Pictures from my Germany and Poland are up at:
I have been really busy since I got back so i haven’t had much time to post. This weekend I am going diving one day and outdoor climbing the second day, so I should have some good pictures for you on Monday, and maybe a story or two.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Current Mood:
Happy
There are two reasons I haven’t written in a while. One, I am on a business trip through Germany, and then next week Poland. The other reason is that until about one minute ago, I had not finished watching all three seasons of the TV show Lost. Now that that is done, I can have free time again. A ward of caution to anyone reading this, do not ever start watching that show; I wanted so badly to stop watching it but my curiosity wouldn’t let me.
I am not going to complain about my love/hate relationship with Lost. Instead I would like to tell you about how my trip has been going. My first two meetings went fine. I spent my first day in Oberhausen with one of our suppliers. It was “Turkish Accounts Day,†something organized by the company for all of its Turkish customers. Not much interesting happened except at dinner. We had two big tables (there were a lot of us and a lot of them) in a nice Spanish restaurant. Since everyone was standing around waiting for someone to do something, I decided to quickly grab a spot. Within a minute or two everyone else was seated. One table was seven Germans and an American. The other table was eight or nine Turks and a Romanian. It was like no one even thought about it. Just instinctively, everyone sat down, perfectly divided. Once seated, the mistake was quickly realized, but no one said anything.
I left my bag in Oberhausen thinking I would travel east for my two Tuesday meetings, and then come back through Oberhausen before heading south to Dusseldorf. It was along the line, so it wouldn’t be too much of a problem to pick up my bag. Unfortunately, my third meeting, Tuesday afternoon, was cancelled because of a big fire in a factory, and everyone at the company I was working at was on site, trying to get things up and running again. I decided to stay in Bielefeld, and rescheduled my meeting for Wednesday morning, and moved Wednesday’s to Thursday. Unfortunately, after deciding to do that, I discovered that there was not one single available hotel room in Bielefeld.
Without any real aim, I wandered a bit upon arriving in Bielefeld until I happened upon a hotel that did not look too fancy. I went in and inquired about a room and was told there were none. Some big fair was going on and the hotel manager said it would be difficult to find a room anywhere. At first he seemed reluctant to help me. As I began making call after call to hotels I had in the list I had picked up in the train station, he eventually decided to help me. He said to come back in one hour.
After a bit of walking around, I came back. He said he had asked everyone he knew that could have a room and there were none. The Internet had yielded the same results. Luckily, he had two guests that had not arrived, and their reservation was guaranteed only until six. They called to confirm they were on their way within a few minutes of the deadline. Finally, after a few more tries, he said I could rent one of the unused, un-renovated rooms on the top floor. The room had no heating, so it was cold. The TV in it used an old fashion antenna. The only bathroom was a shared bathroom at the end of the hall, which also had no heating. No mini soaps or shampoos in the shower (remember I didn’t have my luggage). At least I got a room though, and at a 25% discount too!
My stay in Bielefeld was interesting, but not like my return to Oberhausen. I inquired at the train station in Oberhuasen – before fetching my bag from the previous hotel – about a hotel in Dusseldorf. A quick check online showed that the international furniture fair had taken all of the rooms. It also showed that nearly all the rooms in Oberhausen were also taken, except for one. I remember thinking to myself at least it will be a proper room in a proper hotel. The man at the train station explained to me that in order to get in the hotel I must go first to a butcher’s shop and inquire there about the hotel. Apparently – I am not joking at all – the family that owns and runs the hotel, also owns and runs the local butcher. Because they don’t have enough manpower, the hotel is locked during the day, with no one in reception. In fact I did not see the hotel open once in the evening, despite the fact that they advertise there is a restaurant there. I found this a bit odd. What was even more odd was that they simply handed me a key with my room number on it. Didn’t take a credit card, didn’t take my passport, didn’t even ask me my name.
The rooms were fine. Clean, had heating, had TV. They even had a free wireless LAN you could use from the first floor and the ground floor. I did notice two other oddities however. There did not seem to be a way to call an outside line from the hotel room, and pushing the button for reception did nothing because there was never anyone in reception. The second thing I realized while writing an email to someone who was going to meet me at my hotel. Nowhere in the hotel, not on any papers, not on the napkins, not on anything in the rooms or downstairs, was the name of the hotel. I had no idea where I was actually staying. Only on the front of the hotel, which was a small door that looked like a walkup apartment building, was the name of the hotel. To top it all of, their breakfast sucked.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Current Mood:
Cool
I had to look up Tasseography too, so I will save you the trouble and start off this entry with its definition (according to wikipedia.org):
<<
Tasseography (also known as tasseomancy or tassology) is a divination or fortune-telling method that interprets patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediments.
