The arrival of the internet
coincided with the default of our phones.
One day Joe’s told him he had no service, and the next day mine did as
well. Since we got our phone number’s a
day apart, Joe figured something was up (and we had just topped up so it
couldn’t have been that) so we went into the store to try and figure it out. The people at the store couldn’t figure it
out. It was saying that the accounts
were active on their computers, and so eventually they put our SIM cards into
one of the employees phones and lo and behold it worked. He didn’t seem to understand why- just told
us there was a problem with our phones- which Joe and I found suspicious, but
then another employee (with the help of Google Translate- how people
communicated without the internet is beyond me) told us that since our phones
were registered on foreign passports, we could no longer use them in Turkey and
that we would have to buy a Turkish phone.
This country has some funny rules.
They told us that even once our work visas arrive, we still couldn’t,
but our boss said we can, so now we will wait and see what happens and
hopefully it will all work out. We still
have internet at home and at the school, so we can still communicate, but it
does make things a titch difficult.
While
I see that Vancouver has received some snow, it is merely taunting me from the
mountaintops here, and December has rang in nice and wet, reminding me of
home. Other than that, it doesn’t feel
like Christmas. Most Turks don’t even
know what day of the year Christmas is, often explaining that December 31 is ‘Turkish
Christmas’, but as that is not a thing, both Joe and I have difficulties
actually getting that point across. The
end of November coincided with St. Andrew’s Day, and some of Joe’s students are
aware of Scottish pride and the conception of the kilt. (How they know what a kilt is and not when
Christmas is baffles me slightly, but continuing on) Joe, ever being up for some sort of shock
value, agreed to wear his kilt for the occasion. I was mildly bemused by this concept,
although I did inform him that if he chose to wear it on the bus, I would not
be present for the occasion. He agreed
that the bus might not be a good choice, and instead carried it in and changed
when he got to school. Since we work at
different schools during the day, I was not present for most of it, although
when I asked him how it was going, he said that he had posed for a lot of
photos, that his legs were very cold, and that while the women seemed to like
it, the men didn’t seem to approve. All
of the other teachers felt the need to show me the pictures (as though I have
never seen Joe in a kilt) and I nodded and listen to their amused takes on the
day’s events. Elif told me that it was a
day the students would never forget, and since they will most likely never go
to Scotland, she is probably right.
 |
| Joe and one of his students. |
I
am still in the process of slowly learning Turkish- picking up words here and
there and using the internet the rest of the time. I kept hearing the word ayna, which I knew means ‘mirror’, but from the context, it simply
didn’t make sense for people to be saying mirror all the time, so I figured it
must have some other meaning, or I was hearing it wrong. I did some more looking and found aynen which means ‘same’, but this still
didn’t seem to fit with context, so I asked Elif and Mehmet one day when I
heard it. Elif said that it meant
mirror, and I refuted her. It can’t
possibly mean mirror when I hear it this often.
They clued in that I was indeed hearing aynen (although I could swear they drop the final ‘n’ in spoken
Turkish, because I had been listening intently for it. I again refuted that it must mean something
else, and fortunately (based on the amount I was hearing it and the amount
people usually say ‘same’ in English.
Luckily, Mehmet clued in to what I was getting at and said that it can
also mean, “I agree,” or the like. We
had a good laugh, as did some of my students who were there at the time, but it
was nice to have one mystery solved in a language I am slowly beginning to
understand.
As
one mystery was solved, another is ongoing.
I am used to living on the top floor of an apartment building, and here
in Malatya is no different. The main
difference is that we have excruciatingly loud neighbours and we can’t figure
out where they are coming from. Most of
the rooms don’t border any other apartments, but there is constant thumping and
crying children and the like. We have
concluded that they must be our downstairs neighbours, but never having met
them to see if they have children or not, (and knowing that our next door
neighbours do) we have yet to determine if this is the cause. It is not pleasant wherever they are coming
from, that much we have determined.
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