No, there is no hidden lolcat.

Instructions:

1. Stare at the center of this window as long as you can (at least 30 seconds)
2. Click the ‘Continue Reading’ link below

What you should see: My job!

If you managed to stare at the window for more than 4 hours in one sitting, congratulations… you have more of a tolerance for it than I do!

Turkish Kumpir, heaped with toppings

Yes, it’s a baked potato Turkish style! In addition to the standard butter and cheese, they top them with a variety of things including: black and green olives, pickles, sausage bits, Russian salad, corn, chili paste, mayonnaise, and/or ketchup. Despite the fact that there’s not a bacon bit to be had, they’re still pretty delicious and filling. We got these in Ortaköy, near the Bosphorus Bridge, which seems to be home to at least 20 different yet entirely identical Kumpir stands, so you should have no trouble tracking one down.

Is that... meat?

The McTurco seems to be the McDonalds answer to the Turkish Kebab… some form of flat-bread, shredded lettuce, a tomato slice, and… beer coasters? What are those things?? They look like a very large, very flat Chicken McNugget… and even those probably contain only 1% real chicken. After taking a bite I looked at what I had just eaten… there were little air bubbles throughout what looked like bleached wood pulp! Ugh… I think I’ll be sticking with real kebabs from now on!

Billy says: “What’s the point? Why don’t you just get a real job and then travel. The premise does not match the actual outcome of the show. You guys come off looking like a bunch of morons, aimlessly wandering. Who the hell would want to live like that? Stupid.”

This may be the only negative comment I’ve ever seen left on this site, so instead of simply ignoring it or burying it as spam, I think it deserves a post of its own and a response.

If you’ve spent any time on this site, you’d know that we all had real jobs… careers even. Before I joined Jet Set Zero, I spent three years as a Software Engineer. Needless to say, I took one hell of a pay-cut to join Jet Set Zero and work more hours for less money with almost zero job security. Who would want to live like that? I do, and an amazing number of other people, judging by the number of applicants we get on a regular basis!

The problem with real jobs, as you call them, rarely afford the opportunity for extended travel. A paltry two to three weeks of vacation is barely enough to visit family during the holidays. Combine that with the pressure to meet constant deadlines and move up the corporate ladder and some people find themselves not even taking what little vacation time they have. What traveling with Jet Set Zero has given me isn’t money, it’s time… which IMHO, is much more valuable, but most people don’t realize that until it’s too late.  Yes, we do still have to work, but the jobs we work now are just jobs, not careers. They also put us smack in the middle of the country and culture which we’ve chosen to learn about and have helped us meet wonderful friends and have led to great adventures. What little money we earn still manages to cover rent, food, and fun, and when we’re ready to move on, our jobs are never the things holding us back.

Don’t just take my word for it, here’s Jen to explain why she joined Jet Set Zero:

I also had a ‘real’ job back home.  A job that I absolutely loved, but I wondered on a daily basis what else is out there in the world?  I was given the unique opportunity to become a part of Jet Set Zero and I jumped on it.  I had a thirst to learn more about what was in this world, the people, the places, the food…..  I’ve traveled in short stints before and I find you never really get a feel for a place.  You go to a place and you see the tourist sites just because you have to and that’s all you do, then you go back home to your normal life.  You never REALLY learn about the place you’re at.  So there you have, my reason for living an impoverished life is to spend time somewhere to learn about it and to understand it.   – Jen

The Conrad Hotel on Victory Day

Apparently, today was a national holiday in Turkey; Victory Day to be precise. It’s a celebration of the Turkish victory over the Greeks at the Battle of Dumlupınar, the last battle fought in the Turkish War of Independence.

Although we did notice the increase in the number of flags around the city in the days prior, we might have overlooked it entirely if the sound of helicopters hadn’t caught Brian’s attention. We went out on the terrace just in time to catch 9 helicopters and the start of a parade of naval vessels down the phosphorus strait. The parade was lead by a naval destroyer, followed by four submarines, four smaller cruisers, four bigger cruisers, and then a host of miscellaneous military boats.

