Long time no blog

Last blog was from Plovdiv, where I spent a wonderful day, met some new people, met up with friends from Istanbul, and made friends on the bus ride home. In a nutshell, Plovdiv is a beautiful little town and I'm definitely going back there for another visit.

 

Speaking of visits, my next trip is going t obe to Barbados to visit the parents. I am planning to leave here on or about January 19 or so. Unfortunately though, my wallet was stolen last week so I have to figure out some solution to the problem of being without a drivers' licence. We'll see what happens. Hopefully, some morally upright Turk will find it and turn it in to the police..... Inshallah!

 

As far as my life lately, I still go to salsa classes on a weekly basis. My partner is Cameron, another teacher. He's an Australian yoga teacher whose job before coming here was teaching English to some monks in Tibet or India or something.... He's definitely a character, and he's fun to dance with.

 

The cats are doing well although with winter coming, Baris's lungs are sounding wheezy again. Apparently his lungs are too small for his body. Not surprising since his body is huge! Savas takes good care of him though.

 

I have another friend here Cengiz, who I met at a Language Exchange website. I get to practice my Turkish and he his English so it's a good deal for both of us. We've been getting together about once or twice a week to chat.

 

All in all life is very much the same. I still have a private lesson with a Baha'i in our community once a week. In fact, we have a class now.

 

Anyone reading this, drop me a note to let me know what's going on. I'm tired of opening my inbox and finding it full of only junk mail. My email address is my first name at gmail dot com.....

 

See ya!

 

 

In Plovdiv

Random trips.... Get on a bus. Go to a place. Explore. Go home. That's what I like. I arrived in Plovdiv, Bulgaria at 4 this morning. Lucky for me, the taxi driver I got knew of a 24-hour Internet cafe. I'm still here, although I'm not sure how I will pay, I have Euros and not the local currency, which, since I don't know what it is, I will call "bullies". The Bulgarian alphabet is the cyrillic script, like Russian, so I have no idea what it says when I see prices written. When Scott, another teacher, first came to Turkey, he didn't know the currency's name. It was written YTL (for Yeni Turk Lirasi - New TUrkish Lira) so he called them "yertles", and still does. So it is with the BUlgarian bullies for me. My taxi here cost 3 bullies. The Internet cafe will probably come to about 5 bullies. Hopefully, if I give him 5 euros, I will get bullies for change. The exchange rate is about 2 bullies to 1 euro...

 

Plovdiv. Everything about it sounds dowdy and Russian. It looks like how I imagined Russia to look back in the days of the cold war when the word "Russia" was a bad word. Looking outside, it is kinda like looking at a t.v. show from like 20 years ago. There's colour, but it's not very vivid. It feels like whole chunks of the spectrum are missing, and got taken over by shades of grey and brown. It's weird because in such a setting I would expect to find kinda greyish people walking around hunched over and standing in line for food or coal... Instead all I've seen so far are the teenage boys up all night gaming on the internet, and they are just as vivid as teenagers anywhere.

 

I'm going to go out now and take pictures of Plovdiv. See what it looks like as it wakes up. Then I'm having lunch with Georgina and Rachael. We may even meet up with Sean and Kelly as well... We'll see.

 

Off to Plovdiv!

I got the music back...

I got the music back...
Originally uploaded by Krisia.

I've been in Turkey for a year and a half now and there's been something missing the whole time. I've made several attempts to find and connect with musicians, because the thing I really missed was sitting down with friends and making music together. None of these attempts had really panned out into anything. Last week in conversation class I met a guitarist, Levent. His brother Freddie plays the ney, a Turkish bamboo flute. He arrived in Istanbul last Sunday. We have been playing almost daily since then. I can't believe how much I have missed this. My fingers are calloused, my throat is sore, but I'm extremely happy! :o)

No News is....

...no news. The thing about blogging is that it's really easy to think of excuses not to when you're not in the mood to blog. My latest excuse is that the air conditioner in the teachers' room at work is not working, and hasn't been working all summer. Because I don't have internet at home, this means that my e-mail gets neglected. That includes my blog.

 

The last couple of weeks have been dominated by Ertu and I's "break-up" which is in quotation marks since we were never technically "together" but we were together enough for us to "break-up" and it's taken a while to get over it. We learned a lot from each other and love each other dearly, but sometimes that's not enough, and life goes on.

 

Istanbul is sweltering hot right now. We've been going through cycles of hot and extremely hot, with little respite. With the aforementioned airconditioner in the teachers' room out of service, this means that I spend less time planning classes, and more time at the gym, where it's nice and cool. I can't wait till september.

