reduced her to a blubbering mess as she thought the actions were too difficult to copy.  Of course she had a bit of a fever so that might have been part of it, and we will try again next time because it would be a good song for her to learn.  Kubra is picking up English quite well, and I can also see why they say that learning a new language from children is a good idea- my understanding of Turkish is improving by visiting their twice a week.

Lunch food the kids brought from home.  Quite a feast.

Weekend classes are slowly coming to the end of term- some have just wrapped up and the others will be shortly, meaning that new ones should be beginning soon, but I am secretly hoping that they don’t start them until after the Christmas holiday- which we have mostly booked (four days in Izmir, three days in Marmaris, and four days in Antalya) and are starting to get excited about- although the prospect of more eighteen hour bus journeys is a titch tedious.  The things you must do to save a dime.   I had an interesting conversation with one of my Intermediate classes, we were talking about history and why English is the de facto language around the world, and one of my students asked why the early Presidents in the US are so highly regarded when they were involved in slavery and the mistreatment of the Natives and such.  I thought about saying that unfortunately terrible things often occur with the start of a new nation, and that of course Turkish history is far from unblemished if you ask the Cypriots or the Armenians, but thought better of it.  Their English isn’t quite good enough for that kind of a debate.  Joe did ask his speaking class what they thought about the Turkish Presidents remarks on women’s roles (if you haven’t read the article, I highly recommend it) and they had mixed opinions, but generally thought he had the right idea.  One of the best parts of living in a country is learning people’s opinions.  It gives excellent food for thought.

Occasional Daily Quirks

           The arrival of the internet coincided with the default of our phones.  One day Joe’s told him he had no service, and the next day mine did as well.  Since we got our phone number’s a day apart, Joe figured something was up (and we had just topped up so it couldn’t have been that) so we went into the store to try and figure it out.  The people at the store couldn’t figure it out.  It was saying that the accounts were active on their computers, and so eventually they put our SIM cards into one of the employees phones and lo and behold it worked.  He didn’t seem to understand why- just told us there was a problem with our phones- which Joe and I found suspicious, but then another employee (with the help of Google Translate- how people communicated without the internet is beyond me) told us that since our phones were registered on foreign passports, we could no longer use them in Turkey and that we would have to buy a Turkish phone.  This country has some funny rules.  They told us that even once our work visas arrive, we still couldn’t, but our boss said we can, so now we will wait and see what happens and hopefully it will all work out.  We still have internet at home and at the school, so we can still communicate, but it does make things a titch difficult. 

                 

              While I see that Vancouver has received some snow, it is merely taunting me from the mountaintops here, and December has rang in nice and wet, reminding me of home.  Other than that, it doesn’t feel like Christmas.  Most Turks don’t even know what day of the year Christmas is, often explaining that December 31 is ‘Turkish Christmas’, but as that is not a thing, both Joe and I have difficulties actually getting that point across.  The end of November coincided with St. Andrew’s Day, and some of Joe’s students are aware of Scottish pride and the conception of the kilt.  (How they know what a kilt is and not when Christmas is baffles me slightly, but continuing on)  Joe, ever being up for some sort of shock value, agreed to wear his kilt for the occasion.  I was mildly bemused by this concept, although I did inform him that if he chose to wear it on the bus, I would not be present for the occasion.  He agreed that the bus might not be a good choice, and instead carried it in and changed when he got to school.  Since we work at different schools during the day, I was not present for most of it, although when I asked him how it was going, he said that he had posed for a lot of photos, that his legs were very cold, and that while the women seemed to like it, the men didn’t seem to approve.  All of the other teachers felt the need to show me the pictures (as though I have never seen Joe in a kilt) and I nodded and listen to their amused takes on the day’s events.  Elif told me that it was a day the students would never forget, and since they will most likely never go to Scotland, she is probably right.

Joe and one of his students.

              

             I am still in the process of slowly learning Turkish- picking up words here and there and using the internet the rest of the time.  I kept hearing the word ayna, which I knew means ‘mirror’, but from the context, it simply didn’t make sense for people to be saying mirror all the time, so I figured it must have some other meaning, or I was hearing it wrong.  I did some more looking and found aynen which means ‘same’, but this still didn’t seem to fit with context, so I asked Elif and Mehmet one day when I heard it.  Elif said that it meant mirror, and I refuted her.  It can’t possibly mean mirror when I hear it this often.  They clued in that I was indeed hearing aynen (although I could swear they drop the final ‘n’ in spoken Turkish, because I had been listening intently for it.  I again refuted that it must mean something else, and fortunately (based on the amount I was hearing it and the amount people usually say ‘same’ in English.  Luckily, Mehmet clued in to what I was getting at and said that it can also mean, “I agree,” or the like.  We had a good laugh, as did some of my students who were there at the time, but it was nice to have one mystery solved in a language I am slowly beginning to understand.

                

             As one mystery was solved, another is ongoing.  I am used to living on the top floor of an apartment building, and here in Malatya is no different.  The main difference is that we have excruciatingly loud neighbours and we can’t figure out where they are coming from.  Most of the rooms don’t border any other apartments, but there is constant thumping and crying children and the like.  We have concluded that they must be our downstairs neighbours, but never having met them to see if they have children or not, (and knowing that our next door neighbours do) we have yet to determine if this is the cause.  It is not pleasant wherever they are coming from, that much we have determined.