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

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

Week one is a success!

It's so beautiful here right now! Bright, bright, warm, breezy days. We hear it might be the last hurrah of summer (the temperature is supposed to drop quite a bit next week), so we are trying to enjoy it while we can. A couple days ago, Mike and I went for a walk along the Bosphorous near the Kabataş ferry docks and milled around with the commuters and pleasure seekers there. If it's nice tomorrow, we're thinking we'll go back and hop on one of the ferries out to "the islands", where there are no cars and possibly even a little scrap of nature.

I'm feeling good this weekend, having survived my first week of CELTA. Yesterday, each of us taught a twenty minute lesson to real English learners. For mine, I worked on asking for phone numbers with a group of beginner students. There are a lot of things that I want to do differently next time, but it feels good just to have a little teaching under my belt.

I feel a lot of support and encouragement from our teachers and fellow students. And the view can't get much better from our school. Here's what I see when I lean out the window:

Not bad, right?
Love,
Eleanor

Settling In

Coming to Istanbul has been unlike any travel I've ever done. This past week, we've been doing the tourist stuff, but at the same time, we know that we are something different from tourists. It's nice, because we have been able to take our time and take in Istanbul's marvels at the pace that they deserve. But it's been frightening as well, knowing how much work we have to do to make ourselves a home here.
We've made some serious headway, though, and today I am feeling really good. Yesterday we moved into a studio apartment in the Harbiye neighborhood. It's within walking distance of our school and Istanbul's only organic market, which happens every Saturday. Check out our haul!

It feels good to have a stocked kitchen, a cozy apartment, and even (gasp!) homework to do. Routine is my refuge right now, the more of it the better (I don't speak for Mike, of course). We start school this week. Orientation is on Monday, and classes start Tuesday. I'm excited!

We still have lots of sightseeing that we want to do. Last week, we took a cruise up the Bosphorous on the public ferry. We drank cup after cup of çay on the boat, and then had fish lunch when we stopped at Anadolou Kavağı, a village at the mouth of the Black Sea. The next day we saw Topkapı Palace. Our photos don't even begin to convey how enormous it is. Courtyard, within courtyard, within courtyard. The tiles in the harem are amazing.

More soon, when we have some news about school, or maybe after we check out the Princes' Islands!
Love,
Eleanor