An Average Weekend in Istanbul

Has it really been six months since I’ve written up here?
Oh well, let’s just pretend like I never stopped, and we’ll just pick up with this weekend. Catching up is too big of a task to contemplate, so I hope that through my ramblings about our everyday life 2.5 months into our Turkish adventure, you can get a bit of an idea about what our lives here are like.
This weekend was a fairly mellow one- the lovely Istanbul fall and winter, which has so far been clear and pleasantly cool, turned rainy on us. Friday evening I had taken an epic bus journey (over TWO HOURS on a bus just to get to a business on the Asian side- that’s Friday night Istanbul traffic for you) to meet with some businessmen that were looking to learn English. The chat went well, and one of them gave me a ride back to the shore so I could catch a (much quicker) ferry back to the European side. The night was cool, but not so cold that I couldn’t huddle out on the benches in the open air, listening to some music on my i-pod and watching the lights of the European side approaching. Once there, I caught a cab to a party at a friend’s apartment- I got to spend the evening with about 20 of the lovely teachers I met at MEF, the International School I spent two weeks at. My friend had visited Russia for Bayram, the sacrifice holiday last week, so a vodka and borscht party was had It was a great group of people- Columbians, Americans, Canadians, Turks, New Zealanders… after the party, I split a cab home with three really fun Macedonians that are here working for a music booking company. Ace, meanwhile, was home recouping from another week of 12 hour days. Poor kid.
Saturday morning I took off for another meeting at a local Starbucks (sacrilegious, I know, but it’s my favorite place to study!) while Ace slept in. When I got back, we spent a pleasant afternoon lazing around the apartment- Ace graded papers and relaxed while I cooked a white bean and veggie soup. With no microwave, our quick foods are limited- which is probably a great thing, as it means pretty much no processed foods, and I’ve become a soup-cooking master- cheap, yummy, and healthy. Veggies are so gloriously cheap here that it’s hard to not to be inspired to cook with them. On that note, we’re also living without a dryer (normal for Turkey, and every other country I’ve travelled to), without a T.V. (we had one, but it was taking up the space where we wanted to put in the oven we bought, so it went into the closet- this is not normal for Turkey), but the dryer is the only thing I miss. Oh man, I will never stop missing clothes dryers. The rest of the world is missing out, I tell you. Saturday evening our good friend Erin came in. She’s the English Lit teacher at Ace’s high school, and she lives in the teacher housing waaayyy out in the suburbs, by the school. Her commute is much shorter than Ace’s, but our place is a lot more fun for the weekends, so she often comes out to hang out with us and crash on our futon on Saturday nights. We took her out to a late-birthday dinner at our favorite local restaurant, then we got a cheap beer - our apartment is only about 5 to ten minutes from the main restaurant, bar, and shopping area of Istanbul! We then bought some gorgeous Turkish rice pudding to go, came back to our apartment , smoked our hookah, savored our pudding, and watched the m ost depressing movie ever. “Disgrace”, with John Malkovich. Don’t watch it.

Sunday morning Erin headed out on her hour plus trip home, and Ace and I hit the market. Another great thing about our location is the Sunday market that invades the street across from ours every Sunday morning- it’s a ritual for us to load up on armfuls of gorgeous veggies and fruits. I bought 2 kilos of perfect tomatoes for two lira- about $1.50. Awesome. We then caught a ferry back across the Bosphorous to the Asian side- there’s a really nice district over there with lots of good restaurants, cute shops, and a used academic text market that we were wanting to check out. It was freezing, but we had a pleasant day roaming the streets, browsing through stacks of books in a shopping-mall-sized collection of bookstores, and eating yummy food and a fancy lokanta, one of my favorite kinds of places to eat here. We came back with some treasures, including a beginner’s Turkish textbook, a Barbara Kingsolver novel, some e.e.cummings poetry, and something in French for Ace. We were pretty chilled by mid-afternoon, so we took the ferry back, got some food on the way, and came home to drink tea, catch up on emails, and study Turkish together by the heater.
That’s it for now- I’ve resolved to start writing weekly, so stay tuned if I haven’t bored you too much yet!