The terms derive from the French word tasse (cup), which in turn derives from the Arabic tassa (cup), and the Greek suffixes -graph, -logy, and -mancy (divination).
>>
Before I go into what Tasseography has to do with all of this, let me tell you about Turkish coffee. Turkish coffee came to Istanbul in the middle of the 16th century. It quickly grew in popularity. By the mid 17th century, Turkish coffee had become a measure of a woman’s merits. Prospective husbands and their parents would drink coffee prepared by the potential bride as a measure of her house keeping skills. To spoil unwanted marriages, women would use salt instead of sugar, or spill the coffee intentionally. I have read that still today this is used by parents to evaluate potential wives for the sons, but I haven’t seen or heard of it before.
Turkish coffee is made by boiling finely powdered coffee beans in a pot. Without any filtering, this produces somewhat of a muddy mixture that is typically served in a small white cup similar in size to Italian espresso. The coffee has some particulate matter floating in it, but for the most part, all of the coffee power sinks to the bottom like silt in a river bed. Because of the silt at the bottom of the cup, not all of the coffee can be drunk. Coffee used to be very popular in the Ottoman empire. As a consequence, many of the former Ottoman territories drink coffee in this way - the Arabs, Greeks, and many of the Slavs. So important was the coffee in Ottoman culture, the word for breakfast, ‘kahvalt?,’ literally means before coffee. Now, Turkish tea and ‘nescafe’ have taken over as the popular drinks in Turkish culture (To read more about Turkish Coffee click here). Personally, I love Turkish coffee, especially when it is mixed with spices.
After you have finished your Turkish coffee, the cup’s saucer is placed on top of the cup, and together they are turned upside down. It is then left that way until it dries. Some of the dark coffee grinds stick to the white cup and form a pattern of light and dark. It is from this pattern that a fortune teller can tell your fortune. This practice is known as “fal” in Turkish. Last night Berna did my reading and it was quite cool. Most of it was very positive, with a few warnings. I can’t say that I believe in that sort of thing, but it was fun nonetheless.
In Turkish, Turks say, “To drink one cup of coffee together guarantees forty years of friendship”
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Yesterday marked the first day of Ramadan. I won’t go into extreme detail about what it is, so if you are interested you can read Wikipedia’s Ramadan Page. Â Simply put, Ramadan is an Islamic religious observance. It takes place during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar (it’s a lunar calendar, so it is different than ours). Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset for the entire month! That includes no water as well. Furthermore, you are supposed to observe the Koran more closely during this time period and in general be pure of thought. This includes no smoking and drinking.
Of course each person observes this in a different way. Alper has quit smoking during the day light hours (I think), many people are fasting and Ahmet has recently started smoking cigars in the company. To kick off the first day of fasting, Ahmet, Kenan and I went out for dinner. Unfortunately the restaurant we usually go to is closed during Ramadan so we had to trek a bit, but it was no problem. We were able to get there and start eating before sunset. We of course drank Raki, and to top it off, Kenan smoked cigarettes and Ahmet a cigar.
Since yesterday was my first day experiencing Ramadan, I assumed most of the Muslims here do not observe it. When I went downstairs for lunch today, I was surprised to find the lunch room nearly empty. Most of the tables had been moved and only a few chairs were out. I am often late for lunch, so I checked my watch. I was on time. Only 4 or 5 people from my company were eating of the 30 or so that are typically there. The lunch was unusual as well. It was lots of small breakfast things - cheese, bread, egg, olives, tomatoes, small sausages. It was actually excellent (I really love eating olives here). For a change, I stuffed myself. It felt a little awkward eating in front of our kitchen staff, and having them bring us tea, when they cannot eat or drink until after sunset tonight.
The positive impact of Ramadan on my life is that for some reason all employees get a box of random food stuff from the company (since people are not eating lunch I guess). I assume it’s Ramadan food, so I don’t know what to do with any of it, but there is a lot of olive oil and olives which I am excited about. The second thing is that since there is no lunch break, and no tea breaks (remember they can’t drink either), work ends at 5pm instead of 6pm. Thus my current predicament, everyone is gone and it’s too early for me to head to the city. So what should I do with my time?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Ant’s Birthday was about two weeks ago, but I just got the pictures from Izzy (he was on a week long hiking trip in the south of Turkey). Still exhausted from my vacation in the US, I took a nap and showed up for the clubbing half of the night (I skipped dinner). We went to a club who’s name escapes me at the moment. The club is characterized by having waitresses and other employees that are transvestites (as you will see from the pictures) and has very live performances throughout the night. The performances were great, and the music was good. Drinks were too much, so I kept myself to two (first one was free). Overall it was a good time. Click Ant’s picture to see the photo gallery.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
It has been 6 months since I created this blog. For those of you that might be interested here is some general information about my blog so far.
