Adventures in Renewing a Residency Permit

Many of you don't know me personally, but I think it's fair to say that I am an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. I've never been arrested, I've never been inside an American police station, and I've only been inside a court of law for jury duty. So, much to my surprise, when I went to renew my residence permit three weeks ago, the officer told me I had broken the law by not declaring my change in marital status within 15 days of getting married.

Let me back up...To live in Turkey for any length of time, you have to apply for a residence visa (ikamet). For North Americans and Western Europeans, it's a straight-forward process -- in Istanbul, you make an appointment on the website and pay the money, which is about $160 for the first year (and it's only that expensive because the first time around, you have to buy a poorly constructed little blue visa book for $80). While you don't have the right to work with a residence permit, you don't have to do anything special (as a Westerner) to get one -- the Turkish government is happy to take your money and let you live here, and they don't care why you want to stay.

Getting a residence permit in Turkey is easy; getting an appointment to get a residency permit (or renew or change it) is another matter entirely. See, the online system doesn't work very well, and this is where our problems came in. We tried to make an appointment in August after we got married, but the website wasn't working. Cagatay went to the office in person, and the officer there at the time told him it was broken and that we just had to wait until it was fixed -- and no, he couldn't make an appointment in person. So we checked and checked again and around the beginning of October, we managed to get an appointment for mid-November. That was the day I was going home for Thanksgiving and since we weren't able to change the appointment (you couldn't then, maybe you can now), I just had to skip it. Back to square one.

When I got back to Istanbul at the end of November, I tried to make a new appointment. I checked the website for about three weeks and usually, it just looked like this:

The website always lists just three appointment dates, and they're always full. I was starting to panic because my residency permit expired at the beginning of February, and as you can see from today's screenshot, the appointments are for months later. [In fairness, you just have to make the appointment before your ikamet expires -- they accept your reservation date as "the" date, though I don't think you would be able to leave the country in the in-between period.] Anyway, after about three weeks of checking the website, I finally managed to get an appointment for the end of February.

So, here we are, present time. We went to the appointment as scheduled, and our intention was to renew my residence permit and to update my marital status. Cagatay explained to the officer why we hadn't come earlier, but the guy really didn't care. So the website was broken? Not his problem. So it's nearly impossible to get an appointment? Also not his problem. [Oh, btw, I also contacted the American Consulate in December about this issue, and guess what? Not their problem either.] The officer said that they release 100 appointments a month (per branch, I'm assuming) and that all the private companies that organize your paperwork for a fee know when the appointments are released and snap them up. Which explains why it's so f'ing difficult to get an appointment -- but hey, not his problem.

So, despite our objections, he told us we had to pay a fine. It wasn't actually that bad (about $78), but we were annoyed in principle. But we couldn't pay the fine then -- first, he had to organize the paperwork and then we would have to go to our local police station about a week later. So, the next week, we did that. The police officer there was very understanding, but he said since it was in the system, there was nothing anyone could do. We spent about an hour there and in the end, I signed some paper in Turkish attesting to my "guilt." This officer said that he would give the paperwork to a supervisor and in 10 days, we could go back to the municipality office to actually pay the fine. So, we did that -- about 10 days later, we paid the fine in one office and showed our receipt to the residency permit guy in a building down the street. Once we showed the receipt, he gave us the residency permit paperwork, and we went to the tax office (by cab) in another area of Istanbul to actually pay for the renewal. Then we went back to the municipality office to show that receipt. He said we could come back to pick up the residency permit in about a week. That's today -- three weeks later.

If you've followed along through all this, I'm sure you've realized what the moral of the story is. If not, here it is in brief: Start early for anything involving a Turkish residency permit. Start months earlier than you think you need to. Trust me on this.

