Getting Ready to Go

Mrs. Istanbilly leaves Qatar tomorrow for the last time. She is off to Skopelos for the summer. She has been a busy bee today - she is not only packing her bags, but packing the household effects up ready for shipping to Istanbul. She is doing that because I am so unreliable (her word not mine) that I can't be trusted to do a proper job of it!

Anyway, what I can do is show you a couple of pix of the where we are going to live when we get to Istanbul:

Above is the front view of our house, it is a nice place, brand new, two bedrooms, not overly big, but big enough for us. This is the side of the house:





We have two balconies - one looks over the tennis courts which are in the process of being built and this is the view from the other:





I have to say that this is a view that I can happily live with - at the moment I have a view of the villas on the opposite side of the street about 15 metres away! And if they weren't there I would have a view of Qatar which, for the most part, is brown!





This is the pool which is shared by about 10 or so houses. Provided there aren't too many kids that could be quite pleasant!

I think we have found ourselves quite a nice place to live and it is only a couple of kilometres from the school. In fact, we can see the school from the balcony, but it is difficult to spot in the photo above as the walls of the school are green and it blends in with the scenery.

The next two weeks are going to be pretty drab with Mrs. I not around, but I will be joining her in Skopelos soon. I leave Qatar on the 2nd of July, spend that night in Athens and will arrive in Skopelos at about 2 in the afternoon of the 3rd of July. I am looking forward to the holiday but I am looking forward to getting started in Istanbul as well.

Roll on the 2nd of July!

A World Cup oddity

Here I am in a country which broadcasts virtually every English Premier League match, complete with English commentary, live and yet I am left in World Cup limboland!

It ain't on the tele! Apparently I can pay 80 USD to Al Jazeera and get the World Cup complete with Arabic commentary but the channel for which I buy the top of the range bouquet (or perhaps bucket) doesn't have it, with commentary in any language!

Ah well, I guess none of the teams from the Gulf managed to get through, eh?! And doesn't it show!

And before you advise me to go to the local pub to watch it, Al Khor doesn't have any local pubs... come to think of it it doesn't have any pubs at all - local or otherwise! The nearest bar is in a 5 star hotel about 60 kilometres away.

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Another photo from Istanbul

The place we were staying in was an apartment that had been rented for someone else who, for one reason or another, felt unable to use the apartment. As apartments go it was pretty impractical and we will certainly not be living there when we get to Istanbul. But the views ...

Istanbul

So, I promised you some photos of our trip to Istanbul. Now you have to understand that this was not a tourist trip - so no Blue mosque or Haji Sophia or Topkapi Palace. This was strictly business.

We were staying in a little apartment in a suburb called Kirecburnu, which is really more of a village than a suburb. Anyway, this was the view that we had to put up with:

Back in the Sand

Well, my two week visit to my new school is over and I am now back in Qatar for the remainder of the school year. I have got exams to write and I will have to mark them once my kids have done them, but other than that I have to get ready to leave Qatar for good on the 2nd of July.

First step is getting a police clearance - just so that my new school will have it in writing that I have been a good boy during my time here. Then Mrs I and I have to get our Qatari residence visas cancelled. Our flights are all paid for, so the only other thing to sort out is the bank account - not the easiest of jobs! But I am sure we will manage.

The biggest job is sorting Baggins out (you remember Baggins, the cat who is worth more than I am). We have booked him into kennels for the summer and we hope to be able to take fly him out to Istanbul shortly after the 1st of August.

Mrs I leaves on or about the 19th of June for Skopelos and I will be following her two weeks later on the 2nd of July. We will have just about a month in our island home and then we are off to Istanbul on the 1st of August.

We have rented a lovely little house there and I will put some pix up as soon as I get the time to download them from my camera.

Ready to Go

It is Friday morning at 9:40.

We are packed!

We are ready to go!

Just got to wait until 11 am and then we are off to Istanbul - I'm going for two weeks to visit my new school, Mrs I is going for one week and she will be house hunting!

Unfortunately Mrs I can't stay for the entire two weeks, she has to have a minor (we hope) eye operation on Monday the 31st of May, so she is going to fly back next Saturday. Now, you may be tempted to say that it is a bit ungallant of me not to come back at the same time as her, but my new employers wanted me to have a two week handover and if I put it off until later it will mean leaving my current school early - which has some pretty large consequences! We both think that it is best for me to stay for the extra week.

