School Days

Who would have thought that I would be spending 20 hours a week in school??  After much deliberation, I decided that it would be worth it to invest half of my first month's time learning Turkish.  Soooo, it's back to school!  The first picture shows you one of my first assignments (remind you of 1st grade??).  I am in Intensive Turkish (first level), and there are 13 of us in my class.  We are varied in our backgrounds and purposes, and it's a lot of fun getting to know everyone.  Below you'll see pictures of my classmates.  The first picture shows (from left to right) Ulugbek (a businessman from Kazakistan), Esma (from Afghanistan), Maggie (Taiwan), Mahmoud (Jordan), Tarouq (Iran), Sharron (England), and Tony (China).  In the last picture, you'll see Shafieh and Nafiseh (both Irani), Veronika (Maldovia), myself, and Sachika and Akiko from Japan.  Mahmoud and Tarouq are only 17 years old, and both are trying to learn Turkish so that they can go to a Turkish University next year.  Ulugbek has his own business and is a builder, Sharron has a Turkish boyfriend, Maggie majored in Arabic in Taiwan, and the others are quite varied.  When we were learning numbers and our instructor was having us tell our birth years in Turkish, mercifully she arbitrarily assigned both Sharron and me to the year 1985!As you can imagine, it's pretty amazing to be spending 4 hours a day back in school.  We're going at a good pace, and I'm hopeful that I'll have a passing understanding of Turkish at the end (insha'allah).