Hair transplants in Turkey

According to the Guardian, coming to Turkey for facial hair transplants is a new and booming trend. While there are no actual statistics to support this assertion, the doctors quoted in the article say that more and more Middle Eastern men are coming here to get beard and mustache implants because in Arab countries, facial hair is a sign of masculinity and not having it is a bad thing. "Thick hair is a status symbol, and a sign of strength and virility," one doctor was quoted as saying. According to another, of his 60 hair-transplant patients a month, 10-15 now want facial hair.

This actually doesn't surprise me in the least, for two reasons. First, Istanbul is already a hotspot for lower-cost medical treatments. And second, you walk around Istanbul long enough, you see packs of Middle Eastern guys walking around fresh off their head-hair transplants. They almost always have a white bandage secured around their head with a black headband, but it's usually not enough to hide the bloody implantation areas. The first time I saw some of these guys, in Ortakoy, I thought they'd been in a car accident, seriously. I completely understand why they're walking around -- they come here on an arranged trip through a travel agency, and they're not ill -- but my god if the sight of bloodied scalps doesn't put you off your lunch. I sincerely applaud the guy in this photo for wearing a hat.

Turkey's New Year's Eve Lottery

So, Turkey has a national lottery, and the jackpot is especially big on New Year's Eve. This year, it was worth TL 45 million, which is a little more than $25 million. Not bad, eh? But the tickets are seriously expensive -- you can buy a single ticket for TL 40 ($22) and you win the entire jackpot, a half ticket where you share the jackpot with someone else, or a quarter ticket for one-fourth of the money. Each ticket has a number on it, like in the US, and for the half and quarter tickets, there are two and four tickets, respectively, out there in the world with the same number.  

You can buy the tickets at various places, but when we were shopping in Eminonu a couple of weekends ago, Cagatay pointed out Istanbul's most lucky seller -- Nimit Abla. It was fairly early and there weren't a lot of people out and about, but there was a line stretching down the street of people waiting to buy tickets for the New Year's jackpot. I've never seen anything like it. And there were individual ticket sellers standing around (you can see them in the photo above, at the left, in the white caps), but no one was paying any attention to them -- everyone wanted to buy from the little store.

Cagatay said that they've sold a couple of winning tickets in the past, and as a result, people consider Nimit Abla to be a lucky place to buy from -- but of course, that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, as statistically, they'll sell more winning tickets as more people buy from them. And people were certainly buying from them.

We bought one quarter ticket, but from a lady standing across the street -- she looked like she needed some business. But alas, we didn't win last night...our numbers weren't even close. It was a set of quarter tickets that won, sold in Istanbul, Izmir, Mugla and Malatya, but no word yet on where specifically the Istanbul ticket came from. :)

Happy Halloween!

But unfortunately, we'll just have to celebrate Halloween in our hearts since it isn't a thing here. As an adult, I have never been that big on Halloween -- to me, it mostly just signifies that Thanksgiving is right around the corner -- but it's amazing what you miss when it's gone. Tonight, we'll just be going to the gym, and hopefully after that, I can convince Cagatay to watch the traditional Icabod and Mr. Toad with me, for his second year in a row. :)

The thing I really love about Halloween season is the profusion of pumpkins -- I always buy a couple of mini-pumpkins at the grocery store. But you don't really see whole pumpkins here. Last year, I went on a deliberate search and only came up with chopped pumpkin in the store or a man selling greenish-yellow ones out of the back of a truck. Alas. So this year, I took matters into my own hands and knitted one (pattern here). Very lifelike, no?

Working in Turkey

I've been out of my Monday-Friday (+Sunday!) job for almost two months now, but it's probably never a good time to blog about your workplace, past or present. So I'll just say this for specifics: I worked as a copy editor for about six months at the English-language version of a conservative, pro-government Turkish newspaper. If you're here in Istanbul, you probably know which paper I mean.

