Time flies - how is it December tomorrow?!
I started back at language school yesterday, doing the course that L did last month. My class seems quite different in make up to his. L's class included a few people who'd lived here a couple of years already and so spoke the Turkish that they did already know confidently and almost fluently. That changes the whole dynamic of a class while my class doesn't really have that sort of people in it. This month I'll be doing a lot of relative clauses and indirect speech. Until I started learning Turkish, I'm not sure I knew what a relative clause was (the unfortunate result of going through the British school system at a time when the powers that be had decided that teaching grammer was a bad idea). But my English grammer has definitely improved over the last few months!
My teacher also informed us yesterday that we each had to do a 15-20 minute presentation in Turkish, which wasn't really a surprise as L had to do one in his course. Mine's next week, so I've been busy starting to draft that - I had grand ideas of doing it about utilitarianism and how people usually make their decisions on what will make them happy, but then showing how there are some fundamental problems with this philosophy that acts as many people's de facto moral compass. But then I came back down to earth and realised that communicating those concepts in a way that is easy to understand is pretty hard in English, never mind in Turkish.
So my brainwave yesterday was that it is almost December and therefore will soon be Christmas! Perfect timing for me to talk about a traditional English Christmas, which means that I can also talk about the reason we celebrate Christmas.
On a different note, the weather here has been decidedly English the last couple of days - cold and very wet. So other than a couple of excursions to go splashing in puddles, J's spent a lot of time inside. But he hasn't minded too much - a friend who has young children and very conveniently lives a 5 minute walk from us came over yesterday. Interestingly, there aren't really any volunteer-run toddler groups like there is in the UK, and as the weather's been getting colder, that's something I've found myself really missing. Today J spent a long time playing with his coloured rice, pouring it from one container to another (or just straight onto the mat) which was a great way to entertain him other than the fact that the rice seems to get everywhere. We resorted to hoovering the rice out of his cot in the end...
