Organic goodness, a job, and nostalgia.

                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. 

CELTA Graduation

                CELTA finished on Friday and we had a small get-together on the roof of British Side with the students. Pictures were taken, info exchanged, and broken English spoken.

                After that, it was time to head over to Taksim where a mezze spread and a few bottles of raki patiently waited. 

                Here’s the arcade that housed the restaurant:

                And here’s a dead fish:

                Dancing, invariably, ensued:

                Now that I don’t have CELTA work to do, I’m spending my time mostly refreshing my gmail in hopes of a new, better job offer. I sent off my friends Umit and Didem last night over shisha, and I made more fig jam this morning after finding out that Brigid really liked my last batch. One of the cats has been placing spewed land mines around the house, so every step is now a new adventure. I’ll need to find a beach soon, but I’ll probably wait until I have a job first. I also started studying for the LSATs again, so I’ll be under pressure for yet another month. Come November, I’ll (hopefully) be able to relax and enjoy my time here.

Let Be

                The CELTA course is finally coming to an end and while it remains a huge time commitment, I’ve had to think about the next step. I had a moment of panic in which I was looking to book a flight and flee Istanbul for South America, but I think I’m passed that now. I have been offered two jobs, one at a language school which pays 500USD for 40hrs and hires me out on a week-by-week basis. The other is at a private university, which I’ve heard is where dumb rich kids go after they’ve failed to get into the more prestigious state schools. They pay about the same as the language school, but I only have to teach about 25 hrs/wk. I’ll probably end up taking it as all the good schools have long since filled their faculty positions, but I still have to sort out some “minor” details like who’s going to be paying for my work permit and how am I going to get there every day (it’s on the “asian side” – on a side note, this whole euro/asian city divide reminds me somewhat of west-side story for inexplicable reasons. I’ve never seen the play and don’t really know what it’s about. Snapping fingers? Shark week? Something like that). In the meantime, I’ve spent somewhere around 60 hours each week in this building:

                 And when I get home, I have to feed this:

                Speaking of the cats, I’ve been told that they are called Oscar and Wilde, but I still don’t know which is which. Both Brigid and I call this one Fatso. She says their names don’t matter because they don’t listen to us either way. One of the nice things about living with someone who has travelled the world is that they have a completely different relationship to material things. Since my arrival, Brigid has thrown out two large pieces of furniture because she didn’t feel as though they belonged. At the same time, the coffee drinking process is always accompanied by a heart-shaped tray, a bowl of sugar cubes, and a wooden mixing spoon. Yogurt is eaten out of clay bowls only. 

                The nights have gotten cooler and the days more bearable. I’m almost to the point where I can turn the fan off at night, and when I arrive at school I no longer do so with a steady stream running from by brow to the tip of my nose. I think I offended the students once because I was so sweaty. They looked horrified when I walked into the classroom. The balcony on this house is a great spot to sip whisky after a long day of CELTA. I took this picture at night with a long exposure:

  

                Soon I will have a certificate with Cambridge’s pompous name splattered next to mine and I will be a happy camper. You can expect more upbeat posts after this Friday’s post-CELTA binge and my subsequent beat-the-heat escape to the Princes' Isles. 

Clotted Cream and a Happy Place

Nothing makes me hungry like a month of fasting. Something about sunken cheeks and a 3am drummer-boy alarm to eat before sunrise makes me crave a nice, big plate of butter. Turks do not do butter, at least not well or regularly as best as I can tell, but thanks to my new favorite blog, Istanbul Eats, I found a place that is famous for clotted cream near my house called Besiktas Kaymakci. I had never had clotted cream before, and I'll confess that I thought it was something like cottage cheese. To save time, I'll just say that it's somewhere between butter and cream and it's good. It will also stop your heart. The place was unassuming, run down, and it appeared to be family run. The grandmother stirred a vat in the back of the restaurant, the grandson waited, and the grandfather looked at me skeptically every moment of my stay up until I payed.

The cream was covered in honey and served with hot-as-you-like-it milk. I spread the cream on a loaf of bread and munched whilst gazing at the three pictures of Ataturk above.

Then, I ordered a Turkish coffee and was very happy to find that it put my own attempts to shame.

It was a Saturday, so I decided to go sit by the Bosphorus and waft Istanbul's millennial stink. Pretty boats, ferries, two men fishing, nationalism. Splendid.

On a related note, I stupidly asked one of my students about the symbolism behind the Turkish flag. He replied coolly, "It is the reflection of the moon and stars in the blood of Turkish citizens." The man didn't know what the word "admire" meant, but he was able to come up with that without a moment's hesitation. Sometimes I think they consort this plot against me...

That's it. Be well, all of you.

Drinking Turkey

                You probably think I’ve gone bamboo and slipped off into an oriental haze as you desperately refresh my blog for a new update. Not quite, but I did underestimate the time commitment of a CELTA course  by a few dozen hours. It’s an 8am-10pm workday mon-fri with a few more spare hours on the weekend, but I haven’t got anything else to do so I can’t really complain. The group couldn’t be better and it’s not particularly difficult so much as it is tedious. Also, there’s the unexpected learning curve of forgetting everything you know about teaching and starting over (much harder for experienced teachers). The class is about half native and half non-native speakers, which is good for when I need to know the name of an English grammar point that native Turks have memorized by heart. We’ve already started teaching and I did well in the first session (there’s always a tutor monitoring us as we teach and giving feedback afterwards). Also, it’s a great refresher from Mr Morris’s high school grammar packet.

