There have been precious few times in the past
couple of months where I have wished that Joe and I had working cell
phones. Usually the internet is
sufficient enough that online communication is simple and as there are no dire
circumstances that arise, imminent communication is rarely an issue. However, Saturday night was one of those
nights where a working cell phone would have come in extremely handy.
Last
week at coffee, we got to talking about English TV shows, and Mustafa was
saying that he had a desire to watch the Wire. Since it is complete on my
harddrive- along with a plethora of other English movies and shows- we offered
to have him over and he could take whatever he wanted. Since his wife works and he has to be around
when his daughter gets home, he said that it would be easier if we came by his house. I messaged him on Saturday morning and said
we would stop by after we had eaten if that fit his schedule. He vehemently protested this saying that we
would eat at his house (it’s much easier to cave sometimes) and so I
agreed. I made it home after a long day,
had a quick shower and then tried to finalize our plans, as there had been a slight miscommunication about what time Joe finished work and what time we were
supposed to be at his house. While I
quickly downed a beer (which thank God was in the fridge) and messaged back and
forth between Joe and Mustafa, our internet decided to crash. This as I was waiting for a response from Joe
and trying to get back to Mustafa, stressing me out and making me even more
grateful for the aforementioned beer. I
managed to reset it, sent Joe a frantic message telling me to meet him at
Mustafa’s (praying he would get it in time) and set out (leaving a note on the door just in case). The lahmajun place closed at 7pm, and I only
had a hunch as to what time Joe should be arriving in front of the
building. After saying a quick hello to
his wife and daughter, and discussing how best to figure everything out, we
decided that I would go wait at the bus stop and hope Joe saw me, and that
Mustafa would go to the lahmajun place, and hopefully everything would work
out. To put an extremely stressful
twenty minutes to an anticlimactic finish, Joe spotted me at the bus station,
Mustafa got the food before it closed and we were happily warm inside his house
not long after.
Joe
had a pillow/toque fight with Mustafa’s seven year old daughter (her shrieking
with laughter) and Mustafa and I occasionally taking part, while his wife got
dinner together in the kitchen. It feels
very awkward not to help, and is a cultural norm I am definitely not used to
yet. We sat down to a delicious dinner
and then after Sibel cleaned up (again I was not allowed to help and my Turkish
is not good enough to insist) and a disgusting dessert of rice pudding (Turkish
style) which I ate all of to be polite, we sat down to tea and Joe and I taught
them how to play Yahtzee. It was more
difficult to explain than we would have imagined, but Mustafa tends to over-complicate things and they were sort of getting it by the end of the second
game. We spent the following hour
telling Mustafa which shows to download, and watching clips of his favourite
films (a process which was drawn out considerably longer than I would have
liked) before heading home to bed in anticipation of another long day (for me
at least) on Sunday.
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