Snow!

So it's still been snowing here in Istanbul. On Saturday we got 2-3 inches that stuck on the ground and my classes were cancelled for the weekend. A bit melted on Sunday, but there was still plenty. Today it's snowing even more! It's crazy, and very beautiful.

We've occasionally had to deal with blackouts. İsmail tells me this is because everyone has electric heaters so when it gets cold people crank them up. We had three blackouts in two days. They only lasted an hour to each time. So we had some candlelit hearts games and wine, and got to know each other better. Kar çok seviyorum çünkü o güzel, ve çünkü şimdi sokaklar konuşmuyor.

Last night I wandered around a little taking pictures. There were only a few cars and people on the streets. I was blown away, since Istanbul is normally so crowded. It was wonderfully quiet. You can click on either of these pictures to bring you to our flickr page, where there are 20 more. The video is of the Blue Mosque during the last call to prayer (adhan) of the night. We also have some new roomates: a Spanish guy and a French girl, so Eleanor can brush up on her Spanish and je peux pratiquer le français avec elle.

A Lovely Cold Day

Yesterday we visited Ortaköy and Yıldız Park. Ortaköy is a cute little neighborhood near the Bosphorus. We found a nice spot in a plaza by the Büyük Mecidiye Cami (a mosque built in 1855 - you can see the Western influenced architecture). We watched large ships go by (some over 100 meters) and sketched the view of the Atatürk Bridge.

It had snowed the night before, so when walked up Yıldız Park - which starts at sea level and then goes up a few hundred feet - there was still some snow at the top, as well as a lovely fountain and some swanky tea houses. The tea houses were closed since it was so cold, but it was nice to walk around the park anyway. Istanbul is a crowded place, so enjoying a stroll through a quiet, empty park was quite a treat. On the way back, we stopped to take pictures of the mosque attached to Dolmabahçe Palace.

Today we have even more treats planned! We're going to take an 80 minute ferry ride across the Sea of Maramara to Yalova where we'll visit the thermal hot springs at a town named for them - Termal.

Here's a little video from Ortaköy. We'll have more pictures of our day's dalliances on our flickr page.

Surprise Weather

So it's gotten colder, and it's been snowing/slushing a bit today. Here are Eleanor's thoughts on the subject:

First Thoughts on Amsterdam (by Eleanor!)

It's hard to know where to begin. I didn't realize, until I scrolled down our blog today, that I hadn't written a post since the first week of the CELTA. Thanks, Mike, for keeping us up to date! But I'm sorry to those of you (mostly Dad) who were wondering what had happened to my voice on the blog. Things got really busy for a while, and I also was going through some pretty deep culture shock that made it hard to find motivation for anything beyond the course.

I'm feeling much better these days. As Mike said, the CELTA is finished and we both earned top marks. It feels good to have done what we came here to do, and to have done it well. I've started teaching part-time, and we've moved into a new apartment in a much more inspiring neighborhood. These things have helped me to reset my attitude about living here in Turkey.

Another thing that helped was the very special Christmas week Mike and I spent in Amsterdam. There's so much I want to say about the trip, that I think I'll break it up into a few posts. I hope I don't put you to sleep with it-- for me, it will be good to have a record of all the thoughts that flew through my head that week. Going there sort of snapped my brain back into focus, and I want to hang onto to that focus now that I'm back...

We were lucky to fly in on the day after a snowstorm in Holland. We missed the travel snarls, but still got to enjoy Amsterdam under a blanket of snow. The canals and side streets all had this hushed and misty quality that was immediately relaxing.

We spent that first afternoon wandering around without a destination. The whole city was lit up for Christmas. Each street had its own lighting theme, which made it easy to navigate. If we ever became lost, we turned a few corners and arrived back at a scheme we recognized.

When I walk around in Istanbul, I usually feel tense. It's crowded and the traffic is dangerous. There are bad smells and loud noises. To appreciate the beauty of one tiled wall, or flower covered balcony, or view of the Bosphorous, I have to screen out fifty other distractions. I know this is the wrong approach to enjoying the city. The people who really love it here are those who can appreciate the city as a whole-- who are energized by its commotion and rough-edgedness. I'm still searching for that ability in myself. I like things to be pretty and well-designed, and, yes, a bit safe. I think that's one of the reasons it's good for me to be here, stretching myself.

But as a vacation retreat, Amsterdam let me indulge in all the things I love. Everything-- from the people, to the scenery, to the food-- was pleasant. Every time I looked through a window into someone's apartment home, it was like looking into a design magazine photo shoot. Even in the snow, the whole city was still wheeling around on their bikes, toting children, groceries, art school portfolios. Every third door seemed to lead into a hole in the wall pub, decked in cedar swag, where it was impossible to buy a bad beer...

That first night, I didn't think I could go back. That instant feeling of comfort would be too hard to let go of. In the end, of course, I did. For all the grit in Istanbul, at least you can see what's really there. I'm sure that Amsterdam has grit (the red light district is probably a good place to start looking). And if it doesn't, that just means it's been pushed somewhere else. But at Christmas all of us try to create our own fantasy worlds, don't we? So, just for that week, I exhaled deeply and lived in mine.

