Yep, we're still here - and so's the Pope

Well, the Pope hasn't actually arrived yet - that happens tomorrow, and he's going to Ankara first, but there is sure to be some hubub. I was handed a flyer on the street about a protest, of which I could only read a few words, but it felt a little bit like being home on the Diag.

Mark and I have started Turkish lessons with our TEFL teacher from Kent, and we are making progress, though a tortoise would laugh at me for how slow I am going. Mark is going a bit quicker, but then he has a bit more time on his hands these days. I am currently working two jobs, because I have decided to cut my contract at my first school short, but here they require a month's notice, and so I will be working 7 days a week, probably 60 hours/week until Christmas. Mark's family will show up just in time to see me at the end of my rope, I am sure. But it will all be worth it when January rolls around and life is much less stressful.

My current institution is going to hell in a handbasket...a handbasket like a ten-year-old rollerblading downhill. They have recently changed their entire pedagogical system by writing and publishing their own instruction books such that the students will learn English in skill blocks. What this means is that, in an eight week course (which completes one "level", of which there are 6 - when a student is level six, they're really rather fluent), the students have two solid weeks of GRAMMAR, then two weeks of reading (which is really just more grammar), two weeks of writing, and then FINALLY two weeks of speaking. This is opposed to the perfectly suitable integrated system we had before, in which there was also time for conversations and games and things that make such a course bearable in the first place.

I have only taught one week of this system, but it is enough to know that both the students and the teachers are going to be totally miserable with it. For three hours a day, five days a week, the teacher stands with her back to the students, outlining grammar rules on the board. It's horrible. It's a good thing I saw it coming and put in my notice before I even started with this. I will be switching to Mark's school, which is a totally different system from any traditional school I have encountered (which definitely places the burden on the students, rather than the teachers - perhaps not ideal overall, but suits my purposes of wanting more freetime and less stress well). I was the first of four people to quit this week, that I know of, and that's just at the two of 12 branches in the city. I am glad I have bought my ticket off this island of insanity.

In other news, Mark and I will be celebrating part two of our Thanksgiving this evening. Last night we went to a potluck at the home of one of my fellow American co-workers, which was fun but low-key and included nothing of traditional Thanksgiving foods. Tonight I will be cooking chicken with BBQ sauce, mashed potatoes, and zucchini. Hopefully some of our neighbors/roommates will join us, but if not, it'll just be me and Mark and our specially-purchased DVD of Friday Night Lights, the closest we could get to actually watching football on Thanksgiving Day.

I have started listening to Christmas music, and the song I'll Be Home for Christmas seems particularly appropriate these days. Fortunately, we have a rather large expat community of Christmas-celebrators (I wouldn't be so bold as to lable many of them "Christians"), so there are some things going on that will get us through, I am sure. But, of course, it's just not the same...

Those are the major updates, I believe. So I am sorry if we had worried any of you...but then you may have completely stopped checking the blog for updates by now and maybe nobody will even read this. Oh well. Here are some pictures.

The obelisk thingy in the Hippodrome...and a small plastic helicopter. All part of the Ramazan fun.

A pillar in Gulhane park, surrounded by it's plastic Coke can worshippers.

Mark and our main man, the big (and I mean big - all statues are designed to make him larger than life, even though he was actually quite short in real life) M.K. Ataturk.