Book Review: The Yogurt Man Cometh by Kevin Revolinski

Some friends of ours lent us a copy of The Yogurt Man Cometh: Tales of an American Teacher in Turkey as it's a humorous read about an American's crash course in living in Ankara and teaching at the same school where Justin teaches. We highly recommend the book to anyone living in Ankara or coming here for the first time.

Ankara was Revolinski's first real foray outside the U.S., he has since become a travel blogger. He captures the hilly slopes, the perils of public transit, and the difficulties of trying to teach English to private school students very well. Kevin was able to make friends quickly and accomplished a lot of sightseeing in Turkey in just a year's time, despite getting seriously ill in the process. The experience takes place in 1997-1998 and it's interesting to see how much the city has grown and changed even in just 15 years.

The book is a quick read, it's like a series of blog posts. It's the book that will get you closest to what our lives look like in Ankara. Trust us, you'll enjoy it even if you never plan on visiting here.

First Big Snow in Ankara

(Joni) Last night and today, we got our first big snowfall in Ankara. We've had some dustings before this, but nothing that accumulated much or stayed longer than a few hours. This was 3 or 4 inches, though, and it's COLD, so it's going to stay a while!

This was early in the morning. It kept snowing so we ended up with a bit more than what you see here.

Despite children everywhere clamoring for a snow day, the roads were good enough for Justin to have to go to school this morning, but Elias doesn't go to school on Tuesdays. So instead, we bundled up and decided to play in the snow for a few minutes in the parking lot next to our building. (I'm a wimp and don't like the cold, so we didn't stay out long.)

Elias' favorite things are "flopping" and "rolling" in the snow. He didn't inherit his mama's dislike of cold!

The snow was too powdery to pack into a snowman, but that didn't hamper Elias' enjoyment!

After we had been out for a little while and were about to head back in, one of the men from our building came out to clear the snow off the cars that were parked in the lot. The Turkish culture LOVES children, so he was pleased to see Elias out playing in the snow. He even showed Elias how to make a snowball, and the man told him to throw it at me! I chose not to translate that part of the Turkish for Elias... :) But what I did tell Elias was that he was NOT allowed to throw a snowball at the man! However, then the man said, "Come on, throw it at me!" So I told Elias the man wanted him to throw it at him, and Elias thought that was great! The man threw one back, and they exchanged a few snowballs... Elias' first snowball fight!

Then we were able to move on to my favorite part about playing in the snow... The hot cocoa to warm up with when you come inside!

Elias was so excited about having two big marshmallows floating in his!

So I'm not a fan of winter weather, but having a small child helps at least make it fun! Hopefully we'll get a mild winter this year and it won't last long.

Celebrating the Winter Holiday in Turkey

(Joni) As I mentioned in my previous post, the vast majority of Turks don't celebrate Christmas. However, many of them do celebrate the New Year, and they do it very similarly to the way Americans celebrate Christmas - tree with lights and decorations, giving presents, even Santa (Noel Baba, which means Father Christmas in Turkish) comes on New Year's Eve here! This is why I said Winter Holiday in my post title... Even though in our house, we were very much celebrating Christmas, a lot of the lights/decorations/festivities we are seeing around us are because of New Year!

Karum Mall in the town center has some beautiful star/snowflake decorations.

Since we believe in celebrating Christmas as the birth of Christ and not just a winter holiday, we tried to maintain our family traditions that would help us keep that in mind. So we did our Advent Tree (where we read a short Bible story and put up an ornament every day of December) again this year, and we enjoyed that a lot!

Elias next to our tree in his Phineas & Ferb Christmas jammies that Grandma & Grandpa brought when they visited in the Fall. It's Christmas Eve, so there's only one spot left at the top of the tree for the Christmas Day ornament!

We also threw our own little birthday party for Jesus on Christmas Day, which I unfortunately didn't take any pictures of. But we had a yummy dinner and birthday cake!

Since the postal system between the US and Turkey is expensive and unreliable, rather than mailing gifts to us, our family just gave us money and we did our own shopping for gifts... Elias got so many trains - he's a happy camper! We also had one gift that Grandma & Grandpa had brought when they were here, and it had been sitting in my closet since September! So that was fun for Elias to finally open it!

It was the Toy Story movie and some Toy Story figures. He loved them!

Since Elias had so many days off school, I tried to fill them with fun Christmas-y things like watching Christmas movies (His favorite is the old claymation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!) and making Christmas cookies!

My favorite Christmas cookies - peanut butter blossoms! Elias liked the melted Kisses more than the cookie part - he definitely comes by his love of chocolate honestly. :)

We were also able to Skype with our families on Christmas, which was a blessing. Thanks to modern technology, we were able to watch all of them open the Turkish gifts we had sent, which was so much fun! :) So we had a nice first Christmas in Turkey, and we get to keep celebrating since the holiday the Turks are celebrating is yet to come! We're looking forward to seeing how they celebrate the New Year!

