Read From the Beginning
I say purgatory since we are having a week of school in the middle of vacation, but despite the incredible pointlessness of the week, for me at least, the week has been a bit more like heaven than some other stage of the afterlife. At least this is as close as my school gets to resembling heaven.
But first a note on the ridiculousness of the situation. The students have been on vacation since Christmas; that was the end of the last semester. They took their tests and depending on if they passed or failed got confirmation to move into the next grade. This happened a month ago. We said goodbye, we'll see you in March when the new school year begins. However, for unknown reasons we have this random week of school in the middle of our vacation. Not knowing what to expect I showed up bright and early on Monday morning and sat at my desk to try and figure out what was going on. Everyone was bustling around as usual, in fact it looked like we hadn't been gone for a month. So I sit around and try and determine what is going on, when finally the bell rings. Since no one has told me what is going on, I grab my textbook and head to class as if this really is a normal Monday. I meet Miss Doo in that hall and ask if we do indeed have class. She confirms this, but points at the textbook and says, "the students don't have books." The students don't have books? What exactly are we doing here? "We will play a game," Miss Doo tells me. Play a game? No books? What is this, I ask myself. It has not become clear to me. I have been playing games in class and plan to spend the rest of the week watching Sponge Bob with my classes.
The complete absurdity of the situation has made me question this culture we are living in. What kind of people, since this a country-wide mandated by the government sort of thing, sit back and act like this is perfectly reasonable and not some insane, pointless waste of time. No one is learning anything, no one is teaching anything, why are we here? I have consoled myself with the thought that there must be things that are just as insane and pointless. But here there is no outcry. No one seems to complain. They just accept that this is the way it is.
Despite the underlying craziness of the week, the two days I've had so far have been pretty great. Yesterday was perhaps the best day ever. It started with lunch, not normally my favorite part of the day, and yesterday looked to be more of the same weird stuff, until I got to the end of the food line and saw strawberriers and, to my complete astonishment, cheesecake! I don't know where it came from, but it was tasty and everyone seemed to be enjoying it. Since I was in such a good mood from the cake I then went to see Ms Park about a new computer which she said I could have since my old one was so slow a slug moves faster. When we went to find the new one, we took a detour to see the new English room. I knew they were remodling one of the classrooms to be extra fancy, Ms Park had shown me the plans to get my opinion, but I was completely shocked by the fanciness of the room. Especially compared with the rest of the school which has a sort of run down sort of feel. It even has an electronic whiteboard which I have to take a class for on Friday to learn how it works. I've never even seen an electronic whiteboard before. I'm not excactly sure what classes will be held in this new room, all I know is that it is for me and Ms Park to use. But the best part was the small office at the back. When she had shown me the plans, Ms Park had mentioned that there would be an office for the two of us. Not wanting to get my hopes up about something so exciting I didn't think much of it, but when I saw it yesterday I was completely elated. I can't wait to move out of the giant common office I'm in right now, where everyone walks right by my desk and stares at me or my computer screen. Right now I'm just excited about having more space to myself, but it looks like I will have a classroom of my own where I will be able to do more exciting things with various groups of students come the start of school in March.
So now I sit happily typing on my new, fast computer, having come from a lunch where they served curry (the first time I walked into the cafeteria and thought it smelled good) and spaghetti (which we ate with our chopsticks). Of course there were shells with some sort of animal in them (clams, mussels, oysters...) in the soup. I guess I'm not quite out of purgatory yet.
Today I had the pleasure of attending the ninth grade graduation ceremony. This ceremony is the reason we are all in school this week. For some reason they can't graduate at the actual end of the semester and have to come back in the middle of vacation to do it.
After talking to Miss Kim yesterday I thought we had four classes, and then the ceremony would be around 12. However, this morning it turned out that we had no classes (in fact the other grades didn't even come to school) and the ceremony was at 10:30.
So at the proper time we traipsed over to the gym/auditorium for the excitement. I believe ninth grade graduation here is a bigger deal than in the States because school is only mandatory in Korea up through ninth grade. After this the students will go to various high schools, or perhaps none. Some will go to a regular high school to prepare for college, while some will attend trade schools to prepare for life in the real world. This is why there is so much studying even in middle school, because your grades here determine what high school you get accepted to which determines where you go to college which determines how successful you'll be later in life. So unlike in America, where the rumor that a girl once told me that colleges looked at grades from middle school is false, here in Korea it couldn't be more true.
The ceremony didn't have all the pomp or ceremony of the high school graduations we're used to. Some students came in their uniforms, some came in regular street clothes, one boy wore a suit, but that's because he got a special award and gave a speech. There were seats for the students (all 316 of them) while the rest of us (parents, teachers, friends, relatives) milled around in the back. No one listened to the ceremony, there was various chit chat and poses for pictures. The best was the fantastic bouquets of flowers that everyone brought for the graduates. I've never seen anything over the top. They were mostly comprised of a few flowers (or sometimes none at all), voluminous amounts of netted fabric in various bright colors, and various doodads sticking out like candy, little people in witches hats, or giant feathery hearts. I amused myself for most of the ceremony by taking pictures of the best ones as sneakily as I could.
