(Turkey on Rice)^-1: Visitors and Snow Days

Coming back from winter break was good. It's always nice to take a fresh start. Unfortunately, it is more than difficult when the family matriarch passes away right at the beginning of the first day back. I thought about possibly taking the day off but figured that there was not anything I could do from here and what good would bumming around the apartment do me? I stuck it out. A friend brought brownies and all was basically well. School has been going well and we just finished up the first semester. It is a very crazy time as teachers rush to complete gradebooks and comments and students flock to find out how they can raise their grades that one or two (or twelve in some cases) percent to get to that next grade level/pass.

A friend came to visit. Mon Petit Chou (MPC) taught French at Woodstock while I was there (technically she still does). She decided to come for a week towards the end of her winter holiday as she moved back towards India from France. Things worked out well because she came the same week that reports were due and she would go out and see the city while I worked and we would both get home around the same time and would relax and catch up on old times. There are pictures of some of the places we visited below.

The weather has also been pretty crazy here. The Friday that MPC spent here turned out to be a snow day for us so she worked on some things for school while I ran in to finish up my reports. We then went out and had some fun in the snow. The next week we had Monday afternoon classes cancelled, then Tuesday, then Wednesday. Thursday was an early dismissal because it was the end of the semester and Friday was a day off! I only taught 135min last week. Luckily, school has a few extra days built into the calendar as a buffer so the snow days will just be absorbed into that.

This is the time of year that international schools really start looking for new hires. There are job fairs going on resumes and CVs coming and going and the excitement is contagious even if you're still contracted for at least another year. Having friends packing up and leaving has gotten me to start thinking again about what I want to do in the coming years. Of course, nothing is set in stone right now but I have a pretty good idea of what I'd like to do. Istanbul is a great city and even in just this one semester I can see MEF growing and changing into a better school. At some point I would like to go down and do one of the four to six months tours in Antarctica at one of the science bases. Realistically, I would not be working with anything science-y unless I could manage to get some kind of a job as a lab tech. I'll be happy to be a janitor down there. So, what I'm thinking is that I can study and take the GRE while still in Istanbul. Then I'll go down and do my run sweeping floors or wrangling penguins in the antarctic. That will get me back Stateside around February or March when I can make definite plans for grad school. I'm leaning more towards getting a higher degree in chemistry than anything else at the moment but have emailed one of my profs from ISU with my thoughts and questions. Any snippets of advice that you all might have would be welcomed. It's all very confusing.

Anywho, supposedly the weather this week calls for lots more snow which is rather unfortunate since the past few days have be gorgeous. I went to Eyup yesterday. It's a very conservative part of the city as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of women wearing headscarves and the fact that grandmothers have to actually get up from their seat on the public transport to sit between myself and their granddaughter. Obviously I'm just so virile that I will impregnate her by sitting next to her (With a good gap between us no less. You could see seat.). There is a nice cafe up the side of one of the hills there. My friend, Lurch, and I went up to check out the view. It was a beautiful day and the view of the city was great. There was a little smog but it did not really inhibit the view all that much.