 

My flatmate is going away on Sunday. She's visiting her family for the month of September. I will have the flat to myself. The cats will probably be neurotic at first (apparently Savas missed me a lot when I was gone, and that made Baris act crazy). Rebecca is Baris's favourite so I'll probably be stuck with  7 kilos (that's 15 lbs) of neurotic cat, and Savas (another 6 kilos) will be crazy from Baris's weird mood. Other than that, it'll be nice to have the place to myself for a change. Won't have to close the balcony door every hour when she goes to smoke.... If nothing else it'll be cooler. :o)

On Doing Nothing...

Well, I'm back home in Istanbul after a wonderful, meditative vacation in France and Spain. I got to see friends I hadn't seen in too long, visit places I've wanted to see for a long time, and, most importantly, relax. I stopped everything, and spent quite a few days doing absolutely nothing, and loving it. There's something about seeing a person doing nothing that really bothers people. I think we tolerate it for a few minutes, but when it moves into hours or days, we get worried and nervous.

 

My life is busy. I go to work in the morning, spend the afternoon with friends, or sightseeing, or just walking around, and of course, going to the gym. In the evening I work again. My days off aren't really days off because I have private students. OK so my work isn't a constant, 9-5 kinda thing, and I do have a lot of free time, but very rarely am I just doing nothing.

 

Before I left for this trip, my friend Erturul gave me a book on meditation to read. One of the things that it made me realise was that I wasn't giving myself time and space to think, and listen to myself. By filling my days up from waking to bedtime, I didn't have time to sit and just be.

 

I let myself do that this holiday. And it was great. I learned so much about myself. It's funny how when I was at home and had nothing to do, before, I would be bored, and go and do something. Now I actually make time for not having anything to do and spend it meditating. It's so refreshing and has changed my outlook on life. The only problem is, when people see that you have nothing to do and are doing nothing, they get worried. It's a big obstacle to get over. Now when I see people doing nothing, I don't ask them if their bored, or try to fill up their time for them. I leave them be, and hope they enjoy it.

...and another

...and another
Originally uploaded by Krisia.

I can't just do my parents' ... here's mine. Liss, yours is coming.

What's good for the goose...

What's good for the goose...
Originally uploaded by Krisia.

... :o)

Forgive me mother...

Forgive me mother...
Originally uploaded by Krisia.

but I couldn't resist!!!

There's a great site where you can make your own South Park characters and my mom is so animated, it was only a matter of time....

Blogroll please...

So here it is, the results of hours of work, now it should (crossed fingers) be easier to keep track of what's blogging. Here is a comprehensive blogroll of my friends, acquaintances, and people that maybe I wish I could be friends with. If you're on this list and don't want to be, or not on this list and want to be, let me know! (It's on the right, under the archives... you might have to scroll down a bit...)

 

 

Feed me!!! - (literarily)

No that's not a type-o. I need to be feed literarily, as in with words... I don't know if that's a real word, but I like how it feels in my mouth.

 

I spent the good part of a morning (albeit another scorching Zaragoza summer morning, in which staying inside in a cool dark house is preferable to anything else) blogsurfing. This involved clicking on the links of all the blogs that I have in my google favourites, and reading all the new entries one by one. Of course, as I visited blogs, I found links to blogs of other people I know, and added them to my links, and the cycle continued. Before I knew it, hours had passed, my links list became long enough to have to scroll through, and my head was full of news of relocations, marriages, new babies, travelling tales, new software (some of the people I know are quite computer-geeky), and various other bloggable bits of info. By lunch time (and in Spain that's somewhere close to 3 p.m.) my head was ready to explode, but I felt happy and caught up. There were so many people I met in Haifa during my service there that I wish I had had a chance to know better. Somehow, by reading their blogs, I feel like they have become a part of my life, or rather their lives have become a part of mine. It's not the same as getting to know them better, but it's better than not.

 

So during this foray into blogland, I got to thinking how cool it would be if this whole process wasn't manual. Clicking links, reading new stuff, if any, reading old stuff and realising that I had already read it, finding comments etc... Very time consuming, and tedious, and if I weren't on vacation in Zaragoza, I probably wouldn't have the time, energy or inclination to bother. As with all my other ideas, I knew that if I though it could be automated, someone must have already done it. So I googled it, and found that with a simple free subscription to bloglines, I could add everyone's blog with a single click for each, and then when I wanted, it would show me updates on the stuff I hadn't read yet. How cool! Now all the blogs are in one place, instead of clicking 20 jillion links and scrolling around the archives to read new stuff, I can see what's been added since last time. I also added my flickr contacts and dude, my life just got really easy.

