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.
