Once upon a time...

1. I quit the preschool!
2. I went to Germany
3. I stopped eating Baclava (for lent) --> not true anymore
4. I joined a gym --> currently on hold

So, starting with #1: The Preschool. After many months of deliberation, I decided it was time to suck it up and high tail it out of there before they drove me completely insane and caused me to figure out a way to get myself deported. I've withheld a lot of the juicy details from this blog for fear that they somehow would hunt me down on the internet, but now that I'm gone and have no affiliation with them whatsoever, I have no problem expressing the animal house that is E.G.P. (still going to use acronyms bc I would be lying if I said I wasn't still a LITTLE scared of them). I can't remember everything I've said in previous posts so I'm just going to sum up the situation with a little story.

A rich couple - we'll call them Dan and Mary Istanbul - woke up one day in their marble canopy bed and exclaimed "Hey! Why don't we start a school? We, like, have alllllllllllll this money and we just can't figure out what to do with it because we already own so many expensive cars, a house on the moon and an underwater city in the middle of the Atlantic." They agree and think this is a brilliant idea because the wife can speak English and English is like, becoming one of those popular languages that like, everyone should know. SO, they buy a house in a nice, upscale neighborhood and convert it to a school. Then they think about what they should call it and decide it doesn't really matter as long as the words 'English' and 'International' are in the name and on the pamphlets. "OK, so we have a school and a name, now we just need staff and students" says Mary. Dan says, "OK, so re: enrollment, I think we should accept everyone who wants to attend our school because, like, we'll get more money that way." Mary says, "yes, I totally agree and don't think it really matters how many kids we have. It's not like children under the age of four need to be heavily supervised, right?" "Right" says Dan. Then, they think and think and think about what kind of staff they will need for their English International school. Suddenly, Dan is like "Mary! I've got it! Stay with me on this, ok?" And then Mary is like, "okk...?" And then Dan says, " OK. We're in Turkey, right?" "Right." "We want these children to learn English, right?" "Right." "There's a huge draw to Istanbul for native-English speaking teachers, right?" "Right." "Then why don't we hire a mostly Turkish speaking staff? You know, like, native-Turks?" "Perfection!" cries Mary.

A few months pass and their plan seems to be running smoothly...the schoolhouse is finished, the Turkish staff is staffed and so on. Only one minor problem keeps popping up, which was enrollment.

"Dan, I was doing some thinking, and I know this sounds crazy, but what happens if none of the Turkish staff can teach the children English?" Dan slowly put's down the latest edition of Turkey'$ BIGGE$T MONEY MAKER$ on his 5 billion dollar coffee table and says "Holy WOW Mary, you're right! See..see how I'm holding up three fingers on each hand and then putting them next to the 'O' that my mouth is making..see? See how that spells wow?" "Wow, that is wow! Look - I can do it too..see?" Dan and Mary continue like this for almost an hour until Dan realizes they've gotten off-track again. "Anyways, Mary, That means we should probably hire someone who's a native-English speaker then, right?" "Yep. I think so, but like here's what I'm thinking. We'll hire someone to fill a director position and then maybe teach a class too....that way she'll be like the poster child of successful English teaching and learning and being Englishy in Istanbul..and then she can just talk to everyone and make it look like all we do here is speak English....and I guess... sometimes I can pop my head in during school hours just so people know I exist, you know, face time.." "Totally." "...but I have this other important businessy job, as we both know, so this English school can't obviously be MY main priority..." "Obviously?" "...right, so since you speak absolutely zero English, why don't you run the school and then have the director lady do the talking blah blah I'm repeating myself so we agree, right?" "100%!" "Perfect, lets send something out on this website called power-hungry-alpha-females-for-hire and hopefully someone will respond..." ...but Dan was already on it; the advertisement was posted before either of them could say "giant mistake", and alas, four days later, they hired a power-hungry alpha-female from England who we will call Crazy Bridgett who ..!!!!! has a 3 year old !!!!!!.. that will attend the school.

