The End of November

Hello Everyone,

Eleanor and I have some exciting news! We just booked a flight to Amsterdam for Christmas week! It also happens to correspond with our visas expiring. So we'll spend Christmas in Amsterdam, see the Van Gogh Museum and some other Dutch art, tour the canals, etc, and then get another 3 month tourist visa for Turkey. Maybe after that we'll get residence permits.

We recently saw my parents again, along with some other family friends (you know who you are), as they stopped overnight in Istanbul after finishing up an amazing tour of Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. They had some fun stories to tell! My parents also got us a Turkish carpet for our apartment! (see pic)

Tomorrow we're going to take advantage of some (hopefully) sunny weather and go on a hike in the famous Belgrade Forest! We're both really looking forward to getting out of the big city for a bit and seeing and hearing some nature, rather than car horns and old engines. Walking down some streets you pretty much have to shout to be heard by the person walking right next to you.

We miss you all, and hopefully we'll have some fun pictures of the forest to share soon!

Love,

Mike and Eleanor

A New Job and Marathon #7

Mike:

So sorry it's been so long since we've posted! It's been very busy here. First of all, my family visited for a week and my sister visited for almost two weeks so I was entertaining them. It was great fun! We did a lot of fun stuff together and I'm sad to see them go. My sister flew back to Portland on Thursday and my parents continued their trip through Turkey and will soon head toward Syria and Jordan. Fortunately, I'll get to see my parents again when they swing back through Istanbul for 24hrs before they fly home.

I've also been busy because I got a part-time job as an English teacher at the American Cultural Association language school in Bakırköy - a section of Istanbul. I work for 12 hours on Saturdays and 11 hours on Sundays, so I'm super busy on the weekends! One of their native speakers had to leave on a family emergency, so they needed to hire someone quickly. One of the other students in my CELTA course works for the school and she recommended me and when I interviewed they hired me on the spot and said I'd start in two days!

It's been a little crazy, and it was hard at first adjusting to teaching so many classes a day and so many different levels (introductory, elementary, pre-intermediate, and intermediate), but I just finished my 3rd weekend of classes and it's getting easier and I think the students are getting a lot out of it too. The school mostly wants the native speakers to focus on improving the students' speaking and listening skills, but I teach some grammar as well.

ALSO, on Oct. 18th I ran the Istanbul Marathon! It was my 7th marathon and my slowest! I couldn't spend much time training because of the moving to Istanbul, and once I got here there weren't a lot of places to run, but I toughed it out and I'm glad I did. It took me 4hr 45min. I was so relieved to finish. The course was beautiful though, it started with a run across one of the bridges over the Bosporus Straight, so I ran from Asia to Europe! Istanbul also has absolutely horrid traffic, the worse I've ever seen in any country - but for the marathon they closed all the main roads and it was very enjoyable to enjoy seeing the city sights free from all the car noise and honking (people here love to honk!).

Anyway, congratulations if you finished reading all this and sorry I don't have any pictures. I'll try to remember to take some of the school and will post them later.

Hope everything is good back in the Northwest!! I miss nature.

Cheers,

Mike