Preschool Christmas Party

(Joni) As a general rule, people in Turkey don't celebrate Christmas. Because of this, we've been surprised and pleased to learn that Elias' international preschool in fact makes a HUGE deal of Christmas! They've been learning Christmas songs all month, doing Christmas crafts, having one day when everyone wore red and green, and then Friday was their huge Christmas party. (It was the same format as the one they threw for Halloween.)

Unfortunately, Justin had to work, but I was able to attend the Christmas presentation from Elias' class. The class filed in wearing adorable Rudolph hats they had made from their handprints.

Then they sang a series of songs in English. We had been hearing Elias sing them at home for weeks, so I knew he knew the words, but he must just not like performing with a group because he just sat in his chair rather than participating in the singing. Here are a few of the songs (Elias is seated on the far left.):
Then the highlight of the party was that Santa came!! He made his big entrance, and then one by one each child sat on his lap and answered the questions "What is your name? How old are you? What do you want from Santa?" The kids had varying levels of proficiency in English, but I could see a great improvement in the ability of the kids to answer those questions since the Halloween party. Elias still wouldn't answer them even though he obviously knows English. :) Here is Santa's entrance and Elias on Santa's lap. The lady helping him is Ms. Olga, the school's phonics teacher. Elias LOVES her, and you can see him answer her questions (He said "Yeah." to all her questions.) rather than Santa's.
One funny note about his class is that the boys in his class almost all said they wanted Angry Birds from Santa! Who knew Angry Birds was so popular among 4- & 5-year-olds in Turkey?! Although Santa asked them what they wanted, he gave them all the same gift, which was a small Santa that dances and sings Jingle Bells. (See it pictured below.)

Then they had a spread of Christmas cookies, which Elias enjoyed immensely.

And they sent him home with a huge bag of fun things.

Clockwise from top: Paper bag with wreath craft, dancing Santa, cookie on a stick, bag of cookies/candy from his teacher, stocking craft with bag of popcorn/cookie/candy/winter rubber duckie, and gingerbread man/Christmas tree/snowman crafts.

So it was a fun Christmas celebration! And now Elias is off school for 10 days, which is practically unheard-of in Turkey. Since they don't celebrate Christmas, they don't have a school holiday. But I'm sure the International Preschool teachers enjoy the break! :)

The End of the World (Kıyamet Günü)

I wanted to chronicle something about the last week. Friday, December 21st was the day that supposedly the Mayan calendar ended (even though this supposedly isn't true) along with the world. This was a big deal in Turkey and the talk of my students and co-workers the past couple weeks. Şirince, a Turkish village on the Mediterranean, was somehow prophesied to be a "safe" haven and saw its population swell as a result. Tom Cruise was even rumored to be coming.

On Thursday, one of the 4th grade teachers had an "Apocalypse" (Kıyamet Günü) party and several students promised not to be in school on Friday. Indeed, Friday's attendance in my classes was the lowest all year.

One of the local malls had a clever marketing scheme around the day. This poster reads "The apocalypse is happening at Kentpark Mall! 110% (off)" The fine print says "100% Kentpark Mall, 10% off all purchases over 100 lira." Clever!

When I got to school on Friday I was reminded that we still had until about 1:20pm local time before the apocalypse was supposed to happen (times for each city were tweeted out quite a bit). Thankfully, the world didn't end while I was with my 2nd grade class. But the low attendance made it one of the most well-behaved classes of the semester.

Long-Distance Family Photo

(Joni) My family traditionally takes a large group photo every Christmas, but this year we're in Turkey and my family is in two different US states, so that makes taking a photo together rather difficult. However, my sister ran across this cute idea on Pinterest, and she tweaked the idea to work for us. So we made letters to spell out the word FAMILY, and we took different photos to fit, then patched them together into what turned out to be an ADORABLE group photo! (Click to enlarge.)

F-Us
A-Our son, Elias
M-My parents
I-My nephew
L-My other nephew
Y-My sister and her family

A really funny thing about this photo is that my sister and her family live in Georgia, so it was 70 degrees (F) the day they took their photos... They were sweating in their long sleeves! On the other hand, it was absolutely freezing in Ankara when we took ours - we stripped off our hats and coats just to quickly snap our photos before putting them back on! In fact, the morning after we took ours, we woke up to a layer of snow!

But it was fun to be able to collaborate on this "family photo" together, and it helps me still feel connected to them even from far away.

A shoutout to learnturkisheasy.com. If you're learning Turkish...

(Justin) Gül Öztürk has been a big help in my language learning. She writes very helpful Turkish-teaching posts at http://www.learnturkisheasy.com. She has a parallel site that simplifies news stories into simple Turkish and includes an audio file as well. I wanted to give her a shout-out as she is trying to generate income from her work. You will find her sites linked on the right hand side of this page as well.

There are so many freely available resources available for learning Turkish, and so many Turks eager to help people learn. We're quite thankful for them.