Crazy Bridget is awesome at schmoozing, so they love her. As per the original plan (because it made the most sense this way) Crazy Bridget was the director of the school as well as the English teacher for the 4-year old classroom. Time was spent dashing between office and classroom answering phone calls, typing up a cute monthly newsletter, applying hot pink lipstick and providing students with a quality education. I don't know, nor do I care, how long E.G.P. has been around, but lets just say that for hundreds of years Crazy B was the English speaking staff save for a few Turkish girls who pronounced words like "baby bear" as "baby beer", ship = sheep (and sometimes shit) and blah blah blah.

As the years passed, Crazy Bridget grew her hair long like the Turkish women - except that she looked nappy because she wasn't Turkish - and continued applying the hottest of hot pink lipstick all over her face. One day after a very hectic day at school, she realized that as crazy as it was to grasp, they just couldn't pretend that they were actually speaking English at the school anymore. She dug deep down into the memories of when she worked in a less insane work environment and realized that it was impossible for her to act as the entire English staff of E.G.P. She proposed the idea to Dan and Mary to hire more native-English teachers for the 2 year old class and the 3 year old class, and because they were a giant, happy family now, they agreed to hire a real staff for the 2009-2010 school year. The road, however, did not come without it's shortcomings...

"Mary, this is starting to cost us more money. I thought you wanted an English International Preschool? We already have the Turkish teachers, Crazy B as our English speaking staff...what more do you want?" Mary looked at him and huffed with frustration. "Dan, honey, duh it will be more expensive. That's why we'll hire them and pay below minimum wage, not offer any health benefits or work/residence permit. We'll just have Crazy B talk our school up so much that we'll establish a name for ourselves in the international community, and then like everyone will be happy and all the wars will stop and I dunno, maybe we can rent one of those babies from a developing country and get our picture taken with it on opening day so everyone will think that we're really spending our money on selfless acts of kindness rather than a year's supply of bad cologne for you.."

It's now September, the start of term and E.G.P. has *Sally from NY to teach the 2 year old class alongside *Turkish Girl 1 (TG1); *Monica from Turkey to teach the 3 year old class alongside TG2; and then of course our dear friend Crazy BBkins who is being all managery/teacheryish alongside TG3. October 2009 begins and they decide to fire Monica because she "didn't have enough personality". At around the same time, Sally quits because she is moving back to America. Coincidentally an e-mail pops up in the inbox of Crazy Bridget from yours truly expressing interest in any English Teaching positions available. Crazy Bridget immediately starts banging on her keyboard and replies with "OMGZ, YES! We have an opening! Prestigious International School! Talented English-teaching professionals are sought!" So, blah blah we chat, she liked me and a day later I'm in Turkey. 3 months later I will find out that our preliminary phone conversation was basically so she could gauge whether or not "I sounded attractive, because you know, you can never tell if they are skinny or fat".

So, I move to Turkey and Crazy B sets me up with her friend Deniz, aka "my neighbor that I love soooooooo much, she's SO sweet, young at heart - you'll love her!", who coincidentally lives across the street from Crazy B - perfect for micromanaging her new little minion that in her mind she has just "flown over" from Prague. These are all direct quotes btw, and FYI - by "flown over", she somehow, I guess, decided in her head that she paid for my plane ticket because I'm not sure in what universe does one say they have "flown you over" without contributing a penny to your flight. I normally wouldn't be making a big deal about this but it's something that will come back later so take note of this..

Because Crazy B likes to control everything, she almost uncomfortably forces me into riding with her to work to/from school. I know at one point I had said that I appreciated her doing this, and in the beginning I definitely did, but over the weeks I came to find that this was just a result of her needing to be in complete control of everything. As we all know, I moved out of Deniz's flat at the end of October for reasons I don't need to delve into again because I've already talked about that; but in short, nudity and generation gap were the winning factors. When I inform Crazy B of my relocation, little parts of her start melting because she suddenly realizes she can no longer control me as much - it means I ride to/from work on my own and -GASP- wont live 50 feet away from her. When she realizes she's exposing her inner core of demon skin, she quickly comes up with a story to reel me back in that goes something along the lines of... "Oh I figured you wouldn't want to live with her anyways. It's probably so hard to live with an old woman like that! I barely even know her anyways. She just made *Poppy sweaters sometimes so occasionally I'd go over and say hi." I think WOW - what a deceiving woman you are, Bridge.

