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Welcome Traveller
Here at Joel's Journal, we are constantly striving to find ways to make your browsing experience as delightful as possible. To that end, our staff has spent the last several hours tagging the most interesting entries according to their topic. We hope you will enjoy clicking on whatever topics below catch your fancy, and then scrolling down to see ( Read more... ) -
Mehmet U WHAT?
Today the Turks are voting, so I have a holiday. I may be a foreigner and ignorant of the complexities of Turkey's volatile political scene, yet I have still determined without a doubt who should win: Mehmet Ufuk Uras.
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Snowboarding and Eating my Face Off
The last time I wrote an entry for this journal, I was on the bus coming back from my border run to Bulgaria. That trip marked three months on my Turkish visa. This week I bought airline tickets to Malta, where I will spend my second border run with Keelty and Australian Jim (known to my students as Hamburger Jim, because in my improvised sentences ( Read more... ) -
Bulgarian Border Run
I am on a sleek new Metro Tours bus, riding home to Istanbul after a restful four-day exile in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Plovdiv was known to the ancient Romans as Philipopolis and to readers of the New Testament as Philipi. It was an important outpost of Byzantine power after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and was later a centre of Bulgarian ( Read more... ) -
Photos from Turkey
Life has been moving along at quite a clip for the last couple months. I have taught every single day since the start of December, and have regularly been putting in over 40 hours of work a week, not counting prep time and marking. I have worked every day, that is, except for a delightful two-day holiday at Christmas, spent making eggnog and ( Read more... ) -
Istanbul: Ölümüne kankayız!
Last night, I dreamt I was in Constantinople. From the slender spires surrounding me, the soulful strains of Allah's praise spilled out across the city. They bounced off the marble edifices of pashas' palaces, reverberated down labyrinthine lanes bustling with the most robust rug and spice markets in the world, rolled over the cool gardens of the ( Read more... ) -
Bidet me this, Istanbul!
Today is my first day off since I started working, and I'm relaxing in my big new room at the teachers' residence. It's on the third floor (which is really the fourth floor since Europeans can't count) and far enough above the street that I'm no longer woken up by the mournful song of every passing street sweeper. The high ceiling of my room was ( Read more... ) -
Merhaba from Istanbul!
It has only been a week and two days since I left Canada. I always marvel at how many more days seem to cram their way into a week when one is in a new place and doing new things. I'm now in Istanbul and have been since early Saturday morning, but before I even arrived here, I had had a week overfull with visiting and adventuring, so naturally I ( Read more... ) -
I have sat in airports guarded glass and chrome.
Tomorrow, I leave for Turkey, with stops in London and Köln.
Why Turkey? Why indeed. Perhaps pictures, with their vaunted verbosity, will do a better job explaining than I will.
( Stolen pictures of my home-to-be, that offer, I hope, some explanation for why I want to go to Turkey. ) -
Accident prone and heading for the Middle East
I almost stapled myself in the medulla oblongata today. Last week, I stood on a roll of plastic and slid off a roof into a pile of shingles. The week before that, I shot a three-and-a-half-inch nail lengthwise through my thumb and into the palm of my hand. A couple weeks before that, I tried to swat a blackfly while using a pair of electric hedge ( Read more... )
