Currently living in:
SASKINBAKKAL
on the Asian shore of
ISTANBUL
Turkey
I teach English as a Foreign Language
My favourite colour is orange, except when it's green
I have a large frog collection
I sing alto
I love RPing on MUSHes
I'm always on a diet
Travelling is what I don't do when I'm on holiday
I'm working on being a better photographer
I'm a Libra
I have arthritic problems in my hands
I have a mobile phone and I'm text addicted!
Cellists do it with their legs open
I support Fenerbahçe this week
I drink vodka neat or with apple juice
Just a quick note...
You can get a far better idea of what I’m really like by reading my blog which is mostly a description of what happens in my life rather than a detailed analysis of the inner workings of my mind, although introspective entries creep in far too often, given my parents read it. However, if you’re interested to know what goes on, then go there. If it’s introspective, deep dark secrets you’re after, you’ll just have to ask me in person.
Where would you like me to start? Do you get a choice? I was born, I went to school, I did all the usual stuff, but mostly I was just going through that in order to get to the good part: life as a grown up. I did my best to ignore being a child and tried even harder to ignore being a teenager, with lamentably bad results. But at some point I got the idea in my head that I wanted to travel, and that meant I needed to know languages, and things went from there.
In my Gap Year I worked in the Czech Republic as an English teacher and then travelled over a lot of Eastern Europe. I also managed to make it over to Canada for a month. I’ve done my best to get out of England at every available opportunity since then, and photographic records can be found here.
I studied Czech and German at university in London. Studying languages meant most importantly that I got to keep a relatively wide curriculum and I managed to get in a good deal of language, literature, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, politics and history amongst other things. Oh, and I studied Czech because I was being difficult, and I wanted to be different. And it was different, not to mention a lot of fun, even though, to be honest, I wasn’t the world’s most conscientous student by a long, long way. Minimalist describes it best! I made some wonderful friends too, and also joined the University of London Chamber Choir for alcohol and song in equal measure.
As part of my degree I studied Central and East European History (oh, and visited quite a few lectures on political theory as well) at Phillips-Universität Marburg for a semester and then did Czech Literature and literary theory at Masarykova Univerzita in Brno. The less said about Germany the better, but Brno was a blast (and is where the picture of me opposite was taken). At that point I decided once and for all there was no way I was going to stay in the UK once I’d graduated. And there wasn’t much at University career fairs to tempt me away from that, either.
So I wandered through my final year at University in 2001, got accepted onto the CELTA course at International House in London and suddenly discovered what the word work meant. Four weeks in July gave me a qualification and a few weeks later a job at an affiliate International House in Torun, Poland. I started in September 2001, and after nine months there, having fun in a small town, travelling about, learning about what it really means to be a teacher and enjoying the job far more than I ever thought I would (but not really the company of the other teachers, and getting a little claustrophobic by the end of it) I decided to move on to bigger and better things.
I arrived in Istanbul at the end of August, 2002, and instantly fell in love with the city. I'm working for International House Suadiye, which is on Bagdat Caddesi, slap-bang in one of the poshest areas on the Anatolian (Asian) side of the Bosphorus. I live in Saskinbakkal, have two terrific housemates, Fife and Yasmin, and I'm having an absolutely amazing time - see the blog for more!