Travelling Teacher

Originally printed in Good Teacher Magazine: Term 2, 2009, pages 35 – 37

Just to bring you up to speed. Lomlf and I are spending a short time in Marrakech looking after a couple of classes.
We have had one trip through the souk or market. Pretty scary and the weather was disgusting.

So the the following day we talked about the tour experiences we’d had the previous day. We talked about the effect tourism has on the economy in this area. Also how the downturn in the world economy is going to create long term hardship. Most people are on the poverty line. Remove even part of their income and they drop into the starvation area. (more…)

Originally printed in Good Teacher Magazine: Term 1, 2009, pages 32 – 36

After setting of from, Cappadocia as per my last musings, LOMLF and I arrived in Istanbul 18 hours later.

The bus trip was uneventful apart from the dog that was run over by the bus and the driver’s complete disregard for the rules of the road.

In Turkey they are meant to drive on the right side of the road but it seemed that our driver and all the others that we passed, and who passed us, had forgotten this.

The rule apparent was that you drive in the middle of the road and only pull over to the right when someone is coming the other way, or if a faster vehicle comes behind you and gives a polite tap of the horn, normally of 30 seconds duration. If you are coming to the brow of a hill then “ensha Allah” applies (“if God wills”). So it was only by the “Will of God” that Lomlf and I arrived at all. At the third or fourth near miss you tend to relax in a dazed adrenalin depleted stupor and allow life to wash over you.

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