Enjoy the photos from the day!

A Turkish submarine on The Bosphorus

Choppers in the distance

A close flyby

Istanbul, Decorated for Victory Day

Soldiers stand at attention on a Turkish naval ship.

A few months back, my laptop decided that I no longer had the correct brand of power adapter and therefore it was no longer going to charge my battery. It will happily turn on when plugged in, but unless it’s sure my power adapter is a Dell (and it is), its going to guard access to my battery closer than a farmer guards his twin daughters. The only logical reason for this is that Dell brand power must be the electronic equivalent of sipping Cristal while generic brand power exists only to be chugged liberally by frat-laptops. Whatever the case may be, I decided to give replacing it a chance, so I had my family ship me the spare I’d left at home back in April. Yesterday, a man who only spoke Turkish came to our door and had Rob sign for a white slip of paper, also entirely in Turkish, that seemed to say that my package was somewhere within the city limits.

Here’s where the fun begins! Today, my boss had to meet with a customer for about an hour, so I figured I’d run out and pick it while he was gone. I dashed down to the bus stop and hopped on a Metro bus towards what I hopped was the right address. I was a little off, and needing to be quick, I hailed a cab who drove in what can only be described as large figure eights towards my destination, finally dropping me off at the cargo processing center. Once inside I showed the slip to a number of security guards who directed me to a long dingy looking hallway with 9 different numbered windows and a general atmosphere like a combination DMV/Hospital. I could detail each of the 6 separate lines I stood in and the 5 different documents I shuffled between windows, but it would take as long as the experience itself. In short, it was explained to me that any package with a declared value of over 100 Euros had to be picked up at this location so that a 10% customs tax could be assessed. Unfortunately my package had been declared as 105 Euros ($150 USD), so not only was it not delivered to my doorstep, I would have to pay 23 TL if I ever wanted to see my box again. Explaining that the contents of the box were barely worth 23 TL didn’t seem to matter much to them, and when I asked to speak to a customs agent I was just told: “You don’t need to talk to him”.  In the end I conceded defeat and paid the 23 TL customs fee and attempted to collect my package, only to be sent back to the first window to pay a 2 TL ‘service fee’ for the assessment of the customs fee!

Finally, two hours after leaving work, I walked out of the cargo office one package heavier and a total of 46 TL ($30 USD) lighter. Luckily my boss had a good sense of humor about it and didn’t mind me vanishing from the office for a good chunk of the day. The lesson learned here is that bureaucracy is alive and well at the PTT (Turkish Post Telegraph and Telephone) and you should always declare the value of your package under 100 Euros if you want to avoid a similar fate.

Join us again for Volume II, if and when the package that Brian had shipped out here over a month ago ever arrives!

Up until now, commenting on a post meant either filling in your name and email address each time or registering for an account on our site and keeping track of another password. To make things simpler (and because we’d love you to stroke our egos by commenting more), you can now log in with any Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace, AOL, or Yahoo account! Read on for instructions:

New Users

If you’ve never registered for an account on our site, the process is simple.

Login Widget

Either click on the ‘Log in‘ link in the upper left hand corner of the site or find the new log in widget located just before the episode list in the sidebar to the left. Click on your favorite social networking application and give it permission to log you into our site. That’s it! Once you’re logged in, you’ll be returned here and ready to leave us a comment. You’ll also be able to edit your profile, if you want to change the way your name displays on comments.

Existing Users

Already have an account? You’re awesome! Still, if you’d prefer to log in using one of these social networking services instead, you can. You must be logged in to link an account!

If you’re not already logged in, just use the ‘Login‘ link in the upper left hand corner of the site or in the login widget to log in once normally (i.e. enter your JS0 user name and password). Once you are logged in, return to the home page and you’ll find the login widget now says “Connect Your Account or login using …” (if it doesn’t, refresh the page). Pick your favorite social network, authorize it, and you’re done! Your accounts are now linked.

