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Category Archives: Turkey

Your daily misinterpretation

Monday, October 26, 2009

Today I found myself talking with a friend about whether costumes are ever worn in Turkish culture– I’m planning a speaking lesson that deals in part with Halloween, and needed background information to use when encouraging my students to draw out comparisons between traditions. She insisted that costumes were extremely rare.
I remembered a [...]

Filed in Photos, Quick Hit, Turkey, Turkish Culture | Comments (1)

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)

Daire var!

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

I have an apartment! It’s right across from the university and furnished– the best possible option. Pictures– of this and other things, though I’ve been too busy to photograph much lately– incoming.
In discussing the apartment with Narin, I found out something very surprising to me: many Turkish people apparently don’t know– and don’t [...]

Filed in Housing, Living in Turkey, Quick Hit, Turkey | Comments (1)

The last five days

Sunday, October 4, 2009

For the last five days (Tuesday-Saturday), I’ve been in Ankara for Fulbright orientation, an intense and extremely helpful experience. I haven’t been posting because the orientation was so exhausting; I’m full of ideas for outreach projects, research plans, and English teaching techniques. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to see Ankara’s sites (primarily [...]

Filed in Quick Hit, Travel, Turkey, Turkish | Comments (0)

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)

Fortunes

Sunday, September 27, 2009

I am finally sitting outside the Gaziantep airport, after a rather chaotic trip over here. The last few days before leaving were a whirlwind– even more so than usual, I think, because I wound up needing to take the GRE the morning before I left. (I did fine, though not as well as [...]

Filed in First Impressions, Travel, Turkey, Turkish | Comments (0)

Made it. (Barely?)

Friday, September 25, 2009

I am writing from Gaziantep, finally (and am on the laptop of my host, where I cannot find the apostrophe key, so expect some wacky phrasing and orthography). It was not the most pleasant plane trip I have ever taken, unfortunately, although I am dealing with much less jet lag than I anticipated.
There is [...]

Filed in Quick Hit, Status Reports, Travel, Turkey | Comments (2)

Look! It’s a visa!

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Departure time for Turkey is rapidly approaching (more on that sometime soon), so I was really relieved that my Turkish visa arrived today. The paperwork took forever to get together– my own fault, though compounded by my lack of a non-passport ID and distance from a FEDEX office– and I’ve been worrying about the [...]

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V, w, and f

Sunday, May 24, 2009

I’ve been spending part of the day (post-dishes and inside chores) catching up on unread blog posts in Google Reader, as I’ve been ignoring that segment of the internet for a few weeks now. Sifting through back posts in Language Log is usually entertaining, although I tend to save long and complex work to [...]

Filed in Academia, Language, Turkey, Turkish | Comments (0)