Two months in izmir: what I did so far 🙂
Hello people! I am Vincent, a nineteen year old german who is doing a long term ESC-Project with Pi Youth association in izmir for one year. To start this blog post, I would like to divide it into “work” and “freetime and general life in Türkiye”.
My life in Türkiye
I am currently living in izmir, more specifically Buca, which is a part of this beautiful city. I’m sharing a flat with another long term volunteer from France and, most of the time, also with short term volunteers. Although we are living kinda far away from the center of izmir, I already made some good friends, who are living close to me. Given that, I really am enjoying my free time here, rather it’s with my Turkish friends or with the other volunteers.
I already went to a lot of places here, like The Atatürk Museum, The Clocktower and the bazar of Konak, as well as ice skating in Bornova, just to name a few. From the second day on, I really loved Izmir, my fellow volunteers and my life here in general. Despite all the good things, there are also some challenges of course. For me it’s a really difficult task to eat healthy and well balanced, especially cause I am vegan 💚. But I already got a solution for that problem, thanks to a really friendly and lovely vegan organization, which I got to know at a fair at Kültürpark.
Speaking of that, I have to also mention the fair in early september, where we participated as representatives for PiYA. It was an international fair for young people, with a lot of really amazing NGOs and cool programs and events in general. The first week, we only spent our time there. Since it was in Kültürpark, which is a huge park in the middle of Izmir, we also were able to visit Luna Park, also located inside Kültürpark. Lunapark is an amusement park, where there are lots of rides and all of that stuff. For the german readers, it’s also kinda like “Volksfest”. So if we just wanted to have some fun, meet young people from various countries or participate in different kinds of events, that was the place to go. So to summarize all of that, I can only say that I really enjoy living in Izmir, especially thanks
to my amazing fellow volunteers.
Work
So speaking about my work, I have to start from the beginning again. After the week of the international fair at Kültürpark, I started my first workshop, which I continued to do every monday since then. At this workshop, I try to speak and teach English to children at Buca science and art center. The first time doing it there, it was together with my two roommates at that point. Also some of the other volunteers joined, because it was the first workshop in general for us, the new volunteers who just arrived some weeks before. Despite that, it was a really good and interactive first session with the kids. After that, I either did that workshop with one of the short term volunteers or, since recently, with another long term. Personally I really enjoy the experience I gain at this workshop, because it’s a completely different target group than the one I am usually working with.
The second workshop was a german conversation club, which I also love doing, because of the nice people I am meeting there. Since I started doing it with one of the other germans, I met a lot of people with decent to almost fluent german and I even made new Buca friends.
The second german conversation club, that I have not been doing anymore since the end of october, was (obviously) not as enjoyable, mainly because it took me almost three hours or even more to get there and back home again. So it was not the best idea for me to facilitate a workshop in Bornova, when I have to get there from Buca. For the most part, I do love doing and also preparing my workshops, and I obviously will continue all of them in the following months if possible.
So to end of this blog post, I wanna share my three favourite turkish expressions with you:
“Gerek yok”, which means like “no need”, “sıkıntı yok”, which means “no problem”, and “afiyet olsun”, which means “enjoy your meal”.
Alright, that’s it for now, see you in two months 🙂