This now brings us to November of 2009 where I begin to daily question my position at the school. My assistant and I aren't working together very well mainly due to communication problems but also some blurry lines re: our respective job responsibilities. The difficult part about the situation was that I normally wouldn't have had a problem pulling her aside and professionally discussing my concerns with her; however things like "Hey, I feel like we are having difficulties communicating our goals for the classroom. Can we talk about this?" or "I was hired to be the English teacher in the classroom and I'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't undermine me in front of our students" are difficult to express to someone who is only familiar with a handful of standard vocabulary terms and can only comprehend about 15% of what you say without a translator. It turned into a whole lot of me trying to talk around the problem using basic vocabulary so she'd understand me, but because this whole process took atleast 5 minutes, the moment would pass and after trying to communicate "I THINK WE HAVE A COMMUNICATION PROBLEM" it just became pointless.

December of 2009 rolls around and I'm back home for Christmas. Friends and family kept asking me what my job was like and all I really had to respond with was "it's going along, but it's nice to be home." Then, my wise parents pointed out that all I do is talk about how miserable I am at the preschool and that why don't I do something about it otherwise it's going to ruin my time here. I head back in January and sit down with Crazy Bridget to discuss my concerns in a very professional way so as to work with her on fixing the problem rather than up and quitting. Rather than giving me feedback, she tried to remedy the situation by sympathetically discussing my assistant's lack of proper education - "she wasn't educated like us, you know?" I found this to be completely inappropriate and just downright mean. If her education was a problem then they wouldn't have hired her in the first place, right?

Around mid-January they fired the replacement they had hired to replace *Sally from NY because she "didn't connect with anyone" a.k.a. the Turkish teachers didn't like her because she tried to do her job, so they combined the 2yr old and 3yr old class which left me with my 3 year olds + three-four 1-2yr olds (11kids --> 15 kids). Then, because Dan and Mary Ist. just love those big numbers, they kept enrolling students to start whenever was convenient for them - nevermind the fact that we were severely understaffed. Come February the 2 year old class grew to 6 children - 2 of which had a constant temper-tantrum and spoke only Turkish. Crazy B separated my class with the 2 year olds so she could take over the 2yr old group completely since she could communicate with them. The 4 year old class (her old class) was then left without an Eng. teacher so the 3 and 4 year old classes were combined. SO, my class went from 11 to 23 children in a matter of hours with two teachers (myself included) to supervise. Then, Crazy B gets pregnant and announces that she'd be leaving at an unidentified time, yet there was no mention of any replacement teachers so the future of the school year was basically me, the 3 turkish girls, the house-keeper who was sitting in as an additional teacher and almost 30 children under the age of 4. A.K.A. a hot-bed for an English education.

I know that's a long story and a little confusing at the end but that's pretty much how I felt when all of this was going down. I decided that it was just a complete joke of a school and that I would give a two-weeks notice on February 13th. When I submitted my notice, Crazy B basically combusted into giant flames and started telling me that I was unprofessional, young, naive, selfish - that "first I quit on Deniz and now them?! How could I do this after everything they did for me...after 'getting me over from Prague'?!" Then - my favorite part! - she asked to speak with my mother. I responded by reaching over with a moist napkin and gentled dabbing her mouth to wipe off the hot pink lipstick...similar to what my mom did for me when I dressed up like Barbie for Halloween in the 8th grade (so many fun memories from middle school!). Then I took a pair of scissors and cut her hair, and when I was finished, remarked with "Ah, much better."

