An indulgent trip down motherhood lane...and a little on change and identity

I realised - as I went to show a friend some photos of Yashar on the blog recently - that I am well overdue to put some more photos of Yashar on here!    This is him at our new local cafe (which is fantastic by the way - if you live in the area it is definitely worth checking out - great coffee and the owner is very much into providing delicious food with good quality ingredients - Molka in Yenikoy).

One of the questions I like to ask other mothers that I meet, is whether they think it gets easier to look after their child as they grow up.  The responses I get are very mixed!  I'm always surprised that so many people swear that it is either just as hard or that it's getting harder.  

In my own experience, I'm  finding it much easier to look after Yashar these days.  I think that this is for a mix of reasons, not all to do with Yashar!  When I first had Yashar it was a huge time of change for me - I moved from working full time as a lawyer in Melbourne to being at home full time and when he was only 3 or 4 months old, moving to Istanbul.  I was struggling with finding my direction and a new sense of my own identity.

As much as I loved being here and found it such an amazing and inspiring place to be, I did find it quite an adjustment.  I knew only a very small amount of Turkish, I wasn't used to the cultural differences, didn't know the area and didn't have any help with Yashar for the most part as my husband's family lived quite a distance away ...too far for dropping in for a few hours to give me a little break - as much as they would have liked to.  And then there was the sleepless nights, the crying... the usual exhaustion of caring for a baby I guess!

Now Yashar has grown in to this amazing little boy - smart and gentle, and by 3 year old boy standards, very well behaved!  Life has changed for the better.   He brings happiness and pure joy to my life everyday.  From simple things, like a totally unfiltered pure grin, and the squeal he gives seeing a cat on the street, or that he just decides to make me a 'present' by wrapping up one of his toys and presenting it to me.

Wow...I had just meant to write a couple of sentences!...Thank you for indulging me.  I'd love to hear what your think and about your experiences...does it get harder or easier?  What does your child or children do that brings pure happiness to your life?  When have you gone through times of big change in your life... what did you do to cope and how did it work out!?

The New Year - a year for inspiration and connection

Well here we are! As usual I am full of optimism, ideas and dreams. Just even more so at this time of year! I am hoping for a year full of time with my family, creativity, bucket loads of inspiration and I hope to share lots of it with you!

Thank you so much for your emails and comments for Christmas and the New Year.  One of the things I like most about connecting with you all is the inspiration and motivation it gives me. There are so many wonderful and amazing people in this little world of ours - talented artists, smart business people and, so importantly, the people that are there encouraging and believing along the way.  So thank you!

Last weekend I had the chance to meet up with Renai, Keryn and Rose - three people I have connected with through blogging, 2 of whom I had never met offline before.   It was so good to be able to meet them face to face...to talk about our ideas, our plans and experiences, motherhood, travel and living in Turkey. 

Above is one of many gorgeous illustrations by Rose Deniz and to the left is one of the beautiful fabrics that Keryn uses in her cards handmade with Japanese fabric (and with a new range featuring fabrics from all over the world).

Totally inspiring.  And it reinforced to me the importance of connection - for everyone, and especially for mothers, freelancers, indie business people and people that like to create.

I hope to explore this more soon and I would love to hear from you about how you connect with others and what it brings to your life...or anything else you have to say about it of course!

My new blog address

Welcome to my new blog address! I'm so glad you're here!

I remember my very first post over at a pink canary's nest when I talked about change. At the time my husband and I had just moved to Turkey from Australia with our little boy (he was 4 months old when we moved).

Only 5 months before that first post I was just finishing up at my job as a lawyer in Melbourne, struggling to fit in anything suit like for a meeting, sipping on my lemonade at the after-work drinks, wondering what I would do if I went into labour at work! Strangers would smile at me in the street and offer me their seat on the tram and I was busy preparing for the birth of Yashar.

