After weighing the pros and cons of a few different offers, I finally signed a contract with a primary school here. The decision broke my promise to avoid children, but I decided to suck it up and deal with the sniveling eager needs of the little germ-sacks. The pay is good, they give me housing, and I start in a little over a week. They assure me that all the work has been done, with worksheets and course materials planned out, but I have problems trusting Turkish organization. Don’t ask why. I’ve already discovered the principal drawback of working at a primary school: clubs. They think that my skills will be invaluable to the formation of a Spanish club, a snowboarding club, and a ceramics class. At least I didn’t tell them that I worked in a restaurant, or I’d be teaching pre-pubescent turks how to make tomatillo sauce and steamed tamales.
I just have to interject and say that I’m watching a guy clean his car with a series of water bottles, just dumping them over the windshield. I’ll start collecting material for a post on Turkey’s brutally indiscriminant use of natural resources. As an American, that might be a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, but what the hell.
I found an organic market today and made some defuckinglicious (stole that from Joe Nugent, who lamented yesterday that Boston was “97 defuckinggrees”) pasta sauce from overripe heirloom tomatoes, one of which I split open to find a worm squirming around. Believe it or not, it made me feel good to have proof that no pesticides were used. Also, Brigid purchased yogurt and eggs from some farmer who treks into town twice a week to sell his produce. I know it seems masturbatory to say that I ate the platonic ideal of an egg last Wednesday, but I did, so deal. The best part (besides the piquant, deeply gold and beat to airy thinness egg that ran like a fugitive over the painted plate – Oh!) was the man who came to deliver the goods. I heard a bell ringing and I looked out the window to see someone walking down the middle of the street with a carved wooden bar with a bucket of eggs on one end and yogurt on the other. He looked like he was escaping the stockade. I suppose I could just show you…
And here are the eggs, along with my pathetic attempt to compose an interesting photograph:
The last picture I have to show you is a shameless inside joke for the BC grads that I know follow my life (sad, lonely and unemployed – them, not me!). I learned that “yeni” means “new” in Turkish, and on the same day I was walking to Taksim when I passed this restaurant:
The translated “New Hong Kong” was the go-to late night Chinese restaurant at school, and I fondly (read: fuzzily) remembered ordering from their impatient cashier after a long night of getting blitzed off of Jim Fields’s “Tsing Tao” six-packs. They always included cokes, although we never ordered them, and the experience was (probably, I really don’t remember and I might be making this up) followed up by hookah in the dorm rooms with a grocery bag tied around the smoke alarm. Sadly, it was the most homesick I’ve been. Anyway, I’m off to the plex… er… gym to go work off the gozleme that I ate earlier. It’s good but not too fancy. It’s a crepe without the delicacy of a crepe. It’s the crepe that bullied the other crepes in crepe school, a hood crepe. One last thing, I splurged on a ticket and I’m going to North Cyprus for Bayram, staying at a place that Brigid recommends called “Nostalgia Hotel” in Kyrenia. It looks gorgeous and I cannot wait.
That was a fantastic entry. Just gay enough. And I want to go. And I miss you.
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