Have you ever seen something that you weren’t supposed to look at, that you know you shouldn’t look at, something that will make you wish you hadn’t looked, but you look anyway?

I was riding an ordinary bus home, on an ordinary night after an ordinary day at work. The driver was driving like a suicide bomber, so I knew I would get home earlier than usual. A few minutes before my stop, the bus stopped, stuck in traffic. But there were no cars ahead of us. A line of cars in the right lane were stopped and had their hazard lights on. Not far in front of the bus in the middle of the road, a group of men were gathered. A fight? It’s not uncommon for the odd car horn to send someone off in this city. The bus made a move to the left lane, slowly trying to inch its way around. Slowly, people began to move curiously toward the front of the bus. With the bus at an angle, I looked out the window and saw what the delay was. There was a man lying crumpled on the road. The men around him were looking at him, touching him, trying to revive him. Suddenly, they began yelling and gesticulating at the traffic pausing to gawk at the situation. The bus driver swung further to the left to steer clear of the crowd. He drove very, very slowly past the group of men. As we crept nearer, I saw the men were no longer trying to revive the fallen man. They were now concerned with keeping the traffic moving past. As our bus, with gawking passengers flat against the window, slowly crept past the grim scene, I looked at the crumpled man lying in the road, although I knew I shouldn’t have.

The back of his coat was ripped and shredded in places from being dragged along the pavement, and his arm was horribly bent, obviously broken in several places. His wrist was twisted so it was even with his forearm. Then I looked at his head on the pavement, his gaping mouth and the fresh, black blood pooling slowly around his head with the hotel sign and car lamp lights reflected in it, and I gasped involuntarily at the naked realness of this horrible accident. I didn’t stop feeling faint until I got home.

I’d never seen anyone dead before, until now. Even if you don’t want to look, sometimes you have to see.

Awesome

Priceless it will make you neigh with delight!!

Sebat

I want to tell you a story that happened to me and some teacher friends of mine a few weeks ago.

It was a Saturday and we were on our break between morning and afternoon classes. Mark, Turgay and I decided to go get some lunch. Tired of the usual places (there are only about 3 decent places to eat in Şirinevler), I asked where we could go to eat.

“A student of mine told me about a good restaurant down this street, but I forget the name of it,” Turgay said.

So we set out in search of this restaurant. We didn’t know the name, but we passed a place called “Sebat” with a big white and orange sign.

“This place looks decent,” I said, and we all agreed to go inside. It was a döner restaurant, and the inside was clean, newly refurbished, and the waitstaff were well-dressed and hurrying around serving the customers. I saw a price list, but because it was posted so high above the register, it was rendered illegible. There was a tall, plump girl behind the register with too much lipstick on – “Hoş geldiniz!”

We took a seat at a table and a waiter took our order.

“What is there?” I asked.

“Döner kebab,” the waiter replied, motioning to the huge piece of meat roasting on the vertical spit in the corner. That was about it. We ordered döner kebab and some soup. The waiter brought out some tomatoes and cucumbers (Turkish “salad”) and a plate of yogurt. The soup came.

“How is it?” Mark asked.

“It’s not great. The soup at Andok is better,” I said. We finished our soup, pecking at the yogurt with bread, and then the döner came.

Let me go on a gristle-dripping tangent here. The döner kebab is the most common street food in Turkey. It is cheap and a great on-the-go snack. It consists of thinly sliced chicken or lamb meat which has been roasted on a vertical spit and is then placed on bread with some lettuce, tomato pieces, and, if you want, salty hot pepper flakes. The standard is between half a small loaf of terrible, cheap white bread (ekmek döner), but of course there are variations on this: there is the pide döner, on pita bread; the lavaş döner, which is rolled in a thin, tortilla-like bread much like a burrito; and of course the pilav üstü döner, which is just the meat on top of rice. The most common döner kebab is the ekmek döner, which can be found for as cheap as 1.25 TL (around 75 cents), but is never more than 5 liras. The döner is not exceptionally delicious, but it is nonetheless a staple of the Turks’ diet, and they will almost always cite it as their favorite food should you ask them. On the same note, it is invariably the most common business venture in Turkey, as you can find, minimum, at least 2 or 3 döner shops on every block.

Inexpensive and easy as it may be, I do not, however, recommend the Turkish döner. It is usually made with cheap meat which sits on the spit all day exposed to the elements and savory germs of passersby, and white bread which has been manhandled by more people than you want to know, hence the cheap prices (I was sick for a week after consuming the chicken variety last year). To add to the disappointment, the döner is not even a Turkish invention – it comes from Germany, where it was conceived by Turkish-German gästarbeitern in the 1960’s and later imported to Turkey. Check it out. Without one bit of doubt, the döners in Germany are not only unimaginably better than their bastard Turkish cousins, but one of the best foods I have ever eaten due to the higher quality of ingredients and the addition of a variety of scrumptious yogurt sauces (none of that here). You could imagine my disappointment upon arrival here to discover that even the döners in New York were much heartier than the measly, tasteless cardboard that is the standard here.

That being said, a döner is a döner in Turkey, nothing more; you won’t find a spectacular one, and if it’s more than 5 liras, it’s a ripoff.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, the döner had just come. We began to eat our döner, which was over lavaş, the thin bread I mentioned.

“How is it?” Turgay asked.

“Bland,” I said. It tasted completely… well, tasteless. Should have gone to Andok, I thought.

As we were eating, Turgay noticed some photos on the wall of some people eating in the restaurant.