Anyway, camera is ready, battery is charged, I shall put some views up when I get back.

A change of name (again)

So, I was thinking, I am not going to be in Qatar any longer - what is the point of remaining as qatarbilly and what can my new name be???

I thought of ByzantiumBilly or ConstantinopleBilly, but they just didn't have the right ring.

Then I hit on it,

from now on my web personal will be:

Istanbilly

Sounds good to me!

Good News

It has been a long time since I have blogged. I just haven't been able to drum up the enthusiasm as I waited for some good news to blog about!

As you may (or indeed may not) know, for the last 18 months I have been looking for a job as Head of Secondary (or something similar) at an international school that preferably comes without a desert attached to it.

During my search I have become quite the international jet setter! Since January of last year I have been to:

London (on three separate occasions, the longest trip being 3 days), Bangkok, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Dubai, Munich, Bratislava, Vienna, Qatar (twice) and Istanbul for interviews and I have had telephone interviews with schools in Casablanca, Rio de Janeiro, Addis Ababa, Bahrain and Budapest.

I have come second more times than I like to think about! I have psyched myself up for interviews and then crashed and burned when I got the 'regret to inform you...very strong field' email. I got three in one week back at the end of February/beginning of March - that was not a particularly good time. Lots of encouragement from people like Carol, Dave, Amanda and, especially, Harry Deelman from Search Associates who sent me a very long and very upbeat and encouraging email, has all helped to keep me writing new applications. And, of course, Mrs QB has stood by me and been excited at the prospect of going here or there to live and has hidden her disappointment when it didn't happen - she has even been checking the Times Educational Supplement every week for me saying things like "What about Abuja?", "Ascension Island sounds nice", "Have you thought of this one in Manilla?" etc

Well, I have finally come first!

On Thursday I traveled to Istanbul and on Friday was appointed Director of Secondary at the British International School of Istanbul. BISI is a very happy school which has grown strong following a sometimes turbulent past. It is perched on the top of a hill overlooking the village of Zekeriakoy which is at the northern end of the Bosphoros on the European side and the school has views of the Black Sea. The whole area is a huge forest and you literally cannot see the wood for the trees!!! Having been starved of forest views like this whilst in the Middle East for the last 13 years, the massive amount of greenery makes your eyes ache!! In the spring the whole area is a riot of flowers - Turkey exported tulips to Amsterdam!, in the autumn it must be the golds, reds and browns of New England because all the trees I saw were deciduous and, apparently, in winter the view is white!

Mrs QB and I will be going to Istanbul next Sunday for two weeks so that I can do something of a handover with the current Director prior to me starting properly in the middle of August. We are both looking forward to spending a bit of time there and I will be taking my camera and so will put some photo's on facebook and on my blog (which I will be starting up again now that I have something interesting to put on there!

You cannot believe how many times in the last 18 months I have wanted to write this email. Well, it is finally written and knowing that I do not have to take a Thursday off work to fly to Copenhagen (or wherever) for a weekend, leaving in the early hours of Thursday and getting back in the early hours of Sunday and then being in work on Sunday morning (for those not in the Middle East, our weekend is Friday Saturday) at 7am, is an enormous relief.

By the way, talking of weekends - for the first time for 13 years I will be going back to Saturday and Sunday as the weekend - that is going to be weird!!!

Well, folks, that is the news I have been waiting for so long to tell you. Mrs QB and I shall now sit back and wait for the requests to visit us in Istanbul to come pouring in. Get your dates in quickly 'cos I think there may be a rush!!!

Wide angle photography

You may remember that my colleagues from my last school very kindly bought me a wide angle lens as a leaving present when I moved on from there. I spent some of my time over the summer playing with it to see what kind of results I got. I told you that I would be showing you some for the bad shots I managed to take along with some of the not quite so bad ones.

I think that some of the indoor shots that I took were quite reasonable, but I have noticed that the lens produces shots which are considerably darker than any other of my lenses and that vignetting (a darkness around the edge of the photograph) is a constant problem with it.