Soon, I'll write a bit more about the other things we did. I especially want to get down some thoughts about the art we saw. I'll leave you with a few more photos from our walk on our fist evening in Amsterdam.

Take care everyone,
Eleanor

More Art

So today we had another one of those cool art classes. This time we did three drawings. The first one was a head shot, the second was the head and shoulders, and the third was a crazy group portrait where all of us - including the model - were looking into two mirrors that had been pushed together. In Eleanor's group picture you can see the crack between the two mirrors. Her art was, of course, amazing. The head and shoulders one she did looks exactly like the girl we were drawing. Since I don't have the skills, I went more stylized and abstract :)




In other news, Eleanor says she's still working on a blog post about our Amsterdam adventures, so it'll be really really cool when it comes out. She has so much to say, in fact, that she might serialize our holiday trip.

This Thursday we're planning a mini-adventure. We're going to take a ferry from Istanbul across the Marmara Sea to Yalova where there are some lovely natural hot springs! Hopefully it won't be raining, but either way we'll have some fun and enjoy a nice soak.

Tah tah for now.

Art and Ikea

Our apartment was in need of some furniture so we headed over to one of the two Ikeas in Istanbul the - close one. This involved a ten minute walk (steeply downhill) to the nearest lightrail station, 25 minutes on the lightrail, getting off and walking five minutes to a metro station, a 15 minute metro ride, followed by a 10 minute walk through Forum Istanbul - one of the many modern shopping malls that have popped up in Istanbul's prosperous suburbs. I've attached a photo of all the loot we bought. We can safely say that Ikea is the same in Istanbul as in the Northwest - for better or worse. In our case, it was kind of nice - and Eleanor had some Swedish meatballs with gravy at the Ikea cafe. We carried almost all of it back in the first trip. Those 2 big, thick boxes contain two heavy dressers - probably weigh about 90 lbs each. We shoved the rest of the small stuff into backpacks. Carrying the one of the dressers around, up and down stairs, escalators and ramps, trying not to smack people in crowded passageways turned out to be very challenging. So when we got off the metro we took a cab most of the way home, so we only had to trudge for 2-3 minutes uphill to get to our apartment. Of course, we live on the 3rd floor so we still had to do that, but Eleanor saved me and carried it the rest of the way. She'd been carrying the bookshelf this whole way.

Then we went back again for the other dresser and the coffee table (this is fascinating, I know). But since we finished our purchase during rush hour, we knew a taxi trip would take forever, so we jammed ourselves and our furniture into the subway, onto the lightrail, and then onto the funicular so we could avoid the uphill. At the end of the day, our arms were rubbed raw and we each had several bruises forming. But we now have a place to put all of our stuff so it was definitely worth it. And the guy we rent from is buying all the furniture - we just had to do the grunt work.

So that was "Our Ikea Adventure." Here's a picture of the goods:


On another note, for the past two weeks we've attended a Monday night art class put on by a British expat. He only charges 10TL for two hours of artistic entertainment and supplies all the necessary materials. The first week we did some still life sketches. This week we did some sketches from a live model. Eleanor is, of course, the class of the class. She's also been extremely encouraging. She's been trying to teach me some sketching back at the apartment, and these drawings are some of my attempts from the class (pics of Eleanor's art to soon follow):

New Apartment

Hello friends and family,

Eleanor and I have recently moved into a new apartment! Our previous apartment was in a pretty characterless part of the city, had a closet kitchen, and - to be blunt - a poop smell coming out of the pipes in the bathroom's sink, shower, and toilet. We didn't want to deal with moving while we were doing our CELTA, which is finished! So now that that's over moving was a high priority.

Our new place is a shared living situation. We have two large rooms to ourselves so we'll still have plenty of privacy, but there is a shared kitchen and two shared bathrooms, and one shared shower. The kitchen is large and we have an oven! We also have a fantastic view of the Galata Tower from the kitchen window (see below). Since it's shared, rent is also cheaper in this apartment - so that means we can save more money for travelling! We have two roomates - a Turkish law student and a Dutch college student, but he's going back to Holland in a few weeks. After him, an Italian architecture student is moving in. We are happy to say that they're both very nice people.

Our neighborhood is also a big improvement over the last one - it's more lively and has a lot of fun places, and not as much motor-vehicle traffic. Plenty of pedestrian traffic, but the roads are too narrow for lots of cars, which is nice!

So yeah, our CELTA is over. We're happy to report that we both received the top mark of "Pass A." Eleanor also got hired at a language school, so we're both employed and earning money. We also had a fabulous, week-long trip to Amsterdam from Dec. 22nd to Dec. 28th. You can see pictures of it on our flickr photostream, and Eleanor promises she'll write a blog post about it soon.

Love to everyone!

-Mike and Eleanor