Sadly, that didn't actually happen. What really happened is that I just sat there and took it because unlike her, I wanted to be professional about my resignation. A girl can dream though, and perhaps in another lifetime I'll be Crazy Bridget's stylist and accidently shave all of her hair off or give her a fierce mullet. The moral of the story is that E.G.P. is a giant clown of a school and has been TEFL blacklisted by yours truly. Nowadays, my schedule is more free and I'm much happier in the city. I work almost solely with private lessons which allows me to do quite a bit more exploring than I was able to do before. This post was quite long so I'll try and wrap this up before I hurt everyone's eyes! Re: Germany - I went on my spring break with my friend Clarisse to her hometown of Heidelberg. It was cute, quaint and refreshing, and nice to get out of the city for a little bit! I toured the castle that is just NBD plopped in the middle of the city as well as celebrated a night of Heidelberg Carnival festivites. This included the two of us dressing up as 80's aerobics instructors drinking cheap German beer and dancing to everything from the Black Eyed Peas to the music from Flashdance.

Lastly, in a nutshell, I failed at giving up baclava and I didn't renew my March membership bc I wanted to save money. The weather has gotten nicer though so I think I'm just going to brave it and run along the water near my house - who cares if people stare at me!

As always, hope you all are doing splendid and please send e-mail updates!!
XOXO
K

Pass the hair gel please.

I know I haven't written in months, and I know that's surprising, but rest assured I have a nice, long account of the last two months brewing in my Edit Post box that will be finished, I swear, by the end of the week. I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to share one of my all time favorite things in Turkey thus far because on this day, March, 4th 2010, something that I thought couldn't get any better than it already is, did. Without further ado, I would like to introduce you to something I deem: The Moof (man + poof). Before I discuss this Turkish phenomenon, I'm going to provide a little context so you may understand just how truly beautiful the Moof is.

Once upon a time, lets say...somewhere between 1993-'94, the entire world woke up and realized that big hair wasn't actually attractive, or cool, on anyone. Everyone on Earth realized that for 15 or so years they had blacked out and were unaware of what they actually looked like when they walked into broad daylight. It was an epiphany heard around the world. Men and women abound worked around the clock to rid themselves of as many cans of extra strength hair spray and extra hold hair gel that they could. Crimping irons were selling like hot cakes in second-hand markets to naive, undeserving locals who didn't know better. Left and right, people were tossing products into the trash and only keeping what would provide for a normal, friendly and non-threatening hairstyle. The purge took days and concerned government officials began wondering where all of the excess hair equipment would, rather, could go. After weeks of deliberation, top government officials decided on an area of the world that they just, well, didn't really care what would happen if Earth's supply of hair gel got into the hands of these people. The United Nations, in partner with The Red Cross, was enlisted to paradrop billions upon billions of tons of hair products into an area right outside of what is now known as present day Istanbul, Turkey. To this day, no man is allowed to step foot on the drop zone due to the shared belief that this land is sacred and holy.

Let us now fast forward to February, 2010. A couple friends and I were chatting about our middle school days and just how uncomfortably awkward they were. Lots of platform sneakers were discussed - unfortunately - along with swishy pants from Abercrombie & Fitch and regrettably a lot of straight leg/regular fit (not to be confused with skinny-leg) pants. When it became my turn again to share a traumatizing experience, I was immediately reminded by the unfortunate case of lice that I got in the 7th grade. I got lice and I got it bad. Nevermind the fact that I was already an awkward 13 year old with braces, slightly chubby and chock full of emotions...lice just never, ever, ever, ever makes someone feel better, ever. ever. I had it so bad that I had to put vaseline in my hair and it wouldn't wash out for about a week to a week and a half. Now, I don't have a picture of what it looked like, thanks Mom:), but I have provided two links a la google images that I believe pay some tribute to the creature that was my 13 year old self.

