School Daze

Classes started up again today at the ol' Dilmer Language School, conveniently located in Taksim, the center of the city. This is my second month at this school. I go 9am to 1pm every week day. I waffle between deciding that we are covering a lot and covering very little. Every day, I am confronted with duality, for lack of a better word, in Istanbul. It is both expensive and cheap. It is both modern and traditional. I don't think that I can say that it appears one way but actually is another; this is a different phenomenon. I don't think I will ever really "know" this place. I just can't figure it. I am always looking for clues.

OK, Dilmer. I realized today that I am going to a school that, if it was located in America, would have ads on the NYC subway. Ads with lots of smiling foreigners looking foreign (and being really excited about that fact). The school occupies one small building, and each classroom (one per floor) looks exactly the same. Same calendars on the wall, same Ataturk photograph. From what I have heard from students at other schools (Bosphorus University, Tomer), Dilmer moves the fastest and is the most lenient in testing. The school seems to be fairly evenly split between Russians (and ex-USSR republics), French & Italians, other Europeans and Americans. My class has nine students, five of whom were in my class last month. The class is now comprised of three Americans (myself, a guy named Tim who is planning on living in Istanbul for awhile, Benjamin the very smart ex-Four Seasons chef), one Dutch person (my friend Jenny who is engaged to a Turkish guy), a new Canadian guy (from Vancouver, so nice to hear that accent as it reminds me of my dear friend Colin - he is a freelance advertising copywriter whose hires himself out as a fixer of mangled translations), a Russian (this somewhat annoying guy named Andre who always wears the strange same highwaisted jeans and a belt that says "Boss"), a new quiet woman from the Ukraine ("Natasha"? - very doubtful), a new lively Italian woman named Veronica (who replaces the previous lively Italian Veronica - she is studying anthropology at one of the Universities in Istanbul), and the very bright and mathematically-minded Korean woman. She has the most amazingly methodical notes - they are all color-coded. Astounding.

Today I started out feeling really encouraged; the class felt really fun and enjoyable. We have Zeynep again, who is a really nice person, very cool, and a patient teacher... I know I like her as a person. And she speaks very slowly. One strong incentive to learn Turkish is to be able to talk to Zeynep, really talk to her. However, as it continued, I felt this sinking feeling that it was going to be simply a continuation of last month. Don't get me wrong, I learned a lot, but by the end I felt a little frustrated... I felt like we did far too much of the same. And yes, yet again, the lesson continued its well-worn pattern. We started off speaking in short sentences around the room. We talked about what we did yesterday or, as we just learned the future tense, what we plan to do. Do we plan to drink coffee tomorrow morning? (of course) Are we going to walk around Istanbul? (guess so) How will we get home? (ah, yes, again my six options for getting home.) Yeah, yeah, it is all worthwhile but I think we need to expand our horizons. We need to talk about more than just our most mundane existence. I don't think we can get into politics or religion quite yet, but I need to talk about more than just taking the boat to school, really. Hopefully I will be able to report a change soon. I have my fingers crossed.