                Outside of class, I haven’t done a whole hell of a lot. I was invited to study at a pool the other and did so gladly, although I didn’t get as much work done as sun on  my shoulders. Either way, a good session.

Then I drank. And drank. And I ate one of those soggy hamburgers that I mentioned in an earlier post. Sweet, salty, disgusting.

 I tried the Turkish drink of choice, raki, which is an anise liquor not unlike a dry jagermeister. It turns milky white when mixed with water, the only thing people drink it with as far as I can tell.

 I also tried ayran, a salty yogurt drink that is supposedly the best thing to drink in the hot summer. My friend Owen Beacock (British pirate) warned me that it tastes like warm cum. Yes, yes it does. Thank you.

Right now I’m drinking what the Spanish would call tinto de verano, but what I’ll deem the only surefire way to drown the disgustingly bitter aftertaste of Turkish wine. Do better, Turkey. This wasn’t supposed to be a post on Turkish drinks, but my mind always goes to food as a last resort. I’m quite tired and have another lesson tomorrow morning to look forward to, so I’ll say that I hope you are all well and have a pleasant tomorrow. 

My New Haircut

                Classes start tomorrow so I figured I’d do one more update before I get caught up in that. It’s hot and humid here and I can’t leave the house without soaking a shirt in sweat. The worst news is that I have another month of this to look forward to, but I’ll be spending it in a classroom that I have been assured is equipped with a “fierce” air conditioning system.  The cats look like opium addicts the way they’re draped over the armchairs trying to cool off, and I’ve gone through about five gallons of drinking water in under two weeks. As I write this, I can feel beads of sweat racing each other at a snail’s pace down my back. Meanwhile, CNN keeps going on and on about Russia’s heat wave and I’m trying my best to care.

                I got a haircut, and was more than a little tense due to some expat reports on the internet (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just youtube “Turkish haircut” – I personally can’t because Turkey has banned it, jerks). I had prepared myself to be slapped in the face by flaming balls (not a joke, go youtube it), but was happily disappointed. It was a pretty standard haircut with the exception of being served tea beforehand and getting a neck rub in the process. I showed them a picture of Jude Law to give them an idea of the style I wanted, and they told me that I looked like him (I’ve included that detail purely for the purpose of letting you know that somebody in Turkey thinks I look like Jude Law, so there!). My barber might as well have been the Sundance Kid the way he handled the blow-dryer, and after a few cups of gel, I came out ready to fist-pump my way to Barcelona.

                I spent Saturday walking around for about an hour in search of a nearby market. Turns out I made a wrong turn very early on – the market is a two-minute walk from my door. It was awesome, they had everything. Downstairs is food, upstairs clothes, and the whole thing is in a parking garage. I bought two kilos of figs only to discover that I don’t particularly like figs. I might be making preserves out of them soon. There’s some sort of crepe thing that some old women were selling that looked very good, but I’m too afraid to try buying anything without a way of knowing how much to pay them (you’d think it would be easier to pick up numbers, but I haven’t really been studying). Next week.

                I was saddened to find that Gabe’s blog is much more interesting than mine, but I wouldn’t want to invent stories about filming basketball players just to hold your attention. This is my blog, it’s for me, and I’ve got nobody to talk to. And if you have anything to say, please comment. It makes me feel good. Also skype me at jamescthorne, I’m on during your morning to midday. 

Steamed Buns and Baba Ganoush

                Hokay, so

Sirin called me up and asked me to meet her in Taksim square for some tea and meze. I had blisters from my sandals so I wore my boat shoes, sans socks due to the heat, and now hobble around the house nursing hotspots all over my feet. But it was worth it, because Taksim and the neighboring area of Tunel are the go-to spots for local youth looking for weekend shenanigans. We had tea on the upper floor of a café overlooking a side street. We sat down and the skies opened up, quitting just as we finished the plate (this meze was more or less hummus, baba ganoush and other pureed veggie dips served with bread, quite good – and I promise photos will come to this blog in short time). One of the nice things about that area is the historic tram which has been preserved and still runs:

                And what’s the one thing that you can always count on next to bars? No, not hookers – drunk food! While they serve kebabs, the favorite food, Sirin politely informs me, is wet hamburgers.  I could probably have invented a more appealing name, but it’s a hamburger that’s been sitting in a steamer for god knows how long. I will be trying it, and I will let you know. One surprising thing is the lack of meat served in its “natural form,” meaning not spiced and stuffed or stacked and roasted. I imagine that this tradition is probably hard to break, as spiced meat means to many that it has been preserved. Still, if I have to eat cold salami, why does it have to be the Oscar Meyer kind? – I want the aged, moldy Italian stuff. I’m probably just shopping in the wrong areas, but for now the search for good, affordable meat continues.

                I went to the Istanbul Modern, and while they seem to have missed the memo that all modern art museums need obstreperous structures of gargantuan scale, the collection was pretty good. Sure, most showed the tendency of Turkish painters to mimic the European masters, but there was still a certain something that was fresh. The real treat was actually a temporary fashion exhibition, and I saw a few good films that dealt with fashion in the age of terror, individuality and xenophobia, etc. All in all, very well done collection and a good café overlooking the Bosphorus.

                I’ve just checked the weather and it’s supposed to creep into the nineties this Sunday. I need September to come soon.