 

I know there are those of you out there saying "duh. I've been doing this for years", but the fact of the matter is that everyone I've talked to in the last few minutes is in the same boat that I was 2 days ago. Too many blogs to read, not enough time. So I'm not the last remaining ignorant person. I also remember seeing stuff about XML and RSS and feeds etc, and having an inkling of what they were, but having no home internet access (that's another story), and having limited time on the crappy work computer to do my online stuff, I haven't been able to pursue it. Obviously I did think about it at some point because when I went to log on to bloglines, I was already registered, and my password was just what I would have expected it to be... I had never used it though.

 

So to all of you who are overwhelmed by the vast ocean of blogged info, online pics, and other stuff that you need to look at to keep in touch with your friends' and acquantances' lives, try it out. Bloglines

Shakira - Hips Dont Lie spoof

found this on google video... I thought it was disturbing, yet hilarious! Enjoy, especially all you Shakir fans!

Overland Journey

The flight from Barcelona to Paris was cheap. As dictated by the mysterious forces that determine the cost of travel on budget airlines, all the flights back to Barcelona on or around the dates I wanted to return were prohibitively expensive. So I decided to take a bus.

 

Like I've mentioned before, one of the things I like about living in a region where everything is on a huge, connected mass of land, is that overland travel is possible. For an island-born, island-reared person like me, this is a remarkable concept. For example, in Bermuda, if the flights somewhere are cheap, the world is open to you. If the flights are expensive, and you don't happen to own a boat that can make a transatlantic journey, you are stuck on the 22-square-mile rock that you live on.

 

The idea of being able to (theoretically, of course!) walk from Istanbul to, say, Lisbon, or maybe from Oslo to Addis Ababa, if you so desired, completely boggles my mind. So the idea of catching a bus from Paris to Madrid really didn't bother me at all.

 

It was a long bus ride. I left Paris at 2:30 in the afternoon, after a picnic lunch of Chinese take-out on the grass in a park near the Baha'i Centre with Violetta. Luckily, the bus only made 2 stops before its arrival at 7:00 the following morning in Madrid. The dinner stop was at a rest stop area next to a beautiful wooded area somewhere in France. I have absolutely no idea where, except that most of the view out the window for the 2 hours before it, were of fields, mostly of grasses or sunflowers. I walked around, stretched, did some deep breathing, ate my dinner, and then just sat in the grass where I was, listening to the birds and the breeze in the trees.

 

I slept for most of the rest of the ride. Earplugs, an iPod, sleeping mask, book and a bottle of water were all i needed to ensure a great bus ride.

 

I arrived in Madrid at 7 and took the metro to the other bus station, where I had to buy a ticket to Zaragoza. That ride was 4 hours. The bus left at 9 a.m. and arrived on time at 1. Hector picked me up at the bus station, at about 1:10. Approximately 24 hours after I had said goobye to Violetta and headed for the metro to go to the bus station in Paris.

 

Now that I'm in Zaragoza, I have absolutely nothing to do. No demands on my time, a beautiful garden and lawn to sit in and think, or not think, whatever. A computer with internet access, a playstation, a guitar.... No complaints!

Paris Pics

I've just had a wonderful few days in Paris. My main aim in coming here was to hang out with Vi and see a few things in this city. I've done quite well on both fronts I think. Vi and I had a wonderful time! She showed me a new game as well, watch out Yahtzee, the Dice Game is here!!! Thanks so much for everything, Vi.
I spent a little time wandering around on my own and got to see some of the sights. I loved the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Pyramid, but my favourite places I don't have pics of. We sat on the grass in a park near the Latin Quarter, next to a fountain. I loved it there. I went to the parts of the city that are inhabited mostly by immigrants, and walking down the street seeing people from all different countries, shops with stuff from everywhere, cuisine of all different countries... it was so cool. I didn't realise how much I missed that diversity in Istanbul. I got used to everyone around me being Turkish! That first day, wandering around, buying shampoo in a store with Black beauty products, visiting a restaurant and getting the Turks to help me because my French was awful! Seeing the market, eating in an Algerian Restaurant.... that's the Paris I came here for. I had a wonderful trip. Click on the pics and take a look at my Flickr Album.

Arc de Triomph, Paris

Arc de Triomph, Paris
Originally uploaded by Krisia.

So I promised another Arc de Triomph, and here it is.

Barcelona

Barcelona
Originally uploaded by Krisia.

There's an Arc de Triomph in Barcelona. It's near the bus station. I'll post

a pic of the one in Paris, when I get there....