I had high hopes and dreams about what was about to come. I wanted to be a good mother and to raise a happy, healthy and content child. I also hoped that this would be my chance to really live a creative life. To explore what I enjoyed and find something that I truly cared about doing. I wanted to be inspired. And most of all I wanted to build a happy and fulfilling life for my family and I.

So here I am, ready for more change! Moving closer to making those hopes and dreams a reality.

Thank you to everyone for your support, encouragement and inspiration along the way. It has been a wonderful (if at times a little bumpy!) year.

Victorian Bushfires

I have been hearing from my family about the horrific fires that have been burning in Victoria and have been reading about them in the paper. Even though I am so far away I still feel the shock of something so devastating happening so close to 'home'. My heart is heavy and my thoughts are with all of those affected by the fires - the family and friends of those that have died, the people that have been injured and the people that have lost their homes.

Donations to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal can be made through the Red Cross Australia website.

Another favourite...

One of the highlights of our trip back to Australia was being able to see an exhibition of my great grandfathers work on at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Before moving to Turkey, Senol and I spent many weekends with my Dad framing prints of my great grandfather's work. It was a wonderful time for us - up in the mud brick studio, which is surrounded by gum trees and garden, far away from the noise of the city where we spent our weekdays. The only sounds would be the birds calling out, the occasional possum on the roof or the classical music that would usually be on quietly in the background. Senol would cut the glass and prepare the backing boards, Dad would make the frames and I would cut the mounts. We would spend time together deciding which frame would suit a particular painting and which mount would bring out the colours of the artwork. And of course there were plenty of coffee breaks.

Now every Sunday we go down to our favourite coffee place and I love that they usually have Mozart playing and I think of Dad and miss our weekends framing together.













After spending so much time framing prints it was wonderful to see so much of great grandfather's work 'in the flesh'. The vibrancy of the work is what struck me most. And I was able to see many paintings that I had never seen before. I also loved seeing the development and change in his work when he started painting the Flinders Ranges.

This is the little summary from the Gallery's website:

One of Australia's greatest artists, Hans Heysen (1877-1968), is celebrated with the first major retrospective of his work in three decades at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The Hans Heysen exhibition features more than one hundred works created over the artist's seventy year career.

Born in Germany in 1877, Hans Heysen emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia with his family at the age of seven. After four years studying in Europe, Heysen embarked on one of the most successful careers in Australian art, becoming synonymous with the Adelaide Hills town of Hahndorf, where he worked and lived.

The Art Gallery of South Australia holds the largest and most representative collection of works by Hans Heysen, including more than two thousand drawings, oils and watercolours bequeathed by the artist himself. Included in the exhibition are many of Heysen's greatest oil and watercolour paintings, alongside rarely-seen
preliminary sketches and studies.

Testament to Heysen's national standing, the Gallery has borrowed masterpieces from every major collection in the country as well as from many regional and private collections, to tell the story of Heysen's art. In addition to his iconic ‘gum tree' paintings, the exhibition takes a fresh look at Heysen's lesser-known themes. Hans Heysen traces the artist's development from early student days painting in Europe from 1899-1903, including images of Paris and Venice, to the revelation of barren
landscapes and ancient mountain forms in the Flinders Ranges from 1926.

The exhibition will be touring Australia for about 2 years, including going to the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia.

PS. Recently Sharon, creator of the website Expats Moving and Relocation Guide, contacted me about putting one of my stories about living in Istanbul on her site. The end result - 'Manyak Misin?' - a post I wrote after one of my early driving experiences here is now on her website. Sharon sounds like she has many interesting stories to tell as well - she has been an expat in the US, Venezuela and Canada.

We are back from Sweden and glad to be home. Actually I was discussing this with Senol in the taxi on the way back from the airport - about whether it feels like he is coming home when he gets back to Istanbul - and, strange as it may seem, we both agreed that it was like coming back to our second home. Australia (Melbourne to be exact) still rates above Istanbul for that coming home feeling even though Senol was born and grew up in Istanbul.

Stockholm was refreshing. It made me think about and compare the positives and negatives of Istanbul. So if I had to generalise -ok I don't have to but I will anyway! - I would say that Stockholm is more organised, has way less traffic, has cleaner streets, lots of bikes (yay! Sweden is very environmentally friendly as far as I could see) and excellent education. Stockholm also has a ridiculous number of tall, thin well dressed people in that very Swedish, thick rimmed glasses, designy, slim pants kind of way. Do you know what I am talking about at all here??? So cool.

But there was one thing I really missed about Istanbul - it was all the love and attention Yashar gets from everyone. Here in Istanbul every time we go out and about Yashar gets smiles from everyone. If we go to have a coffee the waiter or waitress will come over to say hello to him and play a few little games with him and will often pick him up and carry him around to say hello to all the other staff and customers! We are stopped on the street every single time we go out by people wanting to say hello and tell me what a cute little boy he is. In Stockholm, it was kind of sad to see him waving away at people as they went past, his eyes bright with anticipation, and often they would give him nothing back. Of course there were some lovely people we met in Stockholm that were friendly with him, but it was no where near the kind of attention he gets here. Children are truely adored in Istanbul.

Stockholm is a gorgeous city, made up of many small islands so that beautiful water views are intertwined with the city streets. This post is starting to get essay like though - so more on what we got up to next post!

the namesake

One of my sisters recently sent me a surprise gift in the mail. It was the amazing book by Jhumpa Lahiri called the namesake. I flew through the book (woo hoo! Another step closer to achieving the '28 things I want to do before I turn 29') - it was a fantastic, easy read. Very briefly summed up: it is about the Ganguli family's transition between India and America and it explores themes of dislocation, heritage and escape from that heritage.

Although the story told in this novel is quite different to my own situation, I found the passage below particularly striking. I often found myself thinking about it and how Ashima's thoughts fitted in with my own experience.

Ashima has recently arrived at the hospital, soon to give birth to her first child.

Dr. Ashley pokes in his head from time to time. "No need to worry," he chirps, putting a stethoscope to Ashima's belly, patting her hand, admiring her various bracelets. "Everything is looking perfectly normal. We are expecting a perfectly normal delivery Mrs Ganguli."

But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen months, ever since she's arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. It's not so much the pain, which she knows, somehow, she will survive. It's a consequence: motherhood in a foreign land. For it was one thing to be pregnant, to suffer the queasy mornings in bed, the sleepless nights, the dull throbbing in her back, the countless visits to the bathroom. Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing discomfort, she'd been astonished by her body's ability to to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmother and all her great grandmothers had done. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved, had made it more miraculous still. But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.

Interview with expatinterviews.com

I am excited to say that the people over at expatinterviews.com recently came across my blog and asked if they could interview me for their website. The site is run by Victor Volder, who lives in the Netherlands and Lizza Capucion, a freelance writer who lives in the Philippines.

They interview expats and are particularly interested in "what motivated people to live in another part of the world, how they generate their income, how they manage to live there, and what they’ve learned from their experiences in a land that's become their new home."

To check out the interview, including some of my thoughts and tips on moving to Turkey, click here!

And a big thank you to Victor and Lizza.

Manyak misin?!!!!

If you have ever been to Istanbul you will know that sometimes the traffic can be pretty crazy here. My favourite Turkish phrase at the moment is 'Manyak misin?!!!' that is 'Are you a maniac?!!!' I have managed to drive a few times here now (of course with Senol directing me every step of the way). The first couple of times were surprisingly easy. No near misses, no incensed drivers bashing their horns.

The most recent time was a little more stressful! Lots more traffic, cars darting in and out in front of me, narrow streets winding up steep hillsides with Audis and Mercedes parked on one side and sheer drops to the other. Let's just say that it ended with @#$@!! and me throwing the car keys at Senol! Hehehe - very funny...in retrospect.

So this morning we decided to take a more leisurely form of transport and caught the ferry from Yenikoy to Eminonu. It was very early in the morning and was gorgeous and refreshing.


The visit to the Police Headquarters for my temporary residency was not quite as relaxing. It's a funny old place. All the Turkish police women are gorgeous, you have to line up early for a number and then wait around for hours in crowded hallways while the Police go outside and have long smoke breaks. The visit ended with two Russian pros sizing me up in the hallway.

Ahhh...is this the sweet life in Turkey???

And she's back!

Wow, that took longer than I thought. We have been busy moving, buying new things for the apartment and generally getting settled... and I have been totally mesmerised by the views. I often look out and can't believe I'm living here!

There is, however, a price to pay for these views. Let's just say that we now have no need to go to the gym. Poor Senol went up and down these stairs so many times with our things that he has already lost weight! (conveniently Yashar always needed looking after at exactly those moments)

It's pretty steep around here. No gentle strolls allowed. But still I love it! The area where we are is so close to Senol's work but has a little village feel. The neighbours are friendly and the kids play soccer every evening on the street. Vegetable sellers make their way up the hills every day yelling out 'green beans! tomatoes!' as old ladies emerge from their gardens to buy something for dinner. Plus soon I will have a very toned up husband!

Since we are moving soon, I thought I would show you a few pictures of the area we are living in at the moment. It is called Velibaba, on the Asian side of Istanbul.

Some parts of it are gorgeous. Lots of houses, especially the older ones, are often painted gorgeous vibrant colours (although sometimes not so gorgeous!).

A lot of the neighbours have been here for a long time and know each other well. This is both good and bad! It is very safe, with kids out playing in the streets all the time. On the other hand it means neighbours are always dropping in! Now personally I don't mind the occasional unannounced drop in at all (although I know some people hate it!) but sometimes it can really get to be too much!

Some parts of the area are modern, some have a village atmosphere. You can see a shepherd herding goats right next to large modern apartment buildings.

A lot of the buildings are old and ramshackle, built and extended bit by bit as families grew. Lots of new apartment buildings are being built. Health and safety standards are a little different here! You might not be able to tell from the photo but these guys are six stories up!

.

People are always out walking around here, which I love. In the mornings there are so many groups of women out walking together. You can see in the photo my mother in law and Aunty taking baby Yashar for a stroll. One of the great things about living here is that when Yashar wakes up early my mother in law takes him for a walk while I have a sleep in. How good is that!

It is my duty to shop!

Great news! Senol (my husband) accepted a job offer and that meant we got to sign up to rent the apartment we wanted! I am both excited and relieved! The apartment is a bit old but has gorgeous views of the Bosphorus. It is in an area called Yenikoy, a beautiful green part of Istanbul that I am looking forward to getting to know better. We had a good chat with the owners of the building. When they first moved there, about 40 years ago, the whole area was just full of quince trees. Now the area is part of busy Istanbul, but it still has a little village atmosphere I think.

So, since we have just moved to Istanbul from Australia we will need to get everything for the apartment - woohoo - it is now my duty to shop! So I scoured the internet for some inspiration. I was thinking Danish design, some cool second hand/collected things, timber, handmade, not too over done and not like a store catalogue -and I couldn't find anything like that -until I found Emma's Blogg. It is fantastic! So much inspiration in the one spot! All of the photos in the post were found on her blog (wish they were mine!)
Now I just have to find stuff even half as cool! Tried to find some second hand/collected type things today, but no luck so far. It seems that buying second hand just isn't the thing to do here. Usually when I ask someone if they know a good flea market in Istanbul (in Turkish 'Bit Pazar') they look slightly incredulous and don't really understand why I would be interested when I could buy new things. I think there must be good stuff somewhere in Istanbul, I just have to find it! I will find super cool second hand goods even if it kills me!

Let's get started!

Spring is here…time for spring cleaning, getting organised and change (crazy style) …like moving to Turkey with my husband and 4 month old baby! It also means I am going to start sharing a few things with you ... like things that I make (crafty stuff mostly), yummy food, great books and a bit of my life here in Turkey. I have enjoyed reading my favourite blogs for a while now and they have been such an inspiration. I hope you enjoy mine!