Life as Usual...

"Here comes the sun...do do do do...Here comes th..." fumble fumble SLAP!

And so starts my new morning routine - waking up at 6:45am each morning to go to my new job waaaay out in Cubuk (for my Canadian friends, that's like living in Mississaugua and working in Toronto only without the traffic jams).  The commute to my new school takes about 1 hour.  Sometimes a little longer if we have to stop for fuel on the way.  Kinda strange that.  Even the intercity buses feel no compunction about stopping at a service station with a full load of passengers to re-fuel...takes some getting used to.

So, let me tell you a bit more about my school. The school I now work at is called Yukselen Kolej.  It's a K-8 private school.  Although 'kolej' translates to college in English, it really denotes private school.  There is nothing more special about this school than any of the state schools (ie. public schools) other than the fact that most classes are small (22 to 24 students) and that they have foreign language education (state school starts in grade 9 whereas we start in kindergarten). Another difference is that our kids at the kolej are spoiled and without discipline.  We have 6 classes of "newcomers" (those that studied at different schools the previous year whether state or private) - and you can really tell the difference between a newcomer class and the returnee's class.  The newcomers are eager to learn, polite, and respectful.  My colleagues say this will last only this year and then they too will develop that dreaded "chip on the shoulder".  So, enjoy it while it lasts they advise...

The school itself is fairly large by Ankara standards.  We have 2 big buildings each with 4 floors.  B Blok is brand new and just opened this year - it is for the Upper Primary kids (5-8), A Blok is the older building and it houses the K-4 kids.  Each building has it own cafeteria and canteen.  The food is catered by an outside company is refreshingly delicious and healthy.  We also have an outdoor swimming pool and large playground as well as a covered gym for football, basketball and volleyball complete with bleachers for fans!  We can have all these facilities because we are so far from the city centre so we have a lot of space.  To be honest we are in the middle of farmland.  Real farmland.  Complete with cows and their related smells...

The students and teachers are bused to school with our own private servis company.  Instead of the big yellow school buses we are all used to, Turkey has little white mini-buses that seat anywhere from 16 to 24 kids.  These little mini-buses are much easier to maneuver in the narrow twisty streets of the city centre.  We have a fleet of 50 minibuses for our kids.  They start collecting kids at 7:30am and we are usually all at the school by 9am.  At night, all the buses leave at 5pm.  Each day there is a servis that goes near the downtown area which leaves at 1pm - so when I have my half day, I can get home by 2ish!  The servis drivers are all really well dressed too - I don't remember my bus driver back in high school ever wearing a suit and tie to drive but that's the norm here!