Yes, it's Christmas time!!!...

After seven years in Turkey I am finally in Romania for the Christmas. The Christmas atmosphere is present everywhere, I missed this a lot. In every shop, supermarket, or wherever you go you can here carols, there are at least two huge Christmas trees in the center of the city, see one here.

I will spend the Christmas this year with my parents here in Romania and I will be off for Ankara for the New Year's Eve. I may go to UK for a few months next year starting in January.

In this part of December most companies organize Christmas parties for their employees, I uploaded some pictures here from ours. The party was at "Carul cu bere" restaurant, a very old traditional place.

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In Ankara after almost six months

It has been almost six months since I left Ankara and now, I am back here with may family for some time. I am working from home - I love my new job - it is so decent.

First thing after I recovered from a long trip (18 hours by bus from Bucharest to Ankara) it was to go with my family to a Turkish restaurant. I uploaded some pictures I took with my phone's camera, not very good quality but illustrating the specific of a very nice restaurant in Bahcelievler, 4th Street: ÖZ URFALI. This is very close from where we stay.

What is for sure is that you can eat very good, very nice restaurant and reasonable price, something that it is very difficult to find in Bucharest. The service is very very good, you just look to another direction than the plate for a second and somebody will come and ask if you want something... They have an electronic system for warning the waiter but you never get to use it...

I always prefer to go to the fast foods in Bucharest because wit the other restaurants you can never know what you gonna get :-) We have so much to learn...

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Artist family... except me

All members of my family have some talents and I have none. My only hobby and job is informational technology.

Gean started to go to piano lessons and so far he is going very good. He knew more then ten colors since he was three. Once, I went with him on a Saturday to a client and he asked my son "What color is this pen?" without expecting something different than black or a basic color. He said "gray". He could also name "light blue", "dark blue" and tones for other colors at an age when children cannot name more then three four colors.

Zuhal, apart from being a painter she takes canto lessons now and she plans to sing in an opera. She will open a personal painting exhibition on February.

I like photography very much but I cannot say I am an artist. I have seen pictures taken by Zuhal and they are much better than mine. Having an artist eye and talent is not something that can be compensated by work.

Few days ago I was speaking with an artist couple, both violinists. I was so happy to see that there are still so innocent people in any matter regarding computers, technology and things like this. They do not look at technology like a goal, or something to be desired but merely a mean to do something. World will still be beautiful as log there are still artist delighting us with their innocence and playfulness. Life is a game after all...

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I am an enemy of Turkey

At least according to my mother in law.

During her visit here in Romania, in July, I was accused by my mother in law that I hate Turkish people and Turkey, and that I did not appreciate what Turkey offered me in seven years of staying. She cut short her visit and took the plain back to Turkey.

I was shocked and even if I do not want to accept, it affected me a lot, specially that it comes from a person I love and I thought she did also. I learned from this that I should not take other person's affection for granted and learn to control what I say. I learned actually a lot in Turkey but I will make this the subject of another story.

Looking back of what I did, here are things that contribute to her reaction (some of these can be amusing but believe me, it may not be amusing for a Turkish person).

Most of the problems came from our talks regarding the EU membership. The current government in Turkey is trying to get into negotiations with EU regarding their membership. This is not seen with good eyes by many Turkish people who consider the "please take us into EU" attitude a mistake ant that Turkey is much better than any other European country. My mother in law is one of these. However I considered her an open minded person and attacked her opinion more than once. There are many things in Turkey that are far from being even close to European standards. She argued that there are bad things in any of the EU countries and they are not taken into consideration and everything is just politics. In the end it does not matter who is right, it looks like she was not as open minded as I believed.

I called the Greeks "our Greek friends" more than a couple of times - related with the fact that they are also in EU and most of our vegetables come from them (and not from Turkey which is also exporting vegetables in Russia and less in EU). Turkish people do not like Greek, they still have a lot of arguments and Greeks have an open aggressive attitude towards Turkey. I was just trying to take the mickey...however I did not anticipated such a reaction. It looks like I really did not get used with they emotional reaction of Turkish people even after seven years...

