Yaramaz Went Away

 What were you doing 10 years ago?
End of August 1998…I think I was in Canada, heading back to London, and Pieter was stranded in Canada with my parents due to an Air Canada strike.

What were you doing 1 year ago?
End of August 2007…Exactly what I am doing now, though my office was upstairs and I wasn’t so jaded.

Five snacks you enjoy?
1. Red Licorice
2. Pistachios
3. Top Kek Pöti
4. Gummi anything
5. .Grapes

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to?
1. Madame George- Van Morrison
2. We’re on the Road to Nowhere- Talking Heads
3. Don’t Go- Hothouse Flowers
4. Unbreak My Heart- Toni Braxton (D’s fault entirely)
5. Bongo Bong- Manu Chao

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire?
1. Eat at all sorts of amazing places all over the world
2. Travel, travel, travel
3. Quit my job 
4. Build a house
5. Give a lot away to family and friends

Five bad habits?
1. I spend way too much time online.
2. I chew pens
3. I procrastinate like mad
4. Inappropriate temper
5. Swearing like a sailor at inopportune times

Five things you like doing?
1. Cooking
2. Reading
3. Listening to music
4. Dining out at nice places
5. Traveling

Five things you would never wear again?
1. Jelly Shoes
2. ?
3. ?
4. Those poorly fitting enormous things I used to wear when I thought I was really fat (but I wasn’t)
5. Acid wash jeans

Five favorite toys?
1. My mp3 player.
2. My Macbook
3. My camera
4. Larry’s duck clock (now gone back to St Louis)
5. Bit Torrent

Food Meme stolen from http://www.leftoverqueen.com/

Tomorrow morning at 7am I must embark on a nifty little road trip to Ankara for my Last Ever DOS Meeting. I generally hate DoS meetings, as they tend to involve verbal abuse, tedious presentations about projects that never materialize, and a lot of condescention from various parties (who are all now oddly enough being quite kind since I announced my leaving).  Even the tea and cakes served at breaktime don’t really make up for the loss of irreplaceable hours on my generally hectic timetabling Fridays.  This one, however, will be my last foray into the wilds of Anatolia, so I plan to make it a super-fine road trip, with camera, mp3 player, and a sense of Road Trip Freedom coursing through my almost-there veins. Ankara isn’t exactly thrills personified but damn, at least it is Out Of Istanbul- something I don’t get to see much these days.  Claire and Man-Joe will be there so with luck we can make it semi anarchic.  Though I suppose attempting a bout of post meeting/pre-minibus anarchy during the first week of Ramazan in the wilds of Anatolia isn’t really the easiest thing to pull off. I’m not even sure any cafés will be open before iftar, or if they are, like the odd open one in Kayseri, we may have to make merry in the back room, curtained off from passers by.  

Slowly working my way through a carton of spicy garlic broccoli-pineapple rice noodles from the magnificent Woku up the street. If I had known three, four years ago- hell, even last year!- that I could find really good Asian noodles in Istanbul (delivery! And not full of cucumber and yogurt and tomato cubes!) I could have been spared some painful food-longing crises.  I still have nightmares about that Chinese restaurant in Ankara’s sophisticated Kzlkaya neighbourhood,  where the cashew chicken had cucumber chunks floating amongst the (non-cashew) almonds in the tomatoey sauce (resembling the tomato sauce on an Iskender Kebab).  We washed it all down with ayran, and then strong cups of sweet Turkish tea.  Or that Meksika Makarnas I had at the lone semi-European café in Kayseri, where the Mexican aspect was prepresented by a great quantity of ground beef sautéed in fake curry mix and slathered in feta cheese and mixed with macaroni.  

The air has cooled somewhat this week. I don’t wake in a sweat anymore and occasionally find myself wrapped up in my duvet in the morning.  

I have been thinking a lot about my move, most imminent (less than 3 weeks!!).  Small details like people I wish I had seen more during my time here but who all faded away into invisibility somehow (Yasmin from Suadiye, Iman, Miles) or places I wish I could have visited or revisited (the Black Sea, Cappadocia again after my 2 year absence, the far east around Mardin and anl Urfa and Diyarbakr, Assos ) or cafés I wish I had written a book in or streets I wish I could have lived in. Cherry seasons I wish I had taken better advantage of.  And so on. Last minute double-takes and apprehensions. I am ready to go, for the first time since I came here, with no strong need to prove to myself that I can change it for the better and live more honestly and realistically and authentically.  I am genuinely tired of the noise, the chaos, the yelling neighbours, honking horns, lack of bicycles, lack of swimming, lack of cultural permeability, lack of quality workmanship or accountability.   I’m tired. I just want to go home.

 We are currently midway through 2 Dumbass Bank Call Centre intensive training programs. They want our teachers to use their scripts to help their staff improve their telephone performance.  Below are exerpts from some of the scripts they want us to work with. 

I was walking to work yesterday morning, cutting through the little shopping centre full of tea-drinking middle-aged women is Mrs Roper muumuus (the lite versions so in style here these days)  and the tiny boutiques that sell them, when one of the women, in the process of unlocking her particular boutique stopped to ask me where I had bought my bag.
‘In Canada’ I replied
‘Oh’ she replied, ‘I am not familiar with that shop. Is it in Akmerkez?’
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘Canada- like Toronto. Ca-Na-Da’
‘Hmmm Gogo, you say?’
‘No, Canada, in Vancouver. Just north of America’
‘So you didn’t get it in Istanbul?’
‘No, I’m afraid not’

*head desk*

Other than that moment of Zen, things are fine here. Aside from the unmentioned bomb that had Mecidiyeköy blocked off last night. And the other bomb in the thermos in the ili cemetary up the road by Cevahir. And the heat. It went down to 30 degrees yesterday, with overcast skies, and felt like autumn had finally moved in. 

I’m ready to go. I’m tired.

 On yesterday:

Teacher B came in yesterday evening as I was trying to sort out vast amounts of unnecessary other crap, by that point piled quite deep- at the same time as Teacher S came in saying the Ready To Go Intermediate 2 book was nowhere (it was on the shelf just above the normal RTG shelf…I found it after 1 min of looking)- and told me he couldn’t find the RTG Upper Int book and how was he supposed to teach anything without the book? And could he have the RTG CD as well? So, as I was searching for the book, I explained there was no RTG cd, because RTG is a resource pack made of numerous varied sources.

I did sleep last night. I’m not sure when the book fell out of my hand but I do know it wasn’t 3am like the other night. Lola woke me at 6 for breakfat by biting my ankles and dragging me to her food bowl. I fell back asleep til 8am, which seemed to be a reasonable compromise. I feel better than I did yesterday. Mind you, yesterday was chockablock with idiots and crisis management and damage control and a disappointing late-lunch sandwich from Atom Tost and the discovery that I was down to one lone English Breakfast teabag in my desk-box. Apparently everyone in the school helps themselves to my teabags and pens and notepaper and whatever else I havent hidden away.  But today is better: my pen is still on my desk where I left it last night; I only had one oral test waiting for me as I walked in the door this morning; at Kahve Dunyas when I was waiting for my takeaway cappuccino, they had set out a bowl of their marvellous dark/milk/white chocolate covered espresso beans on the Waiting For Take Away table.   I picked up a icingless havuçlu kek from Karafrn and so had a rectangle of dry but decent carrot cake to go with my cappuccino at my desk after I oral tested the lovely and quite fluent Mr Nejat Tarhan. 

So today is good.

I am currently in a mood itching to go back to Canada. I have dreams of waking in the side-garage bedroom, looking out onto the rainy back garden, rain pounding on the roof, slowing easing myself upstairs for a lazy strong coffee on one of the sofas, with a stack of books/newspapers/magazines at hand.  More rain, more calm, no damage control, no crisis aversion, no body-swelling heat. And family. It will be good to have that again.

Note the very recent birth of Emily the Leo with Leo rising and Aquarius moon
I now have one more family member to drink tea with, as soon as she can hold a sippy cup.

 I got an email yesterday from an ex colleague who had returned to his home country not long ago after working a short summer contract with us. About six hours after he got home,  first thing in the morning, his wife of many, many years asked him for a divorce.  It came as a huge shock. Not long after that, perhaps still in a daze, he seriously burned his hand on the frying pan. When he went to the doctor, the doctor told him he could have either painkillers for the hand or painkillers for the emotional anguish he was feeling but not both. He chose to keep the physical pain and to numb the emotional.  This got me thinking. I do think would have chosen the physical painkillers because I am quite good at living with emotional pain. Emotional pain is not pleasurable but it has a certain exquisite fragility that feels almost transcendant.  Physical pain is just distracting. I didn’t write or think anything creative during the month after my car crash last year.