Luxury Get-Away (When All You Want to Do Is Get Away)

Working at a luxury beach resort has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember. Now that I’ve finally done it, I can reflect a bit on the experience, which is, predictably, not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. The work of an “animator” – that is, a one whose job [...]

Read Full Post »

Management 101 – Notes from the Field

Things I’ve learned about team management that I attribute to reading Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s book, Confidence, while working abroad in Turkey. These are things I hope always to implement and never to forget: 1. Lead by example. If you want your team to work hard, show them the way by doing. There is nothing more [...]

Read Full Post »

Distrust in Friendship

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of trust in Turkey. Everyone’s always afraid someone is going to stab them in the back. This means everyone is always concealing little pieces of information and telling little lies, which in turn, often leads people to stab them in the back. People continuously feel they’ve been [...]

Read Full Post »

Giving In Order To (But Not Expecting To) Receive

You can tell a lot about a culture by its language. In Turkish, there exists a tense for what has or will supposedly happen; for what someone else says has happened, but you haven’t seen for yourself. There’s a serious lack of accountability in Turkey’s corporate world, and oftentimes even in personal relationships in the [...]

Read Full Post »

Wait- What?!

This is a rock in the Gloria Zoo. There are two other rocks there that appear to have had similar confusing signs, but now the signs are gone and they’re just rocks. Would anyone care to wager what the *%$! this is supposed to mean?

Read Full Post »

Yuliya Learns English!

When Yuliya came to Turkey from the Ukraine two weeks ago she didn’t speak a word of English. Now, being forced to run her own activities, Luyidmila (seen in the video with red hair, Luda has been in Turkey for about a year and didn’t speak a lick of English when she arrived either) has [...]

Read Full Post »

The Director’s Sordid Affair

I can only imagine how pissed – quite frankly – Mustafa Erdoǧan is after the Turkish tabloids reported today that his failing marriage is due to an affair with one of the company’s lead dancers. This dancer in question was one of my roommates last season, and I have a hard time believing that she’d [...]

Read Full Post »

Removed, But Nowhere to Go

I’m leaving Turkey. But not really. We’re going to quote – figure something out – unquote. That’s what my friend Ferhat keeps telling me. In Turkey, when something has gone wrong and you don’t know how to fix it, first you say everything will be okay (It won’t.) and then you say you’ll “figure something [...]

Read Full Post »

Leadership & Tyranny in Turkey

I recently finished reading a book called “Confidence” by Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School. The book outlines the habits of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, both in the corporate world and on the playing field, and analyzes how winning and losing streaks are started, continued and broken. Among the most important habits of winners and [...]

Read Full Post »

Update: My Life

It’s been a while and much has changed since I last posted to my blog. Plans for the next phase of life are in full swing and I wanted to share them here. To be totally honest, I don’t know if I’m running to, from, or parallel to situations that have taken shape. But I’m [...]

Read Full Post »