First Day of Work

After sleeping like the dead for 4 hours, I awoke about midnight local time and could not fall back asleep.  So I unpacked my bags and spoke to a Milwaukee friend via SKYPE.  My apartment is smaller than I expected.  We were told that we would have a 2 bedroom lojman but because of the growth of BLIS and the University, some of us are located in studio apartments that are not next to BLIS but in an area of the campus that is about 10 minutes away by bus.  We will eventually get the larger apartments as University faculty rotate out and the apartments become available. I have seen the 2 bedroom apartments and they are very nice.  The building I am in is very new and my apartment has a dishwasher and microwave which the older, larger apartments do not have and the bus is free to employees.

Bilkent University imports their faculty and teaches all of their undergraduate and graduate courses in English. So the university faculty comes from all over the world especially from North America and Europe.

While I was unpacking, there were 2 short power outages which I hope do not occur a lot.  I eventually got tired again and slept a few more hours before I got up to get ready for the first day of new teacher orientation which thankfully started at noon!  The first day of orientation consisted of filling out reams of paperwork, getting our teacher laptop and a meal with the school administration team.  I saw that BLIS is part of a huge construction site.  The school has really grown over the last several years, so they are building a new elementary school building which will be done for next school year.  Today it is a hole in the ground with a big crane in the hole!  The middle school building is about 4 years old and the high school building was built in 1997.  And the school is going through discussions now to become a 1-to-1 laptop school possibly as early as next school year.  At 5 PM, I and the other new teachers were tired again -- a reaction to jetlag and the altitude-- so most of us went back to our apartments to nap.  Tomorrow (on Saturday) the new teachers will go to a brunch in the city, ride the university bus around the campus to get used to where it can take us and then shopping at the nearby strip mall that has the cell phone store (TurkCell) and the REAL hypermarket (a store like Wal-Mart or Super Target that has groceries and lots of other consumer goods under one roof).  REAL is a Swiss company and the other nearby hypermarket is Carrefour, a French company.