Follow Me As I Discover Land, Language and Self...
“3M is moving another family here,” Sankar announced one evening. “The guy’s name is Ray. I don’t know him, but they’re coming for their look-see visit next week. Do you want to take them out for dinner?” I recalled our own look-see visit in January, 2010, sixteen months ago. It seemed like years ago, the city wintry and strange and both of us tentative, intimidated. Now Istanbul was in full spring…
“There are two kinds of relative clauses,” I began. “One is important for understanding the meaning of the sentence and the other is just extra information.” I stood in front of my students explaining English sentences introduced by which, who, or that. As I wrote an example on the white board, three young men sitting beside the window began talking among themselves. Perhaps they didn’t understand what I was…
Bugra Akçay. Duygu Ikibüdük. Piril Kücükçolak. Erden Öz. Ceyhun Uyanik. I sat in my office reading my class list. Nineteen students. I had no idea which names were male or female. How was I ever going to get to know them all? More importantly, how I was going to perform as an ESL teacher? Although I loved words and enjoyed writing and editing, my formal knowledge of grammar was weak at best. I couldn’t…
Dear readers, A bunch of you have asked me where I am currently. I’m home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through this site I am blogging about the years I lived in Istanbul: 2010 through 2013. I was enjoying my thrice-weekly Turkish class. My classmates included four Japanese women, wives of engineers directing construction of a transportation tunnel between the city’s European and Asian sides; a young Polish woman who was engaged to a…
Dear readers, A bunch of you have asked me where I am currently. I’m home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through this site I am blogging about the years I lived in Istanbul: 2010 through 2013. “Greg, it’s been great talking to you, but I have to go,” I say into the telephone, glancing at my watch. It is just after 8 on a Sunday morning. Sankar and I often wake to…
Dear readers, A bunch of you have asked me where I am currently. I’m home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through this site I am blogging about the years I lived in Istanbul: 2010 through 2013. A weekday afternoon in late October. I’d spent much of it sitting in the green armchair next to our east window, reading and watching ripples on the Bosphorus. The temperature was in the sixties, but the stiff…
Dear readers, A bunch of you have asked me where I am currently. I’m home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through this site I am blogging about the years I lived in Istanbul: 2010 through 2013. Three months had passed. Ninety days. They had been much like those I’d spent in other foreign countries: an initial flood of challenges combined with periodic waves of loss. Thanks to the company’s help, we had settled…
As if on cue, when September arrived, the humidity dropped. The days remained sunny, but the sky turned a deeper blue. Cool breezes ruffled the Bosphorus. I turned our living room air conditioner off, stowed the controls in a closet, and kept the doors to our balcony open all day long. Now my walks down through the forested path to the sea were a treat. On the shore of…
On Friday afternoons when Sankar gets home from work, we consider the upcoming weekend with a kind of sheepish self-consciousness. We have no friends here and, even though we’ve been here less than two months, this seems to reflect poorly on us. What are we going to do for the next two plus days? We’ve been to Istanbul’s major tourist sites more than once, and we either don’t yet know about…
Turkey. The land of exotic culture and cuisine all your friends are talking about. The cradle of Christianity and one of the only countries in the world to span two continents. It’s a wild ride I enjoyed for 3 years, returning home in 2013. Now back in Minnesota, I wrote this article to serve as your homework :). If you’re visiting Turkey for the first time, you’re in the right…