Exhibit A: http://www.thedailygreen.com/cm/thedailygreen/images/ZB/use-vodka-lush-hair-lg.jpg

Exhibit B: http://static.nme.com/images/071113_111549_MCR11_111107_DN.jpg

At this point you hopefully have a nice mental image because it's time to press on with our story, friends! So far we've covered the mass infiltration of styling products into Turkey as well as the perils of being a chubby 13 year old. Now: the Moof! Rewind back to October 15th, 2009. You just moved to Turkey and it's your first weekend in Istanbul. Senses are on overload with the smells of Döner kebab, bad cologne (or body odor - which one is worse?) and the Bosphorus Strait. Your ears are adjusting to the sounds of a language that's not English, the call to prayer, the "scrap metal man" who walks down your street pushing a rickety cart summoning you to give him your broken appliances and the "Simit guy", who yells SIMMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT at the top of his lungs on your sidewalk just in case you need a snack (Simit = turkish "bagel") at HIS becking call. Then, there are the sights - the mosques, the palaces, the ancient architecture, etc.. etc... but it's the people that stick out to you most. One particular characteristic, in fact, is the hair. The women of Turkey have long, dark, rapunzel hair that my friend Beth so intelligently pointed out "makes them look like mermaids". They walk around with it romantically cascading down their bodies and you're left wondering how they get away with looking so magical rather than being "that weird girl with the long hair". If they were anything other than Turkish, you'd be judging them because they look more like the female version of Anthony Keidis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, circa mid-1990's. CASE IN POINT: Kind of like how everyone hated on me last summer when I had hair that went past my shoulder blades. I believe some of you said or were in agreement with something along the lines of "thank GOD you cut it, you were starting to look like a dirty hippy".

The men, on the other hand, do not look like giant mermaids, nor do they look like Anthony Keidis. If they do, or are in any way, shape or form attractive, they've ruined it by choosing a hairstyle that makes them look like they've just survived a dangerous oil spill in their bathroom. Up until today, most of the moofs looked more Johnny Bravo and less the excess bacon grease from Sunday morning breakfast. I swore to myself that I didn't think it was possible for the moof to look anymore mullety-eurotrash than it already it is BUT IT DID! It honestly did, and I couldn't even believe it. It was like Christmas morning all over again. Here I am riding the 29D back to my apartment when all of a sudden at 4.Levent Metro, something shiny..sparkly?!..catches my eye. I swear to God, for a brief second I was brought back to the horrendous bout of lice and the helmet of vaseline that was tightly secured on my head for 9 days. I shuddered not only at the thought of the lice themselves but also the fact that as a 13 year old I had endured 168 hours of "wet" hair. My thoughts quickly came back to 4.Levent as I realized that this sparkly little treasure catching my eye was not in fact my 13 year old self but a man, a Turkish man, DISTRIBUTING FLYERS to any and all pedestrian traffic entering one of the busiest metro stops during prime-time lunch hour. Not to mention...are those are acid wash, distressed denim JEANS?!?! With zippers on the pant legs? I began to weep softly into my sleeve. I thought to myself: this bothers me. This man voluntarily used that much vaseline because he actually thinks he looks cool, or even worse....sexy? And then, what about his hands? What about when he was finished?! How much time did it take for him to wash it off before all the grease was gone? Did it....does it ever go away?

I was stressed, and upset, because I didn't have the answers to any of these questions. I also didn't have my camera which is the worst part because I have no documentation of my little prince. Yet, because I know that this man is out there, I'm optimistic that there are others. Perhaps they all have an apartment together? Or, maybe just a giant bathroom where they sleep, gel their hair, sleep, gel their hair, sleep, gel their hair...and continue this process until someone says, 'Hey! Lets go out in public!', and the rest of them cry, 'Hooray!' And then they all walk out, arm in arm, laughing and just being the little chatterboxes that they are, discussing their favorite celebrities, what 5 items they would bring on a deserted island and how quickly their hair would burn in a rogue fire. From this day forward I'm beginning what I'm calling Moof Watch 2010. Any and all Moof's will be uploaded to this post so please check back frequently.

Time to call it a night....as always, I hope you all are doing great. E-mail updates are always welcome and appreciated:) Lots of love!

XOXO
K