Number of posts: 108
Number of comments: 91
Visits since I started using a statistics program (June 22, 2007): 950
Visits by month
- June07 : 123
- July : 390
- August : 405
- September : 223
Visits by Country
- USA : 63.88%
- Turkey : 12.31%
- Canada : 3.45%
- Netherlands : 1.23% (Baris is now studying in Holland, so I guess that’s all him)
- Great Britain : 0.74%
Number of Posts by Month (they don’t add up, I know, but I had to count manually so maybe I made an error)
- March: 9
- April: 21
- May: 20
- June: 28
- July: 20
- August: 5 (and this month had the most traffic!)
- September: 7
The largest single percentage of my traffic from one IP address is still my parent’s company with 6.86% of total traffic.
The largest percentage of my users are using Firefox on a Windows based computer.
I have started using Google Analytics as well to see how well it displays traffic information. At first glance it seems a lot better than what I am using now to track my traffic. I am also going to post my blog on some blogging sites. Ant recommended I do this to increase traffic. Ok, that’s all for this boring update.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
I didn’t compete, but I stopped by to see what was going on. The third leg of the Istanbul wind surfing championships was held at the wind surfing club I go to, less than 2 miles from my house. So on Friday afternoon of last week, we stopped by to see how things were going. It wasn’t a very big event, but it was cool nonetheless.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
At the request of several of my coworkers, I have begun having a sort of English class at 5pm everyday (well we started on Thursday, and Friday’s was canceled because we had a small crisis in Greece). I have mostly just gone over some vocabulary with them and have been doing small phrases with them. If you are interested, click here to see the handout a gave them with some starting vocabulary (vocabulary.doc). This was not my idea, nor Murat’s. It was their idea. Murat said that since it seems like I am going to be here a while, they would like to be able to communicate with me.
In my class I have Altan, the new guy working on our Turkish documentation, Burcin, the receptionist, Saime, a woman working in purchasing, and Rahile, one of the women working in the finance department. Altan, Burcin and Rahile are all my age and Saime is 30 I believe. My fifth student, is Murat’s uncle who is way ahead of everyone in terms of his English ability, but still not very good. He takes pleasure in telling the other people the wrong English word for things (example, he will tell them a chair is actually called a pencil). It was difficult to resist the urge to do this as well.
The first class was on Thursday, September 6th. Since this is Turkey, I decided I was skeptical to see if they would actually show up and take this seriously, so I didn’t prepare a lesson plan at all. At 5pm, I came back to my office to find everyone there with paper, ready to learn. I was very surprised. Not having prepared anything, I was a bit nervous. This was the first time I was really communicating something more than good morning with Altan and Burcin, and my communication with Saime has not been much more (Rahile organizes customs documentation for our exports so, although she knows the least English of those four, I communicate with her the most). I was literally sweating bullets. In my mind this was a test. According to Murat, I had passed the test of Alper, Hassan and his father. They all had confidence in my abilities. For this group however, this was my first test. I tried to remember what it was like learning French for the first time back in junior high school. I remember Mrs Rainey talking a lot about Friends, south park (it was in its first season), but nothing more. So I just tried to get teach them a few question and answers they could ask each other (Altan helped when it was not clear to the others what the words meant), and I taught them the head, shoulders, knees and toes song, which they all thought was pretty funny.
Afterwards, I made a list of vocabulary for them to have. I have no idea how to teach English to people who don’t know it, so this is what I came up with. Any suggestions would be tremendously appreciated. I also took the initiative and had Ahmet translate my handout into Turkish so that I could learn Turkish along side my co-workers efforts to learn English. My thought is that if I am able to learn the words in Turkish that I am teaching them in English, a few things will happen:
1. Communication will be easier: Perhaps one person forgets one word, or I forget one word in Turkish. Us learning the same vocabulary list in one another’s respective languages can only make communication easier. The trouble with this is that their exposure to English is mostly in the work environment. My exposure is everywhere outside the work environment. It is very easy for me to learn numbers, places, and food, since I see these words all the time. For them, it is very easy to learn words related to doing their jobs in Tecom, since they are surrounded by those words. My strategy will be to - once I get some basic vocabulary in them - teach them things that are readily applicable to their everyday lives. I will just try and memorize the translations of those things the best I can.
2. I can more easily earn their respect. I think it is very important to earn the respect of those you have to work with especially if you are supposed to be leading or teaching them. by making a strong effort to learn as well my belief is they will respect me more.
3. Motivation! If I am learning Turkish, they will have no grounds to complain I am going to fast with English. Also, if I can learn their language quickly, it will prove to them that it is possible.