I have come up with a couple more problems as you can see below:

When I took the night shot of a medium sized oleander I thought the wide angle would be perfect because I could be quite close to the plant but still get it completely in the frame. What I hadn't expected was the effect of the flash. I have used the built-in flash on my camera and you can see that this has cast the shadow of the lens on the side of the photograph. Of course I held the camera vertically, had I held it horizontally the shadow would have been on the bottom. Clearly the built-in flash is not going to work with the wide angle lens - but this is perhaps not a bad thing as I have already started dropping hints to Mrs QB about the possibility of a separate flash gun as Christmas present!





This one wasn't a mistake, I knew what I was doing when I took the photo. I wanted to have this amount of distortion. The corner of the pool is actually a right angle and I think this amount of distortion is quite amazing, though my framing is not as good as perhaps it should be. I did take a somewhat unflattering photo of Mrs QB but I would not dare put it on here! It was a photo of some yachts with Mrs QB stood on the harbour wall looking at them. Mrs QB is at the edge of the photograph and is subject to a similar amount of distortion as the swimming pool. I have learned that being close to your subject but putting them at the side of a photograph is a recipe for a disaster!





I don't often take photographs of people and I very rarely put them on here, but the photo of Captain Jack and Sarah (as before, names changed) demonstrates a good use of the wide angle lens - you get shedloads of depth of field, huge amounts of landscape and at the same time can get quite close to your subject without distortation (as long as you put them in the centre of the photograph!).

Are we ever going to do any real work this year?

This has been a strange year so far. We arrived in Qatar on the night of the 1st of September and have had precious little work to do since then! A decision was made by the school last year (before I joined) that we would not start teaching during the Holy month of Ramadan this year but would instead start after Eid al Fitr. Fair enough, the decision is made and that is fine. To be honest, Eid seems to have dragged on a little longer than it used to in Dubai but the kids are due to start tomorrow. Or to be more exact they were due to start tomorrow.

Then, as reported in today's Gulf Times the start of the school year got postponed! This is due to worries about the H1N1 swine flu virus.

Oh well! I guess I shall just have to do even more lesson planning!

Everything, including the kitchen sink

When we left Dubai on the 26th of June, we had the opportunity of shipping all our worldly goods to Greece without incurring the wrath of the Greek taxman - so we did. And while we were about it we bought a complete new kitchen including a huge fridge, a dishwasher, a huge gas cooker, a load of units, a new washing machine and a new kitchen sink!

The lot arrived about 2 days before Mrs QB's brother and sister-in-law arrived to stay with us for three weeks. 197 boxes of our personal effects and 2 days to unpack them all, three weeks after we were promised them by the movers who shall remain nameless but whose name rhymes with brown and describes a kings best hat. What a ball's up that was. But, suffice to say. Mrs QB and I did not manage to get all the boxes unpacked and Captain Jack and Sarah (names changed as usual) arrived to find the house an absolute tip!

They spent the first few days of their holiday helping us to unpack... then the hard work started. Captain Jack and I started to build the kitchen. I am so grateful to my brother-in-law! Honestly, I think Mrs QB and I really would have struggled to do the job - and I don't think we would have been able to even lift the sink, much less plumb it in and fit it properly. Captain Jack and I dug in hard and spent 4 solid days (possibly 5, time is beginning to blur) grafting away and these are a couple of photo's of the result:

The second photo gives a better view of the sink which is honestly big enough to bath twin toddlers in simultaneously should you want to do such a thing - Mrs QB and I will not be putting that to the test any time soon.

The funny thing is, although we have more cupboards and drawers, a bigger fridge than before, a bigger cooker than before and a dishwasher which we didn't have before, the kitchen looks bigger than before! The only thing I don't like about it is the strip light - I haven't yet decided what to replace that with yet but I will, eventually.

Anyway, the kitchen is done, so thank you Captain Jack for all the work you put into the kitchen and thank you Sarah for letting him!

Visiting Friends

We arrived in Qatar twenty-one days ago and this weekend we had some friends from Dubai over to stay with us. What a super weekend! Bob and Carol (no, of course that isn't their real names, but I'm not going to tell you who they really are, am I) arrived on Thursday evening and left today (Monday) - we dropped them at the airport at about 5pm.