“I know this man from the television. He’s quite famous,” he said. I looked at the other photos. He was right. Even I recognized some of the faces from Turkish television – one man, the host from “Turkey’s Got Talent” (a wildly popular primetime variety show), was in a picture sitting at the table behind ours with the restaurant’s owner, smiling happily. This place’s döner sucks, I thought - it can’t be that popular.

“Who would have thought those famous people would come here to eat, in Şirinevler,” Mark said.

We finished our insipid lunch and stood to pay. When we asked for the bill, the waiter indiscreetly wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to us on a plate. When we got to the register, they read our “bill” total – “61 liras ($45).”

A look of shock passed over our face. “What!? How?” Mark began to argue with them.

It should be noted here that both Mark and Turgay are Turkish – Mark is Turkish by birth, but purely American, and Turgay had spent a good amount of time in Canada teaching English. Even though we all ordered in Turkish, we spoke English during the duration of our lunch, and now it hit me why the bill was so high.

“Well, you had soup, 4 liras each, and yogurt and salad, which was also 4 liras,” the ignorant waiter replied. Asshole. 12 liras for a plate of shitty vegetables.

“But we didn’t order that, you just put it on the table,” Mark said. A sleazy trick commonly used on unsuspecting tourists.

“But you ate it.”

“Then how much is the döner?” Mark asked.

“12.50,” the waiter replied.

“What a fucking ripoff,” I muttered to Turgay. “That döner wasn’t even decent.”

We didn’t feel like arguing, so we each paid twenty liras (for one of the worst lunches I’ve ever had), and grumblingly left. We shorted them 1 lira.

“I don’t understand that, why it was so expensive, and why we had to pay for the salad and the mezzes. Even at Andok they are free!” Mark said when we left.

“Yeah, and that döner was shitty. For 12.50, that döner better ************ me,” I said.

Turgay smiled. “I guess we’re just not rich and famous enough to eat at Sebat,” he joked. We all laughed and walked back to English Time.

Well, at least the yogurt was good.

Speaking Activity

So part of my job as a teacher at English Time involves conducting “speaking activities” up to several times a week. Of course, there are weeks when you won’t have to do any speaking activities, and there are weeks when you will have a ridiculous amount of speaking activities, and others where you have only one. Teachers are assigned speaking activities arbitrarily by the head office every week, but even though you haven’t any say in the matter, you are more likely to receive more speaking activities if you aren’t working a lot of hours.

What is entailed in this speaking activity? Well, for the activity you must go to one of the classrooms and speak about a randomly assigned topic with whoever shows up for the activity. You get paid for it, of course, it’s free for the students who come, and there is only one speaking activity per day, either in the mid-afternoon or early evening before evening classes. “Not too bad,” you’re thinking, “to sit and chat for an hour and get paid for it, and it sounds like it’s good for the students too.”

Yes, it isn’t too bad. At first. It sure is a good source of extra cash when you add up your hours at the end of the month. But after while, these activities become very, very tiresome.

Usually, it is the same twelve or fifteen students who come to the activity; on rare occasions do fresh faces appear. Not always do the regulars come all at the same time of course, but some will come one day, and others will come others. Naturally, this becomes very boring, having the same students in the activity all of the time, especially over a period of 6, 8, 10 months, because you come to know every little thing about these people who have nothing better to do than come to speaking activities – their job, where they live, where they’re from, what they studied, their (lack of) interests, their personal opinions, facts about their families, their romantic interests (or lack thereof). This makes it increasingly difficult to hold a long conversation, especially after some months.

“Well, it must be easier to have a conversation with people you know well,” you’re thinking. Guess again. A speaking activity is usually anything but, because the students never take the initiative to talk. They expect you to ask them questions for an hour to which they can give “yes” or “no” answers. For example:

“So. Tell me about yourself,” I prompt. Strangely this job has made me feel like a therapist.

“My name Ali. I’m live in Istanbul. My job engineer. Mmm…………...finish.”

“That’s it. That’s all you can say about yourself.”

“Yes, teacher.”

“OK, you do realize this is a speaking activity, right?”

“Yes, teacher.”

“Which means you speak and I listen.”

“Yes, teacher.”

“OK, so go ahead.”

Blank stare, dumb smile.

“Ugh,” I sigh. “What’s your favorite color?”

And so it goes for the next hour, pulling teeth like an army field dentist. The worst is when only one person shows up and they have no knowledge of English at all, and you have to sit there for an hour and attempt to have a conversation with this person.

The speaking activities are exacerbated by the fact that the assigned topics get recycled after a month or two, if they change at all from one week to the next. I could work with that no problem, but the assigned topics are usually subjects that you can’t talk more than 5 minutes about: “Should children have pets?”, “Do you like animals?”, “What’s the worst part of living in a city?”, “Do you help poor people?”, “Are there any dangerous animals?”, or “Does money make the world go round?” (the answer is always “Yes”). Sometimes I ignore the topic altogether, but that still doesn’t make the activity that much more exciting. It gets even worse when advanced students come to beginner activities, as they dominate the conversation and cause the beginners to revert to having the advanced student translate for them. A bit contrary to the point of the speaking activity.

Sometimes one can pass off unwanted activities to coworkers feeling particularly sunny on certain days, but this rarely happens. Which means you usually have to endure the hour of non-conversation with the hope that you won’t die of complete boredom and you’ll survive to chalk it up on your hours sheet.

Death by boredom, and dried out by lack of student creativity

Well, I can’t complain too much about the activity, as I have gained one valuable skill from it: now, after over a year of such speaking activities, I know, with confidence, that I can have a long conversation with anyone on the face of the planet. Even a brick wall.

The resting place of those native speakers who met their untimely end in activities

*Photos provided by a trip to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum*