The idea being to make the most of it. So this weekend (said day is Sunday) I arranged to meet some students from Wall Street and friends at a park in the city. The theme was Meet and Greet (with the added incentive of speaking English).
When the chosen hour of 1.30pm had passed and there was no-one about I started to worry but wasn't overly concerned as it was a lovely day and I could just sit and bask in the sunshine.
But to my relief people started straggling in soon after. Now I know the Turks are like the Colombians - time is a relative concept. To be fair to them though a bunch were on time just they didn't happen to be at the same place as me.
Still in the end it all went swimmingly and 8 out of 12 appeared which nicely exceeded my expectations.
I'd been dreaming about how I would run the show and what I might do to break the ice and get people comfortable to talk. In addition I was telling myself that it's their event and to not be overly concerned if it goes in a completely different direction.
In the end I needn't have worried as we ended up with plenty of Chiefs and not many Indians. Of course that had it's problems as well. People were looking to me to lead which would have been fine but I wasn't going to compete over it so I left that to the Chiefs. Things got a little stressed but we managed to find a nice place to sit, eat and drink. Tea was ordered as well as toasted sandwiches as that was pretty much all that was available.
During the afternoon Turkish and English blended nicely together and I think people got something out of the day. My hope was that on top of the chance to practice English the locals got the opportunity to meet some new people.
There were a couple of cameras out in use so I'm off hunting for some pics....
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