Bob and Carol are very good friends of ours and it was absolutely great to see them again. On the Friday evening we had a dinner party - Me and Mrs QB, Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice and Steve and Shirley (no, none of those are real names either) spent the evening eating, drinking, chatting and generally enjoying ourselves and a lovely evening was had by all.

Bob and I are war games fans and spent three days playing a single game of Axis and Allies (the anniversary edition if you are familiar with it). It models the 2nd World War from 1941 and in this particular game Bob resigned after Germany had fallen to an overwhelming Russian assault on the fatherland - a brilliant game and the first time that Bob and I have had a 3 day game! I'm not entirely sure what Mrs QB and Carol did whilst we were war gaming but I know they enjoyed the weekend every bit as much as we did.

We were very sorry to see them go home to Dubai this afternoon but, of course, all good things inevitably come to an end. We are now looking forward to repeating the weekend as soon as possible.

The summer modifications

Over the summer we did some modifications to our beautiful home in Skopelos which, we think, make it more beautiful than ever. Two of the major modifications were the opening up of the top floor and the fitting of the kitchen.

Our top floor was two separate rooms and a corridor between them leading to one of the balconies. The rooms were bedrooms and each had a huge, homemade cupboard built into them. The rooms were small enough, but the cupboards took up way to much room in both of them and one of them was just too small to be used properly. Mrs QB and I decided to have the walls taken down, have the cupboards removed and turn the space into one open plan lounge with absolutely loads of light in it.

I didn't take and "before" pics because I have already got loads of them - on my computer which now resides in Skopelos. Unfortunately, I'm not in Skopelos so I can't put them up. Way back in September 2008 I started putting some pics up but I only put two and they were pix of what was the lounge at that time (it's now a bedroom). However I do have the "after" pics.

As you can see, the room now has windows on three sides and so catches light all day. It is right at the top of the house so other houses in the area don't take any of the light away from it and the noise from the street is not so obtrusive up there. It really is a beautiful room to sit in and, having put a fridge for our beer and wine up there, Mrs QB and I love it and spend most of our time in it.

Time to start blogging again

So, apart from the odd entry here and there, it has been quite a while since I did any real blogging. Mrs QB and I have settled into our mansion here in Qatar and are finding our feet. I finally start teaching again next week (and I'm looking forward to it!), we are finding our way around our new country and I think it is time to blog again.

You may recall (assuming that you have read recent posts) that the ever so kind people I used to work with in my last school bought me a wide angle lens when I left (amongst other things I might add). Now, I have often wanted a wide angle lens but until now have never actually used one. I started playing with it over the summer in order to get used to it and find out what it can do and what limitations it might have.

I will show you some of the results - good and bad - over the next few entries. As you know I like to do available light photography and I am going to start by showing you a couple of the pics I took at night. One of them is with my standard lens and the other with the new wide angle one. For those of you who know Skopelos, the pics were taken from Braxos (pronounced Vrakhos) Bar which overlooks the Paraleia (harbour road).

This is taken with my standard lens.



And this one with my wide angle lens.

For the technically minded amongst you, both photo's were taken at f/5.6 and ISO200, the normal lens one had a 22mm focal length and an exposure of 0.8 of a second whilst the wide angle had a 10mm focal length and an exposure of 4 seconds. Both photo's were taken on my Canon EOS 400D and the wide angle was taken approximatley 20 minutes later than the normal.

Dubaibilly is dead. Long live Qatarbilly.

Many thanks to The Media Junkie who very kindly gave me detailed instructions on how to change my user name and email address from dubaibilly to qatarbilly, now I will start getting emails again when people leave posts on the blog - hmmm, perhaps that wasn't such a great idea after all. Whatever, I am now finally in as qatarbilly and will remain so for as long as I stay in this place.

Great advert

Mrs QB is sat next to me in the internet cafe as I am doing this blog. She has just shown me an advert for The Garden Restaurant in Skopelos Town. Their tag line...

International Greek Homecooking

I leave it to you, dear reader, to fathom that one out!

More modifications

So, today we have got Janis the carpenter in!

We are redesigning the entire top storey of the house - it is too big a job for me so we have got a carpenter in who is knocking down walls and taking out cupboards as I type (well, not really as I type 'cos he has just phoned me to tell me that he is knocking off until tomorrow.

It's dead exciting seeing the walls come down and a new bigger open plan room rise pheonix like from the ashes of the old two rooms and a corridor.

Really looking forward to him finishing and to all our furniture arriving from Dubai - it is currently clearing customs in Athens so should be here in the next year or two!

Refurbishments and other stuff

Well, we have been here for two weeks now and Mrs QB and I have been working... well... not far away from flat out. The front balcony floorboards are now ready to be put down, the balusters have been repainted and a new top rail has been made. The new top rail just needs one more coat of paint before it is ready. We should be in a position to put the boards down and the new top rail on on Saturday. After that I will need to make a cover board for the bottom rail but that is a fairly small job.

This afternoon we are going to paint the balusters on the other balcony, I'm not putting new floorboards down on that one this year, that will be my project for next summer. Similarly, we are going to paint the top rail this afternoon (after the balusters), but I will leave off replacing it until next year.

One of the jobs I have been putting off for the last four years finally got done this year! One of our interior walls was in terrible condition - the previous owners had replastered the wall and, presumably, painted the plaster before it was properly dry! Result - a great chunk of plaster fell off the wall (well over a couple of square metres by the time we had finished getting the loose stuff off). So, this year I finally bit the bullet, went to the hardware shop and bought plaster and the relevant tools. Looked in my DIY manual and found out how to mix plaster and how to put it on the wall. I have to say that I am dead chuffed with the result! Yes, I can afford to be smug about this one - plastering no longer holds any fears for QB!

Mrs QB has also done her share of the DIY - she has been painting window frames that were desperately in need of painting and she also had a go a plastering!

So, today we decided to try to get Mrs QB residency status - not quite as easy as one would hope. Firstly I have to have residency and then Mrs QB can have residency based upon mine. This is because I am European and Mrs QB isn't. The problem is that I have to have some kind of a card which (apparently) all EU citizens have which allows them reciprocal Social Security and Health insurance benefits. Well, I haven't got one of these (I don't think they had them 14 years ago when I left Britain) and I have no idea how to get one. At the moment then, unitl I can find this stuff out we are somewhat screwed, Mrs QB and I cannot have Greek residence. Ho hum. The big problem with all this is that Mrs QB's Shengen Visa runs out on the 10th of August, so she has to leave the country and come back in again. What a pain - fortunately she has a visa for the UK, so I think she is going to go EasyJet from Athens to Luton and back in order to prolong her stay. I guess that we will sort out residency for her some other time.

That's it for now. In a couple of weeks Mrs QB's brother and his wife arrive to stay with us for three weeks and we are going to have a complete rest during the time they are here. In the meantime it is time to get back to the grindstone.

See ya.

Qatarbilly and Blogger

OK, so I am not in Dubai anymore. I have decided not to be Dubaibilly anymore. My email address (which was billbrad@emirates.net.ae) no longer works. But Blogger won't let me change any of this. I have tried to change my email address which is associated with the blog, but Blogger simply refuses to do it. I still have to sign in as dubaibilly and use a non-existent email address to do so. And I don't understand why.

If you have anything to do with Blogger (rather than just using it) or if you happen to know how to make blogger do this mundane thing, please tell me.

I guess I could set up Waiting for Skopelos 2: The Qatar Years, but I don't want to.

Suggestions?

At Home!

It is the 2nd of July (I think) and Mrs QB and I are at home in our lovely little house on our beautiful island of Skopelos.

We have been here for a few days and the work has started! We decided that one of our balconies (how about that for a bit of one-upmanship then!) was in need of some fairly urgent repairs - particularly in view of the quote last year of 14000 Euros to replace them both!

So we have decided that we are going to replace the top rail and the floor boards. I have cut the floor boards to length (3.69 metres)and have sanded them, undercoated them, sanded them again and undercoated them again. Tomorrow they will get their final sanding and then I will apply two top coats before I take the old ones up and replace them with the new.

Our house is white with all the exterior woodwork done in that beautiful rich blue that says to eveyone - Greece. You know the one. It is the same colour as the Greek flag. Vathy Ble Arithmos 2 - Greek speakers please excuse me not using the proper Greek characters, and Kat, can you translate the Vathy bit - I think it means Navy Blue number two but I'm not sure. Anyway, that is the colour the balcony floor boards and the top rails will be.

