Getting Started

Merhaba! It's evenıng, day number 4 (dört) of my adventure in Istanbul.  I'm trying out the blog format because it seems like a good way to convey a lot of information to a lot people in an efficient manner. (Or it will be once I get the hang of it). 
Arrived from Ithaca on Saturday afternoon at Ataturk airport, via Newark and Munich. Was picked up by the very cordial John Chandler, headmaster (not who I was expecting. I was looking for a Turkish cabdriver with a sign saying "Lang") He dropped me and luggage at my apartment (more on that later.) I unpacked my 3 bags and within an hour I had a dinner invitation from my sponsor, Jennifer Sertel, a teacher whose been here 20 some odd years, to join her and some students at her house for dinner. After a quick shower (much needed after about 22 hours enroute) I made the 5 minute walk across campus to her house. Great food and very interesting and lively conversation ensued. The students, 3 of the 5 were about to be seniors, were quite interested in Cornell and we discussed topics including the suicide rate and binge drinking, with sidetracks on whether Holden Caulfield was suicidal, what books they had and hadn't liked in their previous English classes and the idiosyncrasies of their teachers.

Sunday I was taken to one of the larger and more upscale (which means about 1/3 the size of Wegman's) supermarkets, a couple of miles away, again by John C. to pick up some essentials. Later that afternoon I took a walk down the hill and did a bit of exploring of Arnavutkoy, the area where we live. ("Koy" means village and "Arnavut" means Albanian, so this is Albanian Village, based on there once having been a community of Albanians here) I was accompanied on this excursion by Cecile and Kaya, my next door neighbors. Cecile is a Canadian English teacher married to a Turk, Cengiz. I haven't met him yet as he's at his family's seaside house. Kaya is their very cute, very good-natured 8 month old. Cecile is lovely and we are going to be working as advisors to the school newspaper "The Bosphorus Chronicle" together. She speaks Turkish very well (she's been here 4 years) and another advantage is that when her husband returns, she'll have access to a car.

Sunday night Cecile, Kaya and I joined other newcomers for another lovely dinner at the Chandlers' house, which has a patio and a view of the Bosphorus. The other folks I've spent a good deal of time with the past few days: Kristine, an English teacher from the Bay Area, and her husband Danny, who is what's called a "trailing spouse"; they're young (about 30, if that?); Corinne, who is a French teacher from Portugal, Layne who identifies as both American and French, but who will be teaching German (and she's now studying both Tibetan and Turkish). All these women are very attractive. And then there's Graham, a 30ish, 6'4" phys. ed. teacher from Dublin, who is great fun, and who spent the first hour of the dinner happily entertaining Kaya while drinking beer and chatting with the rest of us. (He asked me about my children, and when I said I had a 27 year old daughter who was "quite beautiful," he said, "When she commen' oover?")

Monday and today (Tuesday) were pretty full days of information and getting acclimated to the school, the campus, the people, and the neighborhood. I got a brand new HP laptop yesterday. It's impressive but quite challenging for me for a number of reasons: it's a PC and I've always used only Macs; at the same time I'm still very much trying to learn how to use my iPad; I have to learn how to negotiate the school's websites and programs on the new HP; and it has a Turkish keyboard (So if you see lower case "i's" without the dot or upper case ones with it, that's why. It took me a full 5 minutes to figure how to get "@". I was always a hunt and pecker but now I'm a cross-handed fumbler.)

Had a Turkish lesson with the above group (minus Cecile) yesterday afternoon. A very wonderful teacher, Azru. In reviewing the Turkish alphabet, she helped me understand a basic feature of the 2 different kinds of vowels, the i, u, and o with a dot or dots above and those without. The ones without are back vowels, meaning the tongue stays back, and the ones with (the dots) are front vowels, so your tongue presses up against your bottom teeth. But still, even though I've spent a total of 7 weeks in Turkey and have worked some on learning the language, I felt like a baby who knows about 15 words and pretty much nothing about how to put them together.

Last night we had a lovely bbq/picnic on The Terrace, a fairly new very large cobblestone patio overlooking the Bosphorus. It was set up with long tables and some couches and we were served wine and grilled chicken (Tavuk) , veggies (sebze) hamburgers, sucuk (basically hot dogs) and salads, by uniformed waiters, most of whom were fasting for Ramazan (that's the way the Turks spell Ramadan). At 8:00 we watched the sunset over the water and they were rushing to get some food and water, which they hadn't had since 4:37am.

This is my first evening free, following a guided tour of Arnavutkoy and the Tuesday market, by Phil Esposito, the English department chair. Born in rural West Virginia but somehow managed to end up in college at CCNY and then took a break from a Phd. program for 2 years and stayed for over 35, Phil was described by one of the Turkish students I met the other night as "more Turkish than we are."

I cooked some pasta tonight, a makeshift version of carbonara without (siz) meat (et) My utensils are pretty sparse, but I managed something edible. The only other thing I've prepared in my kitchen is coffee (Nescafe, which isn't so bad, I think, if I heat up the milk) and "tost", basically a grilled cheese. I've been sitting in my kitchen working on this blog,sipping some Turkish kirmizi sarap (red wine), first trying to use my new PC, then switching over to the iPad. In both cases, I figure I'm working on several skills I need, the two computers and a bit of the language. My apartment has many advantages: It's fairly large, with 5 rooms, plus a bathroom, lots of closet and shelf space, a large kitchen with a very big pantry, cabinets, counter space, decent-sized fridge, my own washing machine, a nice relatively new bathroom, which also has good cabinet space. I do have a terrace but it has nothing on it, and isn't private or as large as Cecile's which is half a floor above. I'm incredibly well-located for things central to campus: The infirmary is in this building, I can be in my office (which is a good one) or the faculty lounge in about 2 minutes walking time, and I'm a 1 minute walk from Bizimtepe, the alumni club which has a pool and work out room and a bar/restaurant, (where we'll have a TGIF this Friday, two hours of free beer/wine and snacks, followed by a potluck cookout on The Terrace). I can get a 50 % discounted membership to Bizemtepe, which I will investigate (no idea what the price tag will be.)

The downside of my apartment is that the rooms are oddly carved up. I've moved a bit of furniture and will do more when Sim arrives. For those who are planning on visiting, we do have a room with a fold out couch...bigger than a twin but it doesn't quite look like a double. Pretty thin mattress. But there is also a "guest apartment" that we can book;don't know the details, but I will communicate them later.

Our apartment is extremely "beige." I can't wait until my shipment arrives so I can brighten up the place with the few rugs, books and pictures I shipped. I think there are advantages and disadvantages to being where I have only one neighbor. Luckily, she seems like a great one. Sim's gonna have fun with Kaya. (Which means "Rock" in Turkish.)

Tomorrow we start with 3 hours in the computer lab, learning Moodle (it's like Blackboard); Atlas, (for curriculum mapping) and the RCSIS (Robert College student information system.)

We've got another Turkish lesson and in the evening we go by boat to the Asian side of the Bosphorus for dinner at the chair of the board of trustees' house. Not too shabby.

I will be sending individual and maybe some interest- group emails. Let me know ideas you have for categories (certainly I think I might do a special section for the teachers out there.) Also shoot me questions.

Before I left everyone kept asking or stating: "Are you excited?" "You must be so excited!" For awhile I didn't know what I was, then I knew I was definitely not excited; I was just trying to keep nervousness at bay. Now I am a lot of the time excited, still sometimes nervous, often having fun, and sometimes, like now, just pretty tired.