The First Week in Afyon!

We arrived in Afyon on Thursday afternoon and the days since then have been a crazy blur of apartment shopping and furnishing, mind-numbing waiting on paperwork, and slowly but surely adapting to my new surroundings.  We still don’t have internet in our apartment…so Skype tours are going to have to wait while I get a lot of reading done in the absence of internet L 

That said, WE HAVE AN APARTMENT!  It is a three-bedroom flat on the ground floor near the city center. We’re right next to our real estate office, across the street from the People’s Republican Party (The CHP, Ataturk’s party) and near a variety of stores, bakeries, and cell phone shops J  The campus is set apart from the town, so it will be a 15 minute bus ride to work in the morning, but I definitely appreciate the location and ability to be in an apartment over the accommodations (aka dorms) that were closer to Afyon Kocatepe University. 

On Monday I taught my first lesson!  I will be teaching 15 hours in Hazerlik (the preparatory year of English classes many students are required to take between high school and college) and 6 hours in the School of Veterinary Sciences.  The latter assignment will be two 3-hour classes of conversational English taught to freshman students on Monday and Wednesday afternoons.  I did preliminary classes (introductions and such) in both of my veterinary classes this week but Hazerlik classes don’t start until next week (and don’t REALLY get into the swing of things until the week after that). 

I was told that, as students generally don’t come to the first day of school after breaks, I should go to the classroom but not prepare any substantial lessons plans as I would only have two or three students.   On Monday, I had 26 attentive freshman awaiting my every word and on Wednesday I had even more (and less attentive) students J  It looks like the classrooms are designed to fit closer to 60 students…so it should definitely be an adventure!  Even though there is a lot that is still unsettled, I feel a little better now that I have seen the classes and know what I need to plan for as far as levels/expectations and such.  Hopefully I’ll get curriculum and a class list soon too J I’m excited to start planning some more fun activities to get them engaged during class time! 

Although Afyon is definitely bigger than I expected, it’s still a smaller and easily negotiable city.  I’ve enjoyed seeing different parts of the town through our trips to events at our colleague’s homes and random wanderings. I hiked up the Hittite fortress in the center of the city on Sunday, and it definitely afforded some nice views of the city.  Apparently the legend is that, if you hike the fortress, you will stay in Afyon for 7 years (or forever, depending on the version you believe).  So…you might all be coming to visit me here for a long while J 

There’s so much more that I want to share, but more routine/informative blog posts will probably have to wait until we have internet in our apartment J I’ll have some pictures to share soon too!