We all of a sudden discovered that today (Dec 8th) marks 6 months since we left Tas.

I’m reflecting on our 3 month reviews and finding it amusing that we proudly called it our ‘first quarter’ because we hadn’t realised at that stage that we’d only be here for 10 months.

So what has changed in the past 3 months? Are the big topics of the last milestone (culture shock/homesickness, language, teaching) still important to us, or have we found new things to dwell on? Do we regret being here yet? Are we keen to get home?

Culture Shock

I just asked Stu if he’s still feeling culture shock or homesickness. He said yes without hesitation, which surprised me. The other day I realised that I no longer pined for home and decided that I must be ‘over all that.’ But then, I have been on holidays and as a result have spent a lot of time being in contact with friends back home. I guess those things are always going to be sort of hanging over us because we’ll never really feel like we belong here and it’s not so much a pining for our home culture but more a general feeling of having no idea what’s going on outside.

I’m not scared about the next 4 months, because I know they’ll be quite similar to our first 4 months and it’s comforting to know that we survived those fine. Saying this makes me think about a television series we’ve been watching lately called FlashForward. The basic premise is that the entire world blacks out for 2 minutes and catches a glimpse of what will happen to them in 6 months time. For a lot of people in the show, knowing what the future brings gives them hope and/or determination. Hope because they have a future worth living for, and determination to change their path if they didn’t like what they saw. I guess what I’m experiencing here isn’t really the same, but now that all the uncertainty about living here has faded away it’s easier to look at our remaining time here and feel calm.

Language

I won’t dwell too much on this topic here, since Stu wrote about our Turkish lessons in the last post. It feels good to be at a stage where we have a 27% chance of understanding what someone is saying to us, and a 62% chance of being understood. (Those statistics are completely arbitrary and were just numbers I thought looked good) Occasionally I catch myself starting to translate into Turkish (in my head) what I’ve just said/written, and today I was talking today to a friend at home and she said something and my first response was a Turkish word. Fortunately it was over chat so I had time to remember the English equivalent before responding.

Years ago Stu and I had this friend* who went to another country for a few months to learn a new language. When he came back he would constantly slip in a word or phrase of this language into conversation. We (being the circle of friends) got completely frustrated by this behaviour and were adamant that he was showing off his new found knowledge just to show how smart he was now. I’m sad to say that our friendship with this person was never the same again. Stu and I have been thinking about this incident and cringing at how ignorant, selfish and immature we were. How could we know just how much it confuses your brain to learn a new language? We have been worrying that we will alienate our friends back home with our new language because of this past experience.

[*I've not gone into any details here to protect this person's identity and I ask that people familiar with this story also respect this when they comment ]

Teaching

Not much to say on this because we’ve only just started again this week after a 6 week break. We’ve definitely settled into some kind of rhythm and Aydin appreciates that we have our roles and stick to them. Stu does maths and I do English. It’s good. Kathryn was given the advice by everyone but Aydin’s actual teacher to get him to redo kindergarten. We didn’t have a strong opinion on this either way, but it will be good to know that by doing so will ensure that Aydin will have a better chance of retaining the core basics in both maths and reading. We’re hoping the teacher is ok with the hold back.

Regrets?

We still don’t regret being here. Well, that’s not entirely true. The recent uranium fuss has changed our contentedness here a lot. We have the promoter meds for chelation, but we don’t start on them til we’ve built up our zinc for 2 weeks, but without even opening the bottle we could smell that it’s not going to be a pleasurable experience. Stu explained earlier that it’s because of the uranium that he’s felt culture shock strongly in the last few weeks – it’s easier to resent living here when you can’t even drink the water! We have gone so far as to say to ourselves that if we’d known about the uranium situation then we wouldn’t have come. I guess it is all part of God’s big plan and there is a part of me that feels kind of proud that we’re here doing this and aren’t sitting at home because we were putting ourselves first. It would be nice to know for sure how much we should be worrying about our health and whether drinking bottled water, avoiding root veggies (no potatoes, carrots, parsnip or mushrooms in winter? Come on!) and taking the chelation meds is enough.

Home?

