ne var ne yok?

in the interest of keeping with my new year's resolution (to learn turkish in 2009), i am going to try to include some on the blog from time to time, as you can see in the title of this entry 'what's new?' typically you would respond 'iyilik sağlık' (i'm in good health), or 'söyle böyle' (eh, not much). but i have a lıttle more than that to report.

so far 2009 is off with a bang. ben and i have already made a dozen or so home-improvements, the most exciting of them being our new hot water heater. up until now, our hot water heater has definitely fallen under 'one of those burdens you deal with when living in a developing nation.' they are very different here, and the one we had ran on natural gas. it's mounted on our kitchen wall, and would only work when the pilot was burning. with natural gas you don't really want to leave it running all the time, so we would turn it off when it wasn't in use. this was a pain. also, in more recent weeks, it became harder to turn on, and would only stay on for about 5-10 minutes of use. this is less than ideal when you are in the shower, and especially if you are home alone and in the shower (let's just say it's rather unpleasant to have to walk to the kitchen, wet and completely nude, sometimes covered in soap, shampoo in your eyes, and stand there for about 5 minutes holding the button until the pilot would light). this for us was cause enough to consider alternative methods for heating our water. then on new year's day, we read the newspaper and the situation became a bit more serious. seven college students had been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, a few kilometers from our house, on new year's eve. the chimney from their apartment had become clogged (mind you they were using natural gas for heat and hot water), and they were all asphyxiated. extremely tragic, and scary, and upon reading about this ben and i jumped in the car to check out electric water heaters.

4 guys came to our house last night to work on several projects ben had solicited their help with, and two of them installed our new beautiful hot water heater. let me just say, showering this morning (uninterrupted, for as long as i wanted to) was bliss. ben seemed more pleased with his new high-definition projector that they installed... to each his own.

in other news my turkish class is going great. the 3 hours fly by every day, and i feel like i'm really learning the language. there are six of us in the class, five americans & one italian, and we enjoy chatting about living in turkey about as much as we enjoy learning turkish.

in middle eastern news, we are watching the al jazeera network nightly and praying for the civillians of gaza. al jazeera has correspondents inside of the strip, and their coverage can be very graphic but also seems to be the most accurate. it is hard to watch and believe it's really happening in our region of the world. we pray for a swift and peaceful resolution between israel & the hamas.

i guess that's all for now... hoşça kalın! (bye)