Leigh in Azerbaijan

Another teacher here, Ann Marie Mershon, is a professional writer. She has just started to convert her letters home to blog format, with a little help from me.  The writing and photos give a good taste of Turkey, if you’re interested.  On the right of this page there’s a ‘Blogroll’ heading.  Her name is a [...]

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Today was the 2nd of two exams that we had in Grade 4 and 5. As you can see, the setting is in what could be a lecture theatre but is called the Conferance (sic) Hall.
These are my Grade 5 kids including Elif, Deniz, Meltem, Melis, Zeynep, Mert, Alp, Melahat, Yağmur…

… and these are [...]

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 I don’t know what I did but I can now upload multiple photos again to Flickr, so here is the remainder of the photo log from last weekend.

In Karakoy there were several of these stores in the underpass.  Pistols were advertised for 25YTL.
On returning to Taksim and finding an Asian food store, we passed an [...]

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Tanya and I are visiting Gallipoli and Troy on the 9th and 10th April and then we’re off to Ephesus and Capodocia (Kapadokia here I think).   Some exciting news is that the organising committee for the ANZAC Day commemorations are asking for Aussies living here to volunteer for the event. Al and Louise (teachers [...]

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It’s that time of semester! This afternoon the corridors were filled with wandering parents booked in to see teachers. It all looks very quiet and polite but there’s hundreds of cars jamming the internal roads here.
My time starts this Saturday afternoon and then next Wednesday night. I don’t know whether parents will [...]

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Kristi gave me the directions for the Church of England this morning so that’s where I ended up. I couldn’t find it initially but then I followed an English speaking couple carrying a tray of posies and I thought it might have something to do with worship. Correct. They were posies to give [...]

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A bus load of 21 of us from Koç bussed to Europe this morning, and after almost two hours we arrived to buy copper kitchenware.

This workshop was a very noisy place and only one man appeared to be wearing earplugs. While making it look easy, my guess is that they worked in this [...]

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Still haven’t got the ATM card for the bank here yet.  I’m now been teaching for five weeks.  I’m down to my last 20YTL.  I was set to go to the bank this afternoon but when the bus came I couldn’t find the bankbook.  I did find it later however. The theory is that they’ll [...]

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A collection of sobering links on the current state of affairs on this matter. While in the last couple of years a mandatory life sentence has been imposed on anyone involved in ‘honour killings’ (thanks to Turkey’s desire to be accepted into the EU) the murders continue through forced ’suicides’.
2005 A survey in a conservative [...]

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Some of the food (and a skin cream) that I’ve bought here. With all of these foods you can work out what they are simply by looking at them. If you look harder you will be able to interpret them if you pronouce the labels phonetically.
Lunch in the cafeteria usually has plenty of [...]

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