Ever since we confirmed our return dates, we’ve felt like we’re ‘about’ to go home. I’m sure in 4 months time I’ll reflect back on this post and think ‘oh, but it did feel like just the very next day we were leaving.’ Stu is very keen to get home to his new job and I’m very keen to get home because we’ll be temporarily living with Sam and Dani (brother and fiancee) and I just can’t wait to live with Dani. Neither of us grew up with sisters so this time together before they get married is going to be very special.

And here are the official dates:

• April 1: Our last day of term
• April 4: We catch a bus to Istanbul and the metro to the airport to catch our flights which leave at 9:30pm.
• April 5: We catch a flight to Australia. Because things aren’t simple with us, we’re booked onto a flight which will take us to Sydney but we’d rather go to Melbourne so we’re on a waiting list for that. Who knows if we’ll get onto it or not.
• April 6 very early am: We arrive in Sydney or Melbourne. If it’s Sydney then we’ll be booked onto an arvo flight giving us enough time to grab our first decent Australian coffee in the city. If Melbourne, we’ll be organising to have breakfast with my brother Will and the Arnotts and then contemplating spending the night in Bendigo so we can meet our nephew. (Oakleys: hope that’s ok with you! Completely up to how we’re going)
• April 7: We’ll definitely be back in Tas on this day. Someone shall organise a party for us.

On that happy note, I’m off to watch more tv

It’s getting colder. We’re loving it. Next week will bring an expected high of 2. We’ll be coming home to a Tassie winter and laughing in it’s face!

Families: we successfully posted your Christmas presents today. They’re now in the safe (?) hands of Bulgarski Poshta and Australian Post (allegedly it’s the latter that lets the side down this time of year).

Lots of love

Elly xx

Hi all,

We have lots of small pieces of news! So here goes:

Aydin and Kathryn in Australia: so Aydin (our student) and his mum Kathryn travelled back to Australia 5 weeks ago so that he could catch up with various medical and educational specialists – while his dad Dave stayed in BG. When we returned from our travels with Humf, Dave had news for us. The experts are quite happy with how Aydin has progressed and feel that D+K are by no means disadvantaging him by remaining in BG. This is great news – and a relief for D+K, I’m sure!

Elly and I have felt that the schooling we’ve been doing – especially combined with the speech therapy D+K do with Aydin – has seen his reading (in particular) improve over the last few months. However, we’re not qualified educators, so it’s hard to know what we should expect of a 6-year-old! In that sense it was good to know that Aydin is officially doing well.

Uranium issues: recent testing of the R family has found that they have “concerning” (ie. high) levels of uranium. The (fairly incontrovertible) theory is that the Haskovo water supply is the problem (they mine it around here). Elly and I haven’t yet been tested, but it’s fairly likely that we’ll have elevated levels too. Uranium is a heavy metal, but it’s fortunately not in the same nasty league as lead or mercury. Nevertheless, we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about avoiding exposure. We’ve switched to bottled water already, and we’ll have to avoid mushrooms and root vegetables (no potatoes!!). We’ll also be taking medication that somehow flushes the uranium from our bodies – we’ll have more info on it soon, we hope! All that we know so far is that it’s expensive!

C’mon, leave a comment with your favourite uranium/radioactivity joke; you know you want to…

Term 4 of school: will be exceedingly short! Aydin returns to BG in about 10 days’ time, so we’ll probably only fit in two weeks of term 4 before Christmas (Kathryn has somehow managed to make a start on term 4 material while in Australia – well done on that!). Because we’re following the NSW school year, we’ll then have 5-6 weeks’ “summer” holidays – except it’ll be minus 10 degrees outside, which is hardly “enjoying your holidays by spending every minute outside” weather, is it? As such, we’ll probably start term 1 of 2010 a couple of weeks earlier.

Return flights: we’re organising these at the moment. It’s very exciting! Flying back to Melbourne on our preferred dates is looking tricky (no seats available?!), so we’ll either we flying back a little earlier (late March) or back to Sydney instead of Melbourne. It’s all the same for us poor Tassie mob who have to make the extra domestic flight anyway! So you can expect us back in Launceston in the last week of March or the first week of April 2010.

Good news, you say?

That about wraps up this news bulletin. Sorry to anyone who already knew all of that – we’re supposed to be here to entertain!

How are the Uni exams going, everyone?