4. Work will be more fun. Murat said to me that this will probably be the most fun part of the day.
So far, the best part of being teacher has been Altan’s question to me on Friday (Keep in mind, he was dead serious when he asked me this question). Altan approached me and said he had a question. He wrote down on a piece of paper “hot” and then directly below it “cold.” He indicated to me that he knew the meaning of the words using body language. I nodded and said “okay?” Then on the right side of the page he wrote “dog” and then directly below it the word “cat.” Again he indicated he knew the meanings of the words. Confused with where this was actually going I nodded again. Next, in the middle of the paper he wrote:
“hot_dog = meat”
Followed by:
“cold_cat = ?”
I started cracking up, which was not the right thing to do, because after I started laughing I realized he was serious. He blushed a bit and seemed rather embarrassed. It didn’t help that I immediately called Murat to tell him the hilarity of this situation. After I calmed back down again I apologized and indicated to him that a cold cat is nothing.
This incident reminded me of a similar incident with Alper. I was trying to explain to Alper the meaning of the word “homies.” I said to him that it’s a word used on the streets in cities that people in gangs and things call each other, that they call their friends. Alper’s response was, “Conrad, we do not have this problem in Turkey, everyone has a home.” It took me a second to realize he thought I was saying homeless. I laughed a bit, and shared my amusement with Murat and Baris, and of course explained to Alper the difference.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Current Mood: Happy
I went back to the doctor today. I decided I should figure out how this whole health insurance thing works. According to Dilek, the woman at my health insurance company that is my contact (she’s the only one I could get on the phone to speak English), I have the best health insurance, so I took the opportunity to go in and get checked up. It was an interesting experience.
First, I called Dilek to get a brief translation of my policy and how to go about seeking treatment. It seems I have unlimited coverage for accidents, serious health problems, hospitalizations and things like that. I have 80% coverage on this while abroad. I have 5,000 Ytl of what seems to be doctor’s consultations and visits. What is not covered in the policy (I haven’t checked this with the company) is general check ups. It appears that you cannot go in for a general check up and have it covered even by the best insurance company in this is retarded for two reasons.
 1. Preventative strategies are (as far as I know) ALWAYS cheaper than other reactive strategies. This may not be the case for everything, but it is certainly the case in medicine. Strike one against the intelligence of the insurance company.
2. As far as I could tell, there is nothing to stop me from going in there 10 times this week and making up a variety of random ailments and in a sense, getting a general checkup. This will be no cost to me other than my time, and it will be very costly to the insurance company.
Anyway, moving on. So Dilek gave me the number for the International Hospital here in Istanbul, not too far from where I work. There are plenty of medical clinics around like the one I visited for my wrist, which my friend owns, but they don’t always honor the insurance. That means there is a frustrating process of trying to get a refund from the insurance company. I therefore decided it was best to go where they told me. In general, most primary health care needs are handled by hospitals here in Turkey. Looking around their website, I discovered that they offer health care in the following languages (other than Turkish):
English,
German,
French,
Arabic,
Italian,
Spanish,
Bulgarian,
Russian,
Albanian,
Persian
I arrived there 30 minutes after my scheduled appointment. This is where things differ tremendously from the US. First of all the hospital was small, but really nice. It had fancy falls and and nice chairs. It was a far cry from the sterile bleak hospitals that you see in the US. At the reception desk I answered a few questions and presented my insurance card. They confirmed what Dilek had said in that I had the best insurance. This whole process took under five minutes!
Now this is where things really get unbelievable for someone who is used to 22 years of US health care. Guess how long my wait time was for the doctor? Less than one minute! I was amazed! The whole thing was very quick, I hardly had to answer anything, they spoke English, there was no paperwork for me. The insurance covered everything, but I still got the receipt. The whole visit was less than 100 dollars!
For those of you that are not from the US, going to the doctor in the US is a huge pain in the butt. You have to wait forever, there is always some paper work to fill out, first you see the nurse practitioner, then you wait again, then you see the doctor. Sometimes you will have to keep waiting for no reason after that. For me there always seemed to be something up with my health insurance. The trouble involved with seeing a doctor always acted as a disincentive for me to get problems checked up on. Here, the only disincentive is the traffic. So I think the next time my toe hurts, I minds well take advantage of my health insurance and get it checked out.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
I decided that I do not want potential customers reading my blog. If they are searching for information on my company, they should find my blog - I am sure that is not what they are looking for anyway. Also, the fact that they can read my blog makes me a little bit more reserved. I therefore decided to go through all my old entries and remove all instances of my company’s name except for in the web address. Let me know if any of you catch anything
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Recent Comments