Other highlights included the music teacher conducting a recording whose music was set to a picture slide show of photographs of nature and at the end happy Korean kids (I realized later that he was conducting the audience, we were supposed to sing along, but since no one did, I thought he was just crazy. He came out again later and this time the music was projected onto the screen and I realized we were supposed the sing along. Finally, on the third song, some people joined in.) And outside the auditorium there was a man selling cotton candy.
The Koreans really are the best when it comes to making things fancy and over the top. Why have a bouquet of flowers unless it is wrapped in what looks like a balloon animal? In fact, who even needs the flowers when we have all this other great stuff? I make a jest about the bouquets, but in fact I'm a big fan and wouldn't mind taking home several for myself.
"If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul."
So said Alphonse de Lamartine, French poet and politician, of the city which was then the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Napolean Bonaparte, who had similarly strong feelings about the city, supposedly said that "if the earth were a single state, Istanbul would be its capitol." This from the man who tried to conquer the world for France? (who was, by the way, average height for his day.)
Istanbul is one of those cities that makes you catch your breath before you even arrive there--at least if you're a student of history. The depth and breadth of this city's experience is second to none: at the intersection of two continents and two seas, two hemispheres, and two of the world's great religions, Istanbul is a microcosm of the world itself.
Today was but a glance of the city, but it was a glance that left an impression. In general, most cities that I have ever visited fall into one of three categories: those that one can grow to love, those that will mostly be forgotten, and thost that impress me instantly as being, for lack of a more comprehensive and ellegant word, "cool" 
. Cairo fits into the first category, most cities into the second, and a handfull of cities--Vienna, Quebec, perhaps Istanbul--fall into the third.
We visited Sultanahmet (the Blue Mosque) and Ayasofya today, and took some really cool pictures (to overuse the word). They're still uploading, so you'll have to wait 'till tomorrow to see what we saw.
Enjoy this short video, and give a shout out to my Dad and his special skills.
Just a mini update to say that Istanbul is indeed a cool city, and we are having a lot of fun here. A few of the highlights so far:
- Eating $1.30 doner kebap on the street (the best shawarma I have ever had) while sipping fresh-squeezed orange-apple-carrot juice.
- Sampling a mixed kebap platter at a nearby cafe, with live Turkish zither music playing in the background.
- Following up the kebap with a game of backgammon, as the locals start singing along to the music.
- Eating all the Turkish Delight we can stomach while watching late-night (9pm) Star Trek.
- Walking the streets in the rain (not like there's another option: it's been raining every day).
- Heading into the grand bazaar with no map and no plan, not caring if we ever make it out or not.
- Being rinsed and scrubbed and massaged with scalding water in a 500 year old Byzantine bath.
- Drinking Turkish Apple Tea while discussing travel and teaching with a recent Teach for America volunteer who's traveling around the world before starting grad school in Michigan.
- Eating our hostel-provided Turkish-style breakfast every day: fresh baguette, cucumbers, tomatoes, cheeses, meats, and olives, with jams and nuttella also available.
- Trying out a few of the famous Turkish Mezes (appetizers) at a famous restaurant in the new downtown.
- Talking with our hostel room-mate, a Malaysian doctor, about his multinational Chinese-Malay heritage.
P.S. Our internet connection is not the fastest here, so we've been having some technical difficulties uploading our photos... if they appear lopsided, or incomplete, or ugly, or they're not there, that's why.
We have some more pictures up. Check them out.
Click on the picture to see more.
We're on the final leg of our Turkey trip. We're currently ensconced at a rather nice hotel on the Mediterranean in Southern Turkey. The hotel offers buffets all day and stunning views of the water, in between which we are doing our web design work.
We finished a two day tour of Cappadocia, an area in central Turkey known for its unusual rock formations and cave dwellings. The scenery was quite fantastic, it's low season since it's cold and often snowy, but snow always lends a magical quality to any scene, and places that are already named after fairies take on an other world feeling. The seemingly carefully eroded Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia take on various shapes, like rabbits, camels and Napolean's hat. We toured cave dwellings used by early Christians as monasteries, dug into the strange rock formations in order to hide and protect them from their persecutors. The Christians were eventually joined by the Muslims and you can see churches side by side with mosques, all dug into the rock and often painted with frescoes of scenes from the Bible (as our tour guide said, the story of Abraham is in the Koran too, it's just different). We also visited an entire underground city that was dug by hand several stories into the earth. Safe from invaders and cold weather, the people slept, cooked and made wine below the surface. Walking around in this underground city was like experiencing a location right out of a fantasy novel. Driving around Cappadocia was like being in another world; many locals still use the caves for storage, work or living. Everywhere you go you can see doors dug into the rock, including the hotel we stayed in.
Our hotel room was a converted cave, made quite comfortable by beds, heat and running water. We enjoyed spectacular breakfasts (the traditional Turkish breakfast is bread, cheese, tomatoes and cucumbers, a far cry from the Korean breakfast of rice and kimchi) and were amazed by the fact that the cave had wireless. The hotel animals were quite friendly. We were joined by a dog one evening as we sat outside playing backgammon, and a fancy white cat was determined that it should be living in our hotel room and made its way under our beds several times, even meowing loudly outside the door to be let in.
Our picture collections are just about finished, so be sure to check them out. The Istanbul set has had many recent additions.
