Vertebrate Diversity: The Birds

Our speeches

Our speeches

Our chidren, our games, our dear Europe

Turkey

May
WOULD YOU LIKE TO DISCOVER A MAGIC WORLD?
POINT WITH YOUR MOUSE AFTER THIS SENTENCE.

Welcome to the ancient world!

Discover Turkey with Can & Canan and find out lots of information. The two friends know everything about Turkish food and the Turkish language as well as about sports and cultural and school life in Turkey. Are there special plants and animals? How important isreligion? Which are the silliest prejudices about Turkish people? Find out! And by the time you get to the chapter about the sea, you'll want to go on holiday to visit the beautiful cities! Have fun!

The Second Part to Julio´s Mum´s letter

As we got to know the Turks I struck up a conversation with Eliv and the Turkish English teacher who were going to be our housemates for the week and we made plans together. This was of course all in my atrocious English-cum-sign language. We bid farewell to each other as we headed off towards our different houses led to an odd feeling which I don’t know how to describe, maybe it was anguish or worry... if it were a taste, it would be a mixture of garlic and black pepper. If I were to describe it as a colour, it would be grey. The idea of us going to stay in a family home filled me with admiration, maybe I feared the unknown too. We were invading our hosts privacy and my head was overwhelmed with odd situations involving surly and sullen people... we felt like we might be a bit unwelcome. On top of all that, my English was literally the equivalent of ‘Me Tarzan. You Jane.’ Our house would be home to the three of us plus another Turkish woman and a Polish woman. We didn’t say anything to each other but our respect for each other was palpable. Everything changed upon arriving at the house: a boy ran and hid from us and Julio smiled upon realising that there were other children there too. The family introduced themselves and gave us the children’s bedroom which was presided over by Messi and some other player from the Spanish national side (I am sure Julio would remember his name). They had just won us over!

While there are so many memories from this trip, I will never be able to forget our host family. They were so lovely and so sweet; the parents and four blond and blue-eyed little cherubs! The eldest was fifteen, the middle ones were eleven and seven and the baby of the bunch was just five. They wanted to learn everything about our lives and customs! The eldest daughter knew English but with her parents and siblings were had to resort to mime and we managed between my Hungarian dictionary and their English one.

I can’t put my finger on the names of the cities that we visited, nor the brick-built churches that were less than two hundred years old nor their stained glass windows to which I paid no mind. However, I will never be able to forget the curiosity in the eyes of our host family, or Julio’s joy in playing with their children and how they communicated with just a ball and gestures or sometimes with Google translate. Oh and breakfast! Sharing wry smiles over Nutella and the ever-present rose-hip tea, yellow peppers without even a drop of olive oil or a pinch of salt, apples that they had given us for our mid-morning snack that came from their apple tree. How could I ever forget the cold while walking towards the school where we were meeting everyone else! Or the people on bikes. Or the married couple making dough together. Or the eggs from the kokorokos (chickens). They kept the chickens in the run, which were of course very different from our own because they were tiny and had dark feathers, which they later made into stew. I also had a lot of respect for the grandpa because he was such an entertaining and funny character. There was a mutual love for each other in a sense because nobody tried to talk above anyone else; the smell of the house still lingers on in my mind. It was heaven.

It took a lot to get used to their household’s schedule - we would get up at 6am! They took breakfast together as a family and they were also very punctual. We were up first and would wait for the others. We never have time to sit down and eat breakfast together at home in Spain as we struggle to get a move on and get out of bed. As such, we always end up in a rush and the kids eat on one side and we eat on the other side. In Hungary we would eat lunch at 12 o’ clock and have dinner at 6 on the dot. After dinner was the best bit though because we’d continue to get to know each other and understand each other’s lifestyles.

I didn’t form incredibly intense relationships with the Turks and the Polish. I became good friends with Eliv and the Turkish English teacher but the Polish woman staying with us kept herself to herself but I did bond with the Julia from Poland over music.

I reminisce a lot about the boat trip we took on the river Danube, the long chats we had in the military museum or in Kecskemèt, the climb up to the top of the bell tower and the toy museum... but I am left with certain tastes and, above all, I established close bonds with other people. The teachers were wonderfully kind. I had a splendid time with the other mums - there were so many smiles and we had a mutual understanding. It was so much fun getting to know them better: Nati has loads of anecdotes; Ana Hai’s mother was like Mary Poppins (her rucksack was full of useful things to get us through the day - biscuits, sweeties and clothes); David’s mother was my official Spanish to English interpreter and I discovered a lot about my mother that I didn’t know before.

I believe that we all learnt a lot about ourselves that we didn’t know before. I didn’t know how good I was at improvising on the spot, nor was I aware of my ability to mime so well, nor how my lack shyness would help me to understand the great gaps I would have in English. Julio for the first time understood the importance of travelling and he could appreciate the need to learn English - he really wanted to be able to understand and make himself understood. He will certainly miss the hallway ball games that they played that of course I would never allow. I was ‘Mum’ to two girls on the trip, Julieta and Ana Cea, but we were adopted parents to all the kids on the school trip. We were one big, happy family.

Although we were only there a few days, there was such a good feeling amongst everyone and I miss it. I am kind of sad that life has to go on and our Comenius journey seems further and further away. It would be great if, after a while, Comenius reunites us all and takes us back to where we went in Hungary and we could relive certain moments from the heady pace of that week.

My advice to you all: travel because if you don’t you’ll just die en route! Think of the sounds and smells, the fatigue, the faces and feelings, the laughter and the sobbing when you have to say goodbye...

LETTERS TO OUR HUNGARIAN FRIENDS

 

Publish at Calameo or read more publications.

islam ( islamic spain) is the origin of western civilization

Muslim Spain

Islamic Studies in Granada, Spain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vOGxzFngdc

Turkey (National Geographic video)

Hi guys! I know that Primary 5 and 6 are studying a little bit about Turkey and I found this really cool video. I hope you find it as interesting as I did!

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/places/find/turkey/

Traditional Turkish Dress

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Easter holiday! The upper stages in school are already back to work and are busy preparing presentations on Turkey. This blog entry from Alvaro, Laura, Irene and Bruno is about traditional Turkish dress.