When I first got the job, I found the workplace to be like Mars -- that is to say, an alien world. First off, Turkey has a six-day work week (45 hours), which is unfortunate since studies have shown that an employee's productivity peaks at 40 hours and minimum wage here is a mere TL 700 (which I've also heard cited as the average wage). For most Turks, that sixth day would be Saturday (at the paper, however, we had Saturday off and worked most Sundays). And so, funny enough, when Turks want to take time off, they have to count the Saturday -- Cagatay, for example, doesn't actually work on Saturdays, but he still has to count it in vacation time.

One of the other things that shocked me was that employers pick your bank. The company is affliated with a bank, through whom you'll get your paycheck; if your previous employer used a different bank, when you get a new job you'll have to switch. The company also provides lunch -- at smaller companies, you get a lunch card that you can then go out and use at restaurants, fast-food joints and even the grocery store. Our company was quite large, so we ate downstairs in a cafeteria -- though I heard the cafeteria shuts down during Ramadan, and during that month (July-August this year), the foreigners eat out.

I can't say though that every workplace shuts down its cafeteria -- as I said above, our company was very conservative, which in this context means religious. I worked with expats and Turks on the English-language newspaper, and we were all in the same area, and things always seemed quite normal and relaxed. I never noticed a division in the sexes, but then at lunch, all of the men would sit together on one side of the room while all the women sat together on the other. EVERY SINGLE DAY. (Fittingly, the expats usually sat together in the middle.) The gyms were also segregated. The building had two gyms, which three groups shared -- the executives, the men and the ladies. And the women had their own workout time, a very limited time (eight hours over the week, as I recall). Apparently the regular guys and the executives couldn't work out together in the same space -- but of course, I wouldn't know, SINCE I WASN'T ALLOWED IN.

It all just seemed so, so strange at first. There were other workplace issues, too (ahem, plagiarism), but after awhile, I got completely used to it and couldn't remember what initially seemed so strange. Which seemed even stranger. :)

Mother of all derbies: Fenerbahce vs Galatasaray

The Turkish soccer league season came to a glorious, deafening close on Saturday night. In past years, the season ended without playoffs, and the league champion was whatever team had accumulated the most points over the season. This year, however, they implemented playoffs, called the Super Final, which lasted for 6 weeks and in which only the top four teams were involved -- which ended up being Galatasaray, Fenerbahce, Trabzonspor and Besiktas, all of which are Istanbul teams except for Trabzon.

Each of the four teams started the playoffs with half of the points they'd accumulated during the season, and whoever had the most at the end of the Super Final would be declared champion. Fenerbahce was league champion last year, but they're deep in the match-fixing scandal, so a lot of people don't trust that they rightfully earned that trophy. This season, Galatasaray was ahead at the end of the regular season, and they went into the Super Final with nine points more than Fenerbahce. Trabzon was third, and Besiktas a dismal fourth, and I think it's fair to say neither of those teams had a hope of finishing higher.

So, anyway, Saturday night saw the last game, between major rivals Fenerbahce and Galatasaray -- and Fenerbahce had managed to whittle down the point difference, leaving Galatasaray only one point ahead. To win the title, Galatasaray needed to either win or tie -- but they were playing at Fener's stadium on the Asian side, where they hadn't won in 13 years...so, as you can imagine, there was quite a bit of excitement leading up to this match.

Early Saturday morning, we had sort of forgotten about the game (Cagatay's team is Besiktas, and we don't have the cable channel to watch the Spor Toto games) and made the mistake of heading over to the Asian side for something else. By the time the afternoon arrived, Bagdat Street was packed, with about half of the people in the streets decked out in Fenerbahce gear, waving flags, blowing horns and just generally getting revved up for the match. These photos aren't doing it justice, alas.

We left just as people were starting to walk toward the stadium, probably around 4pm, though the game didn't start until 7, and it took us forever to get to the ferry -- probably because half the road was blocked off for pedestrians.