I actively refused to drink any Turkish tea. I know this seems to be amusing but believe me, it is not. Drinking the black Turkish tea is part of the Turkish culture and tradition. Having a breakfast without tea is hard to imagine and drinking tea in any occasion is usual. Refusing it all the time could have been taken personal. It is like refusing whatever I have got there for such a long time. Actually when I turned back here I was thinking that I will continue to drink it as I got used every morning to have at least one. Maybe I would have had if I had a machine like Jean Luc Picard to say "tea, Earl Grey, hot" and have it ready. However I quickly switched to cereals with milk, it is just easier to have it in the morning rush. I think people here are less attached to habits and traditions and more with rationality and practicality.

I may have done many other things that I am not aware of and may have upset her...

I had many experiences in Turkey, some of them not pleasant, maybe I will write more about these at another time. Even if not pleasant, these experiences were enlightening. I do not hate Turkey or Turkish people and I felt really hurt to be considered one. The better half of my family is Turkish after all... I've had a good time there and I will continue to have...

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It's been a long time...

Yes, I haven't updated my blog for months and so many things happened, I do not know where to begin... maybe because so many things happened my brain was so busy that I could not sit and look at what happened, it was a kind of rush, stress, plans, emotions of a new beginning mixed together.

As I told you before I was starting to grow more and more unsatisfied with my previous job, mainly because of the way I had to work, to many things at the same time, so stressful, my brain could not cope with the effort of trying to do so many things as good as possible. The problem is that I am a perfectionist so even with so much work I was trying to do everything as good as I could. With a different attitude I am sure I would have done much better... the Turkish attitude :-)

The natural consequence was that I decided to go for another job. There was no much to choose in a government city like Ankara and I was getting more and more concerned about what I could do. I was getting phone calls from Bucharest because of my CV being posted on eJobs.ro but I did not go for any of these offers. However after 1st of January 2007 with the EU join, the IT market in Romania started to move so fast that I realized that I will probably find something in Bucharest much better than any jobs in Turkey. I started to get better offers and I decided to go for one of them.

So, since 14th of May 2007 I have been working in Bucharest for Perot Systems. Together with moving to Bucharest lots of problems came, like finding a flat to rent in Bucharest (not an easy job), updating my documents - expired ID etc, getting used to a Bucharest so much different from what I knew - so much crowded, noisy, hot, aggressive, expensive...

Getting the necessary documents for Zuhal and Gean to get here (visa) was another annoying story but thanks to my flexible job I could manage to make time for everything.

Zuhal came in July to Bucharest for one month and we had some time together here, with good and bad experiences. There are photos from our trips here. Unfortunately bad ones prevailed so we postponed for an undefined date her move here. So I am alone here and Zuhal continues to work at Hacettepe University. Even if we disagree about what we should do in the future we are working on a solution. Any suggestions?...

In the meantime we see each other about monthly. I have just came back from Cesme, Turkey, where we had a nice holiday together. Photos here.

Gean is starting a new kindergarten at Hacettepe tomorrow. Next year he will go to school.
The kindergarten is just next to the Fine Arts department so he goes together with his mother to school.

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Move to Blogger

I decided to move our family site to a free service and after I evaluated different online presence platforms I choose Blogger. This is mainly because they support custom URLs so I could use our domain name. Also the integration with Gmail and other Google tools is good, I like Google - read article on my work blog here. I moved the content from our old site here, except the photo area which I will move to picasa shortly. The old site is still available here but as soon as I move the photos I will delete it. I did this because the features and the space offered by the free platforms are very good and I do not have to struggle with a custom scripts, php, web hosting providers etc. I am happy with Blogger until now and I am sure Google will come with more features in time.

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