Feedback

Like we said, we love comments… if you like or hate this new system or have any trouble at all, let us know. You can still register and log into regular accounts just like before, but hopefully that will become the less popular option once we iron out any kinks in the system.

Istanbul, Work and Home

We live in Beşiktaş, Istanbul, a quiet but central neighborhood near the Bosphorus strait; my job however is located in what feels like the other side of Turkey. It’s an area called Avcılar (pronounced Avjilar), and while it’s technically around the midpoint of the European side of Istanbul, it’s none the less a long trip. Every day it takes four buses, 6 Turkish Lira, and about two hours for me to make the round trip commute, which is why I’m really not very happy about showing up today and being told that the boss forgot to tell me he’s on holiday! Now I get to hop back on the bus and spend another hour playing Lemon-aid Tycoon on my cellphone. *sigh*  At this rate, you’d better watch out Jen, my lemon-aid empire is set to de-throne you as our resident lemon-aid tycoon!

The Interview

I was introduced to my ‘student’ on Friday afternoon and spoke with him for about 2 minutes before he decided I was hired. No CV, no credentials, no discussion of the specifics of the job… just hired. Normally that would throw up a red flag, but since I’d been told that he rejected the previous candidate after 2 minutes, on the grounds that ‘he was a crook’, I was already expecting it to be a strange interview process. It seems that this guy has already tried every method possible to learn English: classes, computer programs, flash cards, living in London, etc., and hiring a full time private tutor is his last resort. Rob described it best as being an ESL version of Mr. Smithers from the Simpsons. My job is to follow him around all day and work on his English at every available moment. If he takes a drive to a client, I take a drive to a client, if he has to fly to Germany on business, I fly to Germany on business. He even went so far as to mention that ‘if I drink Ayran, you drink Ayran’, which may be my least favorite part of the job description. (For those of you who don’t know, Ayran is a really popular drink here in Turkey made from watered down yogurt and salt… yum!) Still, it’s a job, and I won’t complain if I get a free trip to Germany out of it!

Day 1

My first day on the job came with almost as little instruction as the interview had. His former tutor had given me a thumb drive full of pirated ESL textbook PDFs and mentioned that the next lesson was supposed to be on Superlatives. I arrived at the non-descript (and rather decrepit) building and went upstairs to meet the man I’ll be tutoring for the next 3 months. We sat around for about two hours discussing the textile industry, fabric swatches, color fastness, rude French people, and the Russian mafia. All the while I attempted to note any grammatical mistakes he was making frequently or vocabulary he seemed to lack, but it’s pretty difficult to hold a conversation while taking notes on a parallel topic. I probably learned more about the process of producing a shirt than what I needed to teach him. Finally I asked him if he had a place for me to plug my laptop in so that I could pull up some worksheets to test him with. He lead me to a spare office and then just left me there for the rest of the day. I wasn’t sure if he was expecting me to come back at any specific time, and every time I checked in with him he was busy, so I sat around the rest of the day googling for advice on things like ‘correcting missing articles’ or ‘ESL student dropping prepositions’.  Some professional I am!

Day 2

I arrived on my second day expecting to dive head first into the private ESL tutoring world, feeling a bit unprepared and mostly just hoping that I wouldn’t run out of topics for us to discuss over the next 8 hours. The day has turned out to be a lot less eventful than expected. When I walked into the owners office this morning, the only person there was his young son, who just shook his head ‘no’ when I asked for his father by name. I took up residence in the empty office again and have been writing lesson plans, preparing quizzes, and generally researching ESL topics for the last 7 hours. About an hour ago the owner finally showed up and told me that he may or may not call me into his office in about 30 minutes for a lesson. Since there’s about two minutes left until my day ends, I have a feeling that the only person learning a thing about the English language today will be me. On the up side, his son has been bringing me drinks all day long so at least I leave here hydrated!