Other jobs on the cards for this holiday:

Mrs QB wants a corner shelf making and putting up in the bathroom.

The other balcony is in better condition than the one which is being refurbished, it just needs a light sanding and repainting.

Three sets of shutters need taking down, sanding, repainting and re-hanging.

We have bought a new kitchen in Dubai and shipped it out (it is due to arrive with lots of other of our possessions on 5 July). It is currently flat-packed so I will have to build that!

We want to take down two stud walls on the top floor - it sounds easy enough, but it isn't. Quite apart from disposing of the detritus, the walls are 4 and a half metres high and I can't get up to the top, plus, in taking them down we have some wiring that needs re-routing. There is a professional coming round to take a look at that job tomorrow afternoon. If we can afford it, and if he can do it quickly, we will be changing the use of the top and middle floors of the house. This involves in the sub-job of taking beds apart, moving them downstairs and rebuilding them.

Other than that, it should be a nice restful holiday!

Last day in Dubai

Well, it has finally arrived, my final full day in Dubai has dawned - am I ready, packed andwaiting for my flight - not exactly! Still got lots to do before we go. The kennels are due to come round this morning to collect Baggins who will spend the next two months with them prior to his being flown to Qatar in early September. The maintenance people are coming round to do an inspection in a few minutes. I've got to cancel Etisilat and Showtime, Mrs DB has gone to the physio, we haven't finished packing and we are going out tonight with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice! Oh boy, roll on 10:05 tomorrow morning. DXB terminal 3, Emirates Airlins to Athens! Wish I was there already!

This has to be the best sign I've seen for a long time:

Sadly, I didn't have my camera with me, but a building near to the Bur Dubai bus station is sporting this wonderful sign:

DUBAI INTERNATIONAL REAL ESTATE

WWW.DIRE.AE

And the web address is real!

Makes me smile anyway!

Last day at school

Well, today was my final day! I have now left Emirates International School - Jumeirah. Is it time to dish the dirt? Not a bit of it, I have had ten years there and during that time I have risen from being a Maths Teacher to being a Deputy Principal, learned a hell of a lot along the way, made some wonderful friends who are scattered around the world (with many of them still being at EIS, others being in Dubai and still others in far flung places such as Madrid, Azerbaijan and Australia to name but a few. There is even one who is going to the same school in Qatar as I am!

Anyway, over the last few days friends and colleagues have been showering me with leaving presents - I have had some lovely gifts, but today the whole staff clubbed together and gave me some gift vouchers for the Mall of the Emirates. Mrs DB and I toddled off over there after work and I bought something that I will treasure for many years. I bought a wide angle lens for my camera and so you will soon be seeing my efforts of photography with a wide angle lens - I have wanted one for years but never got around to buying one - now I have finally got one and I will have to start learning how to use it! I have already realised that I now need to buy a proper flash unit, so that can go on the Christmas wish list for Mrs DB!

Anyway, to all my friends at EIS, past and present, and I know there are some who will read this, I just want to say, thank you to all of you, for your wishes, for your kind words, for your thoughts, for your prayers and for being my friend during the time that we have been colleagues together.

Some Good News at Last

Well, it has been something of a longtime, hasn't it! You may recall that I have been job hunting and I didn't want to tell you anything more until I got a job. Well, I've now got one!

In the last few months I have been all over the place - I've had interviews in Bangkok, London (twice), Bratislava and Munich, I've had references taken up by schools in Vienna, Rio and Quito amongst others, I've had telephone interviews for schools in Egypt, Sao Paulo and Shanghai and I've been totally ignored by schools in Sweden, Beijing, Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam, Shangai and Scarborough!

Now, after being at times totally demoralised, I have finally secured a position just a few hundred miles away in Qatar!

I am just totally relieved because we are out of Dubai on the 26th of this month and I was expecting to have to go back to the UK to supply teach. Now, Cher and I are really looking forward to our holiday on our wonderful Greek island of Skopelos. And it is going to be a great holiday! Because of Ramadan, I don't have to start at my new school until sometime between the 4th and 12th of September (not sure of the date yet), but, and I've never heard of this in any other school, I get paid from the 1st of August!!!

Excellent!