Hello wonderful readers!
Here I am, typing away again, trying to keep up with a blog which has sort of gone by the wayside...As I type, Maria's kitty, Carmalitta, is perched on my shoulder, providing a tiny bit of warmth. Forget Istanbul in the fall, it's winter now, and getting colder. It has been raining most days for a couple weeks now, and the creeping damp has found its way into every pair of socks I own. Yesterday, after trudging through a puddle and collecting dampness up to my knees, I was forced to buy a new pair of socks--which also immediately got soaked. I'm wondering if it will snow anytime soon. Probably not. My fellow Istanbulites are scurrying about with winter parkas, boots, thick scarves and hats, indicating that they don't know what real cold is. When the fish-mongers start wearing mittens, I'll get worried.
Today I picked up my Little Blue Book, meaning I am officially a guidebook-toting, money-spending, sight-seeing tourist for the next several months. Maybe now I will have time to see everything I want to see before I go home! I hope!
I enrolled Maria in school on Monday, and she completed her first week today. Her uniform will require some care. The shirt is yellow, which means after 31 years of never having to remove stains from a yellow shirt, I have discovered a new skill I need to master, unless I want to pay for a new uniform shirt every week.
Maria is happily learning cursive in the other room, and the Friday noise from the neighborhood clubs and nargile houses has started. I think there might be a football match tonight, too. I heard something about Galatasary team and some sort of championship...I'm sure I'll hear the crowds if Galatasaray wins. I've been thinking it might be fun to attend a game at the stadium down the road, but I'm not sure, considering how wild the fans get.
Kitty has moved from my shoulder to inside my sweater. Might it be time to turn on the heater? No, it mightn't--not with the price of natural gas. Yikes! I guess that's what they get for importing all their oil products from another country. I'm starting to be more and more in favor of that decades-long dam project Turkey is working on.
Interesting factoid about Turkey, which I find rather interesting, yet slightly disturbing: All the bills--water, gas, electric, etc.--are delivered in a pile to the main entrance of the apartment building, and the tenants are left to sort through the stack and find their own. I'm not to keen to have everyone in the unit know how much I spend on gas per month, especially since ours was the most expensive bill in the whole apartment building (yes, I invaded all my neighbors' privacy. Does that make me a bad person?). The apartment manager also displays everyone's rent bill in a prominent place in the entry way, so we all know who has and hasn't paid, and who is horribly behind on their rent. It's kind of embarrassing, but great fodder for the gossip chain.
Maria has a new favorite candy. A couple weeks ago I discovered these little chocolate eggs with a surprise inside. Each egg has a little toy or plastic figure in a small egg inside the larger chocolate egg. I have been buying one for her every few days, and she is always thrilled. Her favorite so far has been a Smurf doll. I thought I had escaped from the Smurfs when we exited the 1980's, but they appear to be (back) in full force here in Turkey. I can only hope Gargamel finally gets his grubby hands on them and manages to eat all of them in a gruesome, blue-blood stained night.
That's all for now, thanks for reading.
This is me, signing off...