Then I forgot about it and went to the movies with a friend on the European side, in Nisantasi. We came out around 9:30, when the game had just ended. The score ended up being 0-0, so Galatasaray won the title, and people were just going nuts. We came out and there were all these horns honking, guys shouting and singing, flares going off... Even in the metro, it was a scene. In my car, guys were jumping up and down, banging on the roof, singing at the top of their lungs, and the air was thick with sweat.

When I got home, we watched a bit of the aftermath on TV. It had been agreed that the trophy would be handed to the winning team on the field, which did not go over well with the Fenerbahce fans (who had thrown flares and stormed the field). Apparently it was suggested that Galatasaray be given the trophy in the dressing room (which was rejected) and the prime minister had to intervene in the situation. There is a fantastic photo of the chaos on the field here, on Today's Zaman's website.

Celebrations went on well into the night. One of my coworkers said a Galatasaray fan and a Fenerbahce fan got into a knife fight outside of his building, and a man died in another city when overexicited fans fired a gun up into the air (this is a popular tradition in Turkey; sometimes you see ridiculous stories where brides or grooms or wedding guests get injured). Apparently, 47 fans were arrested during the revelry, and 36 were injured.

Going to the movies in Istanbul

There are so many things here that used to seem strange to me, but after nearly eight months living in Istanbul, I can hardly remember why. One of these initial strange things was going to the movies. Not surprisingly, we get a lot of Hollywood movies, in the original language with Turkish subtitles (except for animated films), sometimes released at the same time in the US but usually out months later. (For example, last week's new releases were Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, My Week with Marilyn, Jack and Jill, The Help, Drive, Safe House and Star Wars Episode I in 3D.)

Going to the movies here is pretty much the same experience as at home, save in two respects: ticket buying and intermission. When you buy tickets here, you have to choose your seat; the only place I've seen that in the US is at the ArcLight Cinema in Los Angeles. And, you can also make a non-binding reservation for tickets; so what we find usually happens on a Friday night is that most of the good seats have been reserved but some people don't end up following through, so when the tickets are cancelled 45 minutes before the movie starts, we're usually able to scoop up good seats.

The other oddness is that there's an intermission during every showing, a little more than halfway through. I guess it's a pee break, but I still find it strange, especially as it interrupts the experience if you're into the movie. Having said that, it more or less stops people from wandering in and out of the theater during the movie. :)

Christmas in Istanbul

Merry Christmas from Turkey! It looks pretty festive, doesn't it? In the last couple of years, the idea of colorful lights and decorated trees has really caught on here. (We've been to IKEA twice in the last month and I couldn't believe how many people I saw buying trees.) But the actual meaning of Christmas still remains a mystery to your average Turk. It's not that much of a surprise considering most people are not Christians but it's slightly amusing because most are buying Christmas trees thinking this is how we celebrate...New Year's. :)

It's a regular day here so unfortunately I had to work (I work Sundays about every other week, alas - a whole different subject). But wherever you are, I hope you had a good one!

Odd Things about Turkey: Smoking on TV

We have a basic cable TV package and with it, we get a number of English-speaking stations, like CNN International, the BBC, and Eurosport. We also have two TV channels, e2 and MSNBC, that show American and British TV shows almost exclusively. How they choose these shows, I have no idea, as they don't seem to belong to any one network; some, like the Martha Stewart Show and Ellen, are about two years out of date while others, like Conan, Leno, Gossip Girl and Game of Thrones, are only a couple of days or weeks behind.

For whatever reason, e2 and MSNBC don't permit smoking in their programming so whenever a smoking implement appears - be it a cigarette, pipe, or weed - they cover it over with a cartoon flower. I've got used to it now though it still cracks me up...why a cartoon flower, of all things?!?

Nudity, not surprisingly, is totally fuzzed out (so why they showed Game of Thrones is beyond me) and I learned last night while watching part of Children of Men that they also fuzz out blood (or at least copious amounts of it; I happened to see the part where Julianne Moore's character gets shot in the neck).

And er, yes, I do take photos of my television. What of it?