Well, here's my helpful
guide-slash-recap-of-what-we-did-in-our-first-week:
- First job: get the essentials. Food, water and toilet paper, enough to keep you going until the next day at least.
- Clean your temporary flat, and in the process, make your first purchases of household equipment: a mop and bucket, and a dustpan and brush.
Our first purchases of a durable nature! J's a fan of the brush and likes to wave it around. Me? I'm loving the mop. The mop head clips onto the bottom of the bucket and it swirls round and fills up with water, then it clips into the drainage bit and you push down on the mop and it swirls round fast to drain the water out of the mop. The day we bought this, it pretty much made my day.
- Start working out (or trying to work out... we're definitely not there yet) what foods are readily available here and how much they cost. It turns out that fresh vegetables such as tomatoes, cucumbers and aubergines are fairly cheap here compared to the UK, as are apples and kiwis. And then try and work out what meals you can cook with the additional constraints of very limited kitchen equipment and 2 gas hobs and no oven. Shop pretty much every day for what you need. Then cook! (added bonus: learn to light a gas hob with a cigarette lighter. I realise this is a talent that most people acquire before they get to my age, but as my in-laws well know, I used to have to get someone to light the hob for me when I cooked in their kitchen. Now I can do it myself! I'm quite proud of this.)
- Get introduced to a few different people e.g. one of my language helpers and another friend who is helping us sort out all the things we have to do and translate for us
- Get your İstanbulkarts, which are a bit like Oyster cards for the Metro, trams and ferries here
- Go to the tax office to get your tax number and to pay the fee to register phones. It's recommended to take a baby with you who can make friends with the officials whilst you are waiting.
- Go to the phone shop and get your new SIM cards. Hello mobile Internet :-)
- Explore!! Walk around some areas to (a) start getting your bearings and (b) start thinking about which residential areas to live in
- Find a friendly emlak (estate agent) and start flat viewings. A great thing about living here is that lots of things happen immediately. A friend had recommended an emlak, so we went with them to meet him and once he knew what we were after and had made a few calls, we immediately went and did 3 viewings and scheduled another for the next day.
- Open a bank account if possible.
- Start learning some language, even if your language course hasn't officially started yet. For one thing, it makes food shopping easier (a lot of dried herbs look very similar).
- And of course, do all the usual things that you do with a baby and try and introduce some semblance of routine as far as you can. Unfortunately, J had a bit of a nasty cold and sore throat in his first few days here which made things a little harder, but he's much chirpier now, and enjoying being chased around the house by one of us crawling after him.
- Aaaand smile. There will be harder weeks and there will be easier weeks, but we made it through Week One!
