In January I came back from Spain at the beginning of the month. After almost two weeks it was good to see everyone and go back to my routines here. We also received some new volunteers which was nice too. I really liked my workshops in January because I was doing workshops that I was really passionate about. I had my spanish conversation club which in the last months had been amazing but unfortunatelly there were less and less participants. In the last week of January I had prepared a “tour though Madrid” which went really well. Other than that I had an Aikido-workshop, which in the last month didn´t go too well but which started to be a lot of fun as I got some reagular participants. This was particulary nice because I was doing something else than only conversation clubs. My english conversation club on saturdays continued to, which is great because I really love this workshop a lot 🙂
One thing that became very present and important in my life since I have been here, are languages. Of course this is not a surprise because if one moves the country and works and lives in an international context languages become automaticly more important. Frist of all we do almost everything in English (this report for example 😉 ) and the biggest part of our jobs is it to give people a environment to practise their speaking. A part from that, living in a country of which you do not speak the language (to any extend) makes things quite complicated. In the last three months I have been more and more serious about learning turkish for real. This of course is a difficult task, as learning a language always is and I did not have a real plan of how to learn a language mostly on my own. But all this experience teaches me, in general, that languages are an amazing ways to comunicating with other people and can be a real complication too.
What I also started to do in January is my first hobby-afternoon-course (?). I started to take dance lessons which is nice because I wanted to do it for a long time. Apart from that living here has not changed to much. I still love living with my roommates and spending time with other volunteers and people I met. I started to spend more time with my mentor and we did some activities like a (kinda) pottery course with other volunteers. We also started to go on more tours in Izmir on the weekends for example to Çeşme, Urla or we went hiking in the mountains behind Karşıyaka. Sometimes I get into such a routine that I get a little bored and want to do something new so these activities were already a good start on that.
My Workshops in February were unfortunatelly the most unexiting yet. My Aikido and spanish- workshops got cancelled and I got two new german cc´s at the beginning of the month and one at the middle. This made my schedule rather simple and it was especially hard to come up with new ideas when I had to do two german conversation clubs on two following days with about the same level. The last german conversation club I got was a nice surprise though.
Because it is at an high school (the most beautiful one too, I believe) and we have a class of 13-15 year old students (and quite a lot of students too) this is a very new experience. But I must say that the work there is a lot of fun and the students are quite respectful and although the communication is hard sometimes, it is a nice workshop. Other than that, February is a very short month. From my daily life nothing really changed in comparison to January. Still my major objective is to learn turkish and to have new experiences and meet people.