Guess what I found last week

(There's been a bit of a lull in blogging but now we have Internet at home (hurray!) and no longer have to carefully conserve our mobile Internet. So now I should be able to blog more regularly.)

The other day I was having a quick look around in a 5 lira shop which is basically the Turkish equivalent of a pound shop, except that it specialises in kitchenware and lots of the things it sells are not 5 lira. And guess what I stumbled across?

This isn't any old casserole dish though.

This is a George Home casserole dish, which I found somewhat amusing. I have no idea how it ended up in a small shop here. And, readers, I bought it (because I did genuinely need a casserole dish). Although with the weather heating up here, I'm not sure I'll be making many hearty stews any time soon.

Note - for this post to make any sense, you really have to know who I worked for, pre-baby. Otherwise it's a slightly random picture of a casserole dish.

A fairly typical afternoon (or, how I nearly flooded the bathroom)

My afternoon started off in a fairly straightforward manner. J and I waved L off to language school, I washed up the lunch dishes, played with J for a little bit and then, after putting J to bed for his nap, settled down, with a cup of tea and a biscuit, to some language study. After a while, the door buzzer sounded. Someone from Türk Telecom had come about our Internet – at least, that's what I pieced together from the words 'Internet', 'Türk Telecom' and 'Süperonline' (the Internet company), plus we've been waiting for something to happen with getting our Internet set up.

Unfortunately, this gentleman didn't speak much English, and my Turkish is currently limited to the present continuous verb form (though that's pretty shaky). He asked some questions, located our cable socket and tried to tell me something about getting the Internet set up and phoning Süperonline. With the aid of Google Translate, he managed to communicate something about Süperonline connecting a modem, 24 hours, a text message and me phoning Süperonline. Further exchanges (conversation would be too generous a term) meant that I managed to work out that we should wait for a text message and then phone Süperonline. In addition, there's some kind of issue with our modem wires that someone from Süperonline will need to fix. So we are still mostly in the dark about what's happening with our Internet and will wait for a text message to arrive, before figuring out how exactly we are going to call Süperonline (or, to be more precise, who we are going to ask to make the call on our behalf).

At this point, you might be wondering why this is such a typical afternoon. But it's this sort of interaction that is becoming quite normal for us – the combination of not knowing how things work here and not speaking Turkish means that we frequently have people try and tell us things that we don't understand about processes that we don't know about. So, as we continue to set up our home here, we are learning to live with a fairly constant level of uncertainty about what is happening when. Some days this is harder than others. But then I remember that we are slowly making progress. Today I knew how to say “I am telephoning” and the words for earlier and later, which definitely did not lead to grammatically correct sentences but did mean that I could work out that we should wait for a text message before phoning, rather than vice versa.

And after the man from Türk Telecom had left, I took my dictionary into the bathroom to decipher the different cycles on the washing machine (rather than just relying on the one cycle which I did understand, the 30 minute express cycle). I figured out which cycle I needed, pressed start and then suddenly remembered that I should definitely not leave the waste water pipe hanging loose but that it would be a really good idea to put it over the edge of the bath (which seems to be a fairly normal way to operate washing machines here)

So we may not know when we will get Internet, but at least our bathroom isn't flooded.