This week has been a hard week. Not in a terrible way, just one of those weeks that's a bit of a slog to get through. Whatever country you live in or work you do, everyone has these weeks from time to time and we're no exception.
It's mostly been small things. A couple of situations, which aren't problems but are somewhat uncertain and where we don't really know what the best thing is to do, have been playing on my mind.
An odd post-Christmas week where we feel slightly caught in the middle between British Christmas culture, where Christmas often seems to last into the week after Christmas Day and where the pace of life usually slows down between Christmas and New Year, and Istanbul culture, where even for those who celebrate Christmas, it was just a normal week.
Three days of solid rain-slash-sleet when I was itching to get outside and get some fresh air. We did get outside, but somehow taking J in his rain gear for a walk on a pavement in our heavily built up part of the city didn't really compare to the optimistic plans I'd had of a day trip out to a forest for a walk. And of the two friends I have who both live super-close, have children about the same age as J and are my go-to people for rainy day play dates, one is out of the country and another has had a virus.
Three power cuts and a water cut within a 24 hour period (possibly related to the bad weather), one of which started twenty minutes before it got dark, lasted nearly four hours and finished 15 minutes before a friend arrived for dinner.
Why am I telling you all this? I'm not complaining (honestly!) and I could give an entire list of things to be grateful for, both silver linings of the things mentioned above and good things that have also happened this week. But there are a few reasons.
One, the small niggly things that that don't seem important enough to mention when someone asks how your week was, but cumulatively seem to add up, happen wherever you are. Just they may look slightly different for us.
Two, this blog is about giving an honest impression of life here, the ups and the downs. I don't want to paint a picture of life here being either swimmingly wonderful or absolutely terrible, neither of which would be true. Our life here is mostly very mundane and normal and therefore it's these small things that probably have the biggest impact on our daily life here.
Three, just in case there's anyone who is labouring under the false impression that people who move country also get an extra dose of holiness along with their plane ticket, I'd like to disabuse you of that myth. We do get more grace when the burdens grow greater, but that happens no matter what country you live in. We have the same temperaments and personalities that we had in the UK. Please don't think that people like us are spiritual super heroes! We're really not :-)