Cheers,

Stu (and Elly).

ps. you know when you’ve finished writing a blog post, and then you suddenly realise you have no suitable photos to add to it? Well that happened this evening, hence my wonderful artwork! Good, isn’t I?

This has been an epic school term.

We’re following the NSW school year which is meant to have 4 terms of 10 weeks each. When we arrived Kathryn and Aydin were behind by a week and had booked flights to leave for Aus immediately after the spring holidays – which are on now – so we decided to push on until they left so we could try and catch up and let them have 2 weeks holiday in Aus, since Stu and I were going to have a 6 week break anyway.

So we’re now about to start week 12 and the three of us are totally over it. Thankfully this week Stu and I are going ‘freestyle’ meaning that we don’t have any material from the department to use. We’ll probably do some revision to try and cement properly into Aydin’s  long term storage things like counting backwards from 20 and the alphabet in it’s correct order and lots of handwriting to try and stamp out silly habits he’s developed. Other than those boring inside things we’d like to do more outside stuff, look at nature and try to teach him to skip rope. Fun learning! Hmm, I guess we’d better sit down and plan it.

The end of this term marks the end of the ‘big long boring period at the beginning of our trip.’ (couldn’t think of a more creative name) To break down the rest of our time here:

• On Thursday Humf arrives for 4 1/2 weeks and we’re going to do a bit of travelling together (I’ll go into that later).
• When he leaves (sniff sniff) we’ll then have 2 weeks until Kathryn and Aydin return.
• Between their return and the end of the school year we have up to 3 weeks of school to do, depending on the jetlaggedness of our student. Then it’s a…
• WHITE CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR!!! Yes, we’re looking forward to snow and roasting marshmallows. Reminds me, Humf can you please bring some packets of marshmallows? BG marshmallows are kinda tasteless and act weird in hot chocolates.
• We’ll start school earlier than Australia (mid-Jan) and have another 12 week term, this time with a holiday in the middle.
• Somewhere in there near the end of term 1 we might be getting a visit from our friend Imogen who is doing a year of exchange at a university near London and Stu’s parents, who just want to travel. We might even be coming home with the senior Grants.
• Which will then bring us to Easter and our time in BG coming to an end. While our flights allow us to stay until the end of May, we felt that leaving at the end of a term will be easier for Aydin and his schooling – our leaving will be traumatic for him and to do it mid-term wouldn’t be very fair on him or his parents.

Our first four months have felt like they’ve dragged because we’ve seen that from next week onwards the rest of our time here is nicely broken up into manageable chunks. We have roughly six months left now, which doesn’t feel very long really, considering how much of the next three months will be spent on holiday.

Speaking of which, we’ve planned a nice little tour with Humf.

We’ll start off with a leisurely week in Haskovo, giving Humf a tour of our new hometown and introducing him to our friends and favourite cafes. This part is mostly just for H to get over jetlag and for S and I to recover after the term. We even have a birthday party lined up with Mirem’s son Hasan turning 11 on Friday.

We will then do a little bit of sight-seeing in Bulgaria: Plovdiv – for some pretty cool Roman ruins, the idyllic town of Bansko – which has a lovely mountain and maybe Sofia – mostly because it’s the capital and still smaller than Melbourne.

We haven’t entirely decided whether to do this next bit or not, but we’d like to then head up into Romania and visit Jon, Margot and James Nairn in Târgu Mureş who are the parents and brother of our very good friend Andy and the owners of the house we lived in for 3 months before we left (and plan to move back in to when we get home!) They’ve been living in Romania teaching English for nearly 2 years now. It will be good to see them and their home there.

Finally, we’ll head back down into Turkey. We have grand plans to see both Cappadocia and Ephesus both of which look amazing even on the Wikipedia pages. Just about everyone we’ve met who has been to Turkey has recommended these places so we do hope to get there. We’ll then leave Humf to enjoy Istanbul on his own and head back to Haskovo.

A few hours ago I accidentally clicked ‘publish post’ before actually finishing writing and right now it’s just clicked over to midnight, meaning it’s now 8am in Ausland and people will soon be sitting down to read a half finished post. Yes, I know you read our musings this early

In any case, it’s time for bed.

Hope you all have a good week. Especially you Humf, and all that flying ahead of you. Good luck mate, see ya in a few days.

Love Elly xx