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Category Archives: Food & Drink

Scenes From a Day

Friday, December 4, 2009

Quite possible the single funniest student mistake I’ve ever seen:
Found while grading writing quizzes. About the Taj Mahal, one student writes,
“It’s made of white barber. It has two towels.“
…
It’s a sound-based mistake, of course, though as a friend pointed out, “How can you mistake marble for barber when the cognate in your own [...]

Filed in Academia, Anecdotes, Cooking, Food & Drink, Living in Turkey, Quick Hit, Reactions, Teaching, Turkey, Turkish Culture | Comments (0)

Thankful

Friday, November 27, 2009

Today is (or was, at this point) Thanksgiving in the US. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday– secular, identified with a spirit of thankfulness and generosity, and heavily food-focused (which satisfies my culinary hobbies). I didn’t expect to be able to celebrate here, because I hadn’t made plans and it’s complicated by Kurban Bayramı [...]

Filed in Cooking, Food & Drink, Introspective, Personal, Reactions, Travel, Turkey, Turkish Culture | Comments (0)

What have I been up to?

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Teaching, mostly. People aren’t kidding around when they say that first-year teaching is tough. I’m learning how to plan a lesson properly, how to work with students who don’t yet know enough English to understand my classroom directions, and how to manage big classes of mostly-sweet but generally-distracted students not much younger than [...]

Filed in Ancient What-Not, Bazaars, Cooking, Food & Drink, Living in Turkey, Museums, Status Reports, Turkish | Comments (0)

On Meatballs

Monday, October 12, 2009

There’s all kinds of stuff to put in a real post– on a tour of the neighborhood, on balancing teaching and adjusting to the culture, on my language struggles, on the Turkish engagement ceremony1 I went to on Saturday– but I taught four hours of night class to my tough group tonight (who were mercifully [...]

Filed in Food & Drink, Turkish Food | Comments (1)

And a little closer to the present

Sunday, September 27, 2009

One more quick status update before I go:
1) Yesterday Narin took me into the city proper for the first time, which was excellent. (She was joking about having no practice being a tour guide in Antep, but she was really helpful.) I now have the beginnings of an understanding of how the bus system works [...]

Filed in Ancient What-Not, Food & Drink, Language, Museums, Quick Hit, Status Reports, Turkey, Turkish | Comments (0)