Phones and friends

I am writing today after pressure from my Mother who is apparently checking every day to see what we have been up to ! I just managed to speak to her for 27 minutes going over the detail of our life - seems we can skip over the top level detail now due to the blog ! There also appears to be a great following - suddenly I'm feeling the pressure to keep writing in the same tone (which is great as I don't have another one - WYSIWYG). What if we have nothing to report on  ?  But we do seem to have some little upset or excitement most days.

So - yesterdays upset. Caused a few little tears actually. We went to try and sort put the phones. In Turkey, if you bring a phone into the country and put a Turkish SIM in it then you must register the phone and pay tax on it, otherwise the phone is blocked after 2 months. Sounds easy enough ? Yeah right !

There are apparently several ways to do this but we chose the following process, on the basis that we are staying near the airport and we didn't want to go all the way to the tax office in central Istanbul (Tacsim Square).

1. Go to the airport police station and get a piece of paper from the stating that you are legally in the country.  (This took us over an hour on account of the fact we didn't know which terminal. We chose to start at International and got directed to Domestic. At Domestic we got sent back to International. So who better to ask than a policeman ? Remember me saying that the people here are very friendly ? Seems that they forgot to tell anyone in authority that ! They have the same sort of pinched looks on their faces as the people in the passport office in London. And even if they can speak English they pretend they can't. Anyway - 2 pieces of paper duly handed over - although the lady did raise an eyebrow when I asked for mine.)

2. Take the paper to the ATBank in the airport terminal - the only bank that will help - and pay the tax. (Great if you have a social security pass - which Paul has. Point blank refusal if you don't. So all of a sudden, hot, tired and stressed, I am being told I can't register my phone. Well I wasn't actually told that - I just got a shoulder shrug).

3. Take the tax receipt and the police report to a phone company - Vodafone in this case - and take out a contract. (This proved to be so cheap - 50 TL per month for calls and data. (Divide by 4 for £). In the meantime the assistant tried to sell me a new android phone - for 1500 TL when it said 899 TL on the card. Sounded like a scam to me.)

So I did something I have never done before - I marched to the coffee shop and bought the cake in the photo below. It lasted all of 30 seconds - tasted great - and actually calmed me down !!

Back to being rational again - realised the Vodafone guy was scamming us, and came up with the solution of buying a second-and iPhone which has already been registered. Cue the shop in Yesilkoy that Paul bought his iPad from. Got quote a bargain there - but I am relegated to the iPhone 4 set now having had an iPhone 5S for the last 2 years. Just as well I'm not bothered about technology. It'll do the job and the stress has gone. (Anyone want to buy an iPhone 5S btw ????).

The result of the stressful afternoon ? The gym was put on hold until tomorrow. Never do today what you can put off til tomorrow.

After buying the phone we trotted off to the town centre for a beer (in way of celebration) and met up with a lovely Austrian crowd - 4 of whom are pilots (or trainees) with THY. What a great bunch. Christian, pictured below, was the really helpful guy we met on Day 3. He has an interesting mode of transport around the town.

A real fun night with a lovely fish dinner in a very cheap restaurant above - wait for it - a fish shop. And I mean a shop that sells fish, not a fish and chip shop. Interesting thing about a fish course in Turkey- that's all it is. Fish. Nothing more nothing less. The full fish, head and all, baked / grilled and deliciously tasty. But not a single vegetable, salad or chip to go with it.

One of the guys on the course (Thomas) has a lovely girlfriend (Johanna) who is very sparky and funny. She will be moving out here in December - which will be great. She's already referring to me as her "British Mother" though !!!! Not sure whether that's to be taken as a compliment or what :-). But since I am actually 2 years older than her mother then I guess I could be. See - bonds being made already.

So this morning I met a lovely lady (Aailya) for a coffee at her condo, along with her THY husband. My first networking contact thanks to FB. Will be meeting up with them again at some point. More coffees lined up for Wed and Thu. Then I had a lovely Skype with my friend Anne from Singapore - now back in the UK. Great to catch up with her after 9 months - can't believe its that long !

Finally - we did go to the gym this afternoon - about time too !! Will probably pay for it tomorrow - but its got to be done. As my Mother put it - the semi-detox didn't last long did it ?