It's been a long time....

I know, I know, it's been ages since I blogged. I think the last time was in November and I got caught up with my travel plans and excitement which took me off course from blogging. But the holiday is now over, so I should get back to blogging and report a bit about my time away.

I headed home to Melbourne on 12 December with a suitcase full of warm weather clothes, only to need to borrow my mum's flannel's and mocco's. It was certainly not warm times downunder. But it warmed up in the week leading up to Christmas and we had a few hot days here and there to warm the bones.

I had some great catch ups with friends and family. I took a couple of day trips to visit friends down the coast in Dromana and Phillip Island and stuck my feet in the sand. I don't think I've had that many bbq's in a very long time. There is nothing like a barbie at home cooked by your dad on his old skool barbie, i.e. not gas. It's oh so tasty.

Man I missed the food back home. I miss the massive variety and options when shopping and dining out. The quality of the produce is so fresh and easy to find. From Italian and gelato in Lygon St to Vietnamese in Victoria St to Sydney Road for middle eastern, nothing beats it.

We had a delish meal at Gingerboy for my sister's birthday which was asian food like I have never tasted and oh so yummy.

After Melbourne, I was off to Singapore for three days with my sister. Singapore is always great. It never lets me down. Great shopping, great service, amazing food and so easy to get around and do things. We ventured out to the best shop, Daiso. We went to the largest Daiso in Singapore, with something like 30,000 sq feet of everything for $2 a piece! Love it! They have absolutely everything you can imagine from stationary to storage containers, chop sticks to deodorant, chinese tea sets to table cloths, and asian food items to cleaning products! I walked out with two big bags full of stuff for less than $100 Singapore dollars. Love a bargain. So now I am writing letters on my stationary, eating lunch from my new lunch box and eating that lunch with my gorgeous chop stix!

So now here I find myself back in Istanbul, holiday over, winter and snow well and truly set in and dreaming of the warmth of far away places like Hawaii and Thailand. I really was not built for this weather. I find the cold so difficult to deal with, especially at temperatures around -4 which it has been this week. Although, it is still such a novelty to me to see snow falling as I never saw it fall before I came here in 2007. The landscape totally changes once a blanket of snow cover Istanbul. The trees look beautfiul and you can really see and understand where the hill in Istanbul are, especially from the 14th floor of my office building. Unfortunately, with the snow comes dangerous raods (and drivers!) black-outs, gas-outs (yes, our gas went off for hours on the coldest day!), slush and mud.

Just another day....

It's cold and gloomy and winter has arrived with a massive delivery of rain. I was forced to drag the massive bag of clothes from the cupboard into the second room and pull out the contents of my closet and replace it with the contents of the bag last night. The bag contained coats, jackets, 6 scarves, 2 pair of gloves and loads of handmade socks from my mother in law, as well as the few my mum had sent me made out of New Zealand possum fur. I then packed the bag with all my lightweight cotton skirts, sandals, flip flops, t-shirts and singlets and said goodbye to them for another eight months. That is how long it will take for me to be wearing them again. How depressing.

So this morning, while trying to feel upbeat about my somewhat "new" wardrobe, I put on my coat and scarf and felt all warm and wintering. I had thick opaque tights on with my ballet flats. I walked out to the car where I found the car park at the front of our apartment block under water and wondered how I was going to get into the car. My new found joy for winter was washed out with the şerefiz (prick) driver who drove by and sprayed a huge puddle of water up my leg even though I was holding out one finger (not the middle one, although I wish now it was!) giving him the "one minute" signal. It's days like that I just want to go back inside and stay there and tell my boss "it's all too hard, I can't come today".  

It really beats my brain senseless about the lack of visible drainage in Istanbul. Like, where is water supposed to go when it rains when there is no drain in the ground to take it away? I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that it will flood if water doesn't have a place to run off. I am tired of jumping over puddles, being sprayed by cars and having water end up in my shoes. And it's not just out the front of my place. It's everywhere in Istanbul. No town planning or infrastructure. Which is what lead to the horrible floods not long ago where lots of people lost their lives and homes. Sometimes I really wonder who is doing that job.

Over the weekend I was with the girls shopping up a storm at Kapalıçarşı (Grand Bazaar). You couldn't escape the rain or associated problems there either. The rain caused an electrical fault and the power went off for about half an hour. Of course, it happened while a friend and I were checking out the latest designer bags in a shop below ground which meant that there was not even any natural light and we were the only two females in the store. The first ten minutes were a tad scary while we continued to rummage around looking at bags using the faint light source of our mobile phones. Gosh, how desperate were we??  

After the electricity returned and we finalised our purchases, we headed back into the main part of the Bazaar were we saw some small shops that had flooded and everywhere you looked you saw shop owners sweeping away water from their doorway or laying down newspaper to soak it up. 

Although it was raining and wet everywhere, the heart of the Bazaar was well and truly beating with tourists and locals bustling about, shop keepers wheeling and dealing their wares and restaurant workers and simit sellers filling hungry shopper's stomach's. It's all part of life at the Bazaar. Even though I live here, going there is an experience each and everytime, and it makes me feel alive and like I am really living Istanbul life.  

Changes

Everything seems to be changing. The weather, the season, and also the time. The change in time kinda skipped me by, and as I reached for my mobile phone on Sunday night to check the time, I thought to myself that it was time I got my good self off to bed. It was 10:30pm. My stock standard bedtime.

As I set my alarm on my mobile phone it didn't once occur to me that maybe my mobile phone didn't update itself. The alarm is set for the same time each weekday;07:45. So I just pushed "ok" and turned out the light. Then at so called 07:45 on Monday morning I woke up and it was dark; darker than I expected and darker than what I thought was normal. After glancing at my Digiturk box, I realised it was in fact only 06:45. Argghhh.

The end of daylight saving also marks a huge time difference between me and Melbourne. It is now a total of 9 hours difference which makes calling and catching family at a decent hour much harder than normal.

Today as I write this post, it is dark out and cloudy. It feels like night could fall at any second. We have started turning on the heat at home to cut the chill that is in the air when we arrive around 7pm. The weather forecast for this weekend is a low of 8 degrees, apparently. What a shock to the system that will be. I need to pull out my bag of autumn/winter clothes and start changing them over from the thin cotton skirts and lightweight tops I have, to the long sleeve shirts and lined winter pants and skirts.

I remember last year that winter felt like it went for about 6 months. I hope this one passes a lot faster than that. It will be nice to experience a summer for a brief time in December when I get back to Melbourne. Hopefully that will make my winter here seem shorter and easier to get through.