Bulgaria Trip

Well last week Eleanor and I had a much deserved vacation. We took five days and shot off to Sofia, Bulgaria. Well, it was really only three days vacationing because all day Monday and all day Friday were taken up by the 10 hour bus ride - but it was fairly comfortable and only cost 80TL round-trip.

We did lots of cool stuff: visited the Rila Monastery in the mountains near Sofia, went to an awesome Indian restaurant, went to a great bar, drank lots of good beer, ate at lots of other good restaurants, saw the archaeology museum which had some awesome Thracian treasures - including a gold burial mask, went to the Nevsky Memorial Cathedral, visited the ancient Boyana Church, took a 30 minute gondola ride up the Mt. Vitosha. Yeah, lots of cool stuff. We even went to the Mall of Sofia and saw Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. They also had a supermarket where we could buy some Belgian beer. Mmm. I also enjoyed a Cuban cigar and some fine Bulgarian wine.

While we were visiting one of the churches they had an orthodox Christian baptism ceremony, which involved three members of the clergy, lots of singing from them, and some chanting from a choir hidden somewhere in the back. We also visited the only mosque in Sofia, since we don't get enough of those here in Istanbul, and visited a beautiful synagogue with a 2 ton chandelier.

Eleanor managed to find out about this free concert on the internet, which was on Thursday night at a enormous concert hall. It turned out to be a bunch of community members who were putting on the show, a bunch of amateur groups. It was laid back and really fun - the audience was mostly made up of the friends and family of the performers. There were tons of acts and it went on for three hours. It started with some ballet and little kids dancing and singing. In the middle there were some older kids 12-17 singing American pop songs karaoke-style while other teenagers did some dancing in the background: very strange. We almost left at one point, but then the last 40 minutes turned out to be a bunch of Bulgarian dancing and singing complete with traditional outfits, so we were glad we stuck around. At the end, the lights came on, the whole crowd stood up, and a professional opera singer led the whole crowd in singing the Bulgarian national anthem. Quite a slice of Sofian life.

Here are some pics (if you click on them they should send you to our Flickr photo stream where we have lots more pictures and even a 1-2 minute video of some great Bulgarian dancing!):


Traditional Bulgarian dancers.


Mt. Vitosha from the gondola.


At the Rila Monastery.


Eleanor is passing through a hole in the roof of a cave where St. Rila (Bulgaria's most revered saint) once lived. It's said that if you go through the hole you'll be cleansed of all your sins.

A Running Tour

Wow, I can't believe it's been so long since our last post! A lot has happened, but I won't try to catch you up all at once. Eleanor's position at her school has changed a lot and now she's also teaching high school freshman half time. I'll let her tell y'all about that stuff later.

I'm planning a trip to Bulgaria at the end of this month. A short trip: just five days in Sofia, the capital. It has lots of nice parks and I'm hoping to do some jogging to explore.

We also have some friends coming to visit next week! Shelby and her boyfriend Andy. They'll be staying with us in our apartment for about a week and we're very excited to share our new home with them.

I've also started training for the Copenhagen Marathon, which is on May 23rd. Last week during a beautiful sunny day, I took my camera with me and stopped to take a bunch of pictures - it was a very slow run! This is a route that I run twice a week, sometimes more. I put all the pictures in our photostream on flickr, so if you want to see more hopefully you can just click on one and it'll take you there. It's a nice running route - it takes me over the Ataturk Bridge (which goes across the Golden Horn) and then I run up the shore of the Golden Horn. It goes pretty far inland. Hope you enjoy!


These are some people fishing off the Ataturk Bridge. When the set their poles down to put on new bait, I sometimes have to do hurdles!


These are some boats docked on the shore of the Golden Horn and an early blossom!


A picture of my nice running path through some parks. To the right side you can see some Turkish people using the strange exercise machines that are in all the parks here.


This is on the bridge with a mosque in the background. Next to the minaret you can see the Galata Tower sticking out - which is, of course, right next to our apartment.

More blog posts to come, we promise!
-Mike

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.