How my life is going during summer in Izmir
Hey there! It’s Vincent again, a 19 year-old German who’s doing their long term ESC Project in Izmir right now. I’ve spent the last ten months here and I’d like to report a bit about the last two months. Similar to my last blog-post, I will separate this one into “work” and “free time”, starting with the “work” part.
Because of the increasing heat here in the summer and the universities closing down for summer break, it has been pretty chill recently with the workshop situation. A lot of places where I did workshops, like schools or university related facilities, were not continued in the last two months. Therefore, as of right now, I only have one workshop that I’m doing regularly.
This one is the one that I basically, with some breaks, did since the beginning. Despite it being pretty long and exhausting, I always really enjoyed it. The children are really cute and it is a great pleasure to try to teach them a little bit of English while simultaneously having fun with some games.
I most enjoyed preparing and facilitating the workshop with one of the other French volunteers, cause we form like a dream team, which is great for working together with so many children. So when I now had to do the workshop with someone else, I didn’t feel that comfortable in the beginning, cause I knew that they had a different way of engaging with the participants. But as time passed, I adapted to that and realized that there is not one “right way” to do this kind of workshops.
And I would say that was one of the learning, regarding work, I had last month. Sometimes, although you have a completely different workflow than your “coworker”, you can still make things work with them, if you just communicate correctly.
Concerning other workshops, I had one at a high school, which has sadly stopped right now.
But, at the time I facilitated it, it was great. We played a lot of games and energizers with the high-schoolers, had interesting discussions and had them present some of their ideas to certain topics. In general, it was a great two hours every Thursday.
The third and final workshop for May and June that I did was at Ege Üniversitesi, a university located in Bornova. That one was particularly interesting, mostly because of the theme. It was separated into two groups, one as a plain English conversation club, the other one with the topic of Women’s rights.
Although we didn’t have that many participants for the second one, and we only really did it once, I still had a great time talking about feminist ideas and concepts and hearing the opinions and takes of our smart participants on those topics. The workshop was, again, discontinued because of the summer break, but I believe that they will definitely implement it next semester again. And if not, it is up to the new volunteers to suggest such an event 🙂 As for work, apart from the workshops mentioned above, I was only a substitute for some workplaces when the other volunteers were either sick or had holidays. I did one conversation club in German, which honestly was kinda improvised cause I was just told to do it a few hours before it was supposed to start. Other than that, I had a good time with one English workshop with kids. It was in Sakin Mekan Agora, a center in Konak, which is close to the city center. Although the children didn’t speak that much English, I still managed to communicate pretty well with them, even with my broken Turkish. It was a really enriching experience, especially because they were really engaged with us volunteers.
After all of those reports of my work, I obviously also wanna mention some things that I did in my free time. One of the most amazing things being my sister visiting me here in Izmir. I have always had a really good connection with her, so I enjoyed every second of her stay and my holidays. We were exploring a lot of Izmir and the surrounding places like Çeşme, which is highly recommended if you ever come to Izmir.
After a week here, we went to see Bursa for one day before going to Istanbul. Before going here, I wasn’t aware of the fact that Bursa was so beautiful and packed with amazing people. Especially there, we met such nice and hospitable people, like our host, who gave us Turkish coffee and an amazing Turkish breakfast in the morning, or a Palestinian, who served us the most delicious food in his little restaurant. In conclusion, I just wanna say that Bursa is kinda underrated and definitely worth a visit.
After Bursa, there was Istanbul, which might be my favorite city in Türkiye. Of course, there are a lot of people and it can get really, really crowded. But apart from the well known attractions, like the spices and the Grand Bazar, the huge variety of mosques and other historical places, there are also so many cute neighborhoods and little streets to explore. We stayed in the beautiful Balat, for roughly three days.
Following those days full of sightseeing, the real adventure began. We went to Pamukkale, with its hot springs and, of course, its hot air balloon tours. After debating for a while, we finally decided to take a tour, which was a bit expensive, but definitely worth all of the money. There was an amazing view, we had an incredible feeling floating on top of the springs, surrounded by clouds. It was the best completion of that beautiful trip and I would recommend all of the mentioned places, as they are definitely all worth the visit.
To conclude that blog-post about my last two months, I just wanna say that I’m enjoying every part of my life here in Türkiye. Despite some complications concerning work, it went smoothly up until that point. Right now, as the workshops get less and less, I get reminded that this year also, slowly but surely, comes to an end. This gets me thinking about my future, my return to Germany and all the amazing experiences that I made here and that will most likely help me a lot in my future life. But I am most thankful for the relationships I made here through my volunteering. I would have never guessed how I would meet such lovable people here.
And I think that that is the most difficult thing for me to let go. The opportunity to see all those amazing human beings almost every day. Luckily, some of them are also returning to Germany with me, some will also most likely be still very close to me. And despite all the distance that will be between us, I think we are united through this year and there will be plenty of opportunities to meet again.
So that’s it for me for now, maybe you will hear from me again in the future, who knows. As for now, it has been amazing months for me and I just wanna thank everyone who helped me on the way 🙂