S's ikamet (residence permit) card arrived today. One on hand the process has been straightforward and almost exactly three months after he was born, we have his card. On the other hand, like any bureaucratic process here, it is invariably stressful.
Here's an insight into the stresses of the ikamet process.
For first time applications, an appointment is needed (and a passport, which delayed our application until S's British passport arrived). After filling out an application online, you click and are given an appointment day and time. There's no choice on the appointment day or time and no ability to change it without cancelling and redoing the whole application. You get what you're given. And as we were going to be in Eskişehir for one week in August and on holiday for two weeks in September, we were hoping and praying that the appointment wouldn't be while we were away. Thankfully, it was four days before we went to Eskişehir.
And then at the appointment, the official said that he had to take an original copy of S's birth-certificate-equivalent documents rather than the notarised copy. Which would have been fine, except we'd been told by the population office where you get this particular document from that it isn't something they keep giving out - so now we've lost one of our original copies and there's a niggle in the back of our minds about what happens next time we need to apply as we could get stuck between two different government offices.
After an ikamet appointment, and provided all your paperwork is in order and accepted, you get sent away with a stamped piece of paper that lets you leave the country for up to 15 days and you await a text telling you that your ikamet card is on its way. However, you don't know how long the card will take to come - it could be a couple of weeks, it could be up to 3 months.
İkamets have to be signed for and a passport shown, so if you're not in when it arrives, it gets left at the post office for you to collect. So this last week we have been really praying that the card would either come before our holiday in September or after it, because if the card arrived while we were away, we didn't know how long the post office would keep it for before sending it back (but it would probably be less than two weeks) and what happened if it was sent back.
And then it was announced that the public holiday for Eid for government institutions was going to be all of next week and I thought the card definitely wouldn't come before we went away. We prayed a lot about it these last few days, but I was still so surprised when we got the text on Tuesday evening saying it was on its way. The card arrived the next morning (and typically they don't arrive until 2-3 days after the text comes, so even that was speedy). So now we are all official and legal here until February 2019 or until we leave Istanbul!
Why am I telling you all this?
Firstly, it's an answer to prayer and I wanted to share that with you. Secondly, I wanted to give a little bit of an insight into how the process works here and why it is something that we ask for people to pray for.
But most importantly, God is good and that's something that S's ikamet arrival has led me to particularly reflect on this week. If I'm honest, of all the stresses I expected when coming here, the bureaucratic processes have taken up more mental energy than I thought they would. I don't tend to stress about the big things that could happen here (with the small exception of earthquakes sometimes...). I find it easy to believe that God is in control of the life-and-death big things.
But the small(er) things? Like appointment dates and paperwork and timings of post? God is in control of the smaller things too and sometimes it takes a bureaucratic process that I have no control over to remind me of that. That's not to say things will always work out easily and I have no idea what will happen with S's birth-certificate-document-thing. But our God is good and can be trusted with all things, big and small, and he is working them out for our good.
Thursday 24 August 2017
Saturday 19 August 2017
Eskişehir - getting there (and back again)
You may be wondering why an entire blog post is needed on getting there and back. Well, Eskişehir is a city about 200 miles south east of Istanbul and we don't have a car.
There are four main ways to achieve any long distance travel in Turkey:
1. Private car
2. Bus/coach
3. Train
4. Aeroplane
So having offered to house sit for a week for a family in Eskişehir, how on earth were we going to get there? Domestic flights are actually one of the most common ways of travelling between cities (Turkey is a big country!) and surprisingly cheap. However Eskişehir is close enough to Istanbul that there are no domestic flights there. Renting a car is expensive and a hassle. So it was between bus and train.
Turkey does not have a well developed rail network in general. There is a high speed line that connects a few cities (the main link being between Istanbul and Ankara) and a few other slower trains. But, Eskişehir is actually located on the Istanbul - Ankara line so my original plan was for us to take the train. And because it is high speed, the train journey would only be 2.5 hours.
Until I remembered that the train station (and there is only one main train station in Istanbul) is on the other side of the Bosphorus and so far out of Istanbul that it barely qualifies as being in Istanbul. It would have taken more time, effort and cost to get to the train station than to actually get the train. And then I read on the website that there were luggage restrictions. I thought we did pretty well at packing lightly for 4 people for a week, but there was no way that our luggage and the pushchair were within the stated luggage allowances. And while we might have got away with it in reality, it wasn't a risk we were ready to take.
That left the bus. Kudos to my lovely husband for taking me at my word and not even raising an eyebrow when I announced our best option was to take our toddler and baby on a 6 hour bus journey.
There are four main ways to achieve any long distance travel in Turkey:
1. Private car
2. Bus/coach
3. Train
4. Aeroplane
So having offered to house sit for a week for a family in Eskişehir, how on earth were we going to get there? Domestic flights are actually one of the most common ways of travelling between cities (Turkey is a big country!) and surprisingly cheap. However Eskişehir is close enough to Istanbul that there are no domestic flights there. Renting a car is expensive and a hassle. So it was between bus and train.
Turkey does not have a well developed rail network in general. There is a high speed line that connects a few cities (the main link being between Istanbul and Ankara) and a few other slower trains. But, Eskişehir is actually located on the Istanbul - Ankara line so my original plan was for us to take the train. And because it is high speed, the train journey would only be 2.5 hours.
Until I remembered that the train station (and there is only one main train station in Istanbul) is on the other side of the Bosphorus and so far out of Istanbul that it barely qualifies as being in Istanbul. It would have taken more time, effort and cost to get to the train station than to actually get the train. And then I read on the website that there were luggage restrictions. I thought we did pretty well at packing lightly for 4 people for a week, but there was no way that our luggage and the pushchair were within the stated luggage allowances. And while we might have got away with it in reality, it wasn't a risk we were ready to take.
That left the bus. Kudos to my lovely husband for taking me at my word and not even raising an eyebrow when I announced our best option was to take our toddler and baby on a 6 hour bus journey.
However, compared to the UK, long distance bus travel in Turkey is much more popular and much more comfortable. As there's lots of bus companies offering the same routes, competition helps maintain inexpensive prices and good service. Buses are really frequent, often running 24 hours a day. The bus company we went with had buses going every hour from Istanbul to Eskişehir (and vice versa) all through the day and most of the night.
Our bus was pretty standard in terms of comfort and service- wider seats and more leg space than the average short haul airline, a bus host who brought round free drinks and snacks, electric sockets to charge phones, and screens in the back of the headrests.
Our return journey was quite a bit harder with the children than the outward journey (lesson for the future: do not travel late afternoon/evening in the hope that your children will sleep half the time.)
But, we successfully achieved our bus journeys with both our sanity and the fellow passengers' sanity mostly intact and we even got to see some Turkish countryside.
Turkey has way more forest than you would initially assume. This picture isn't a very good representation of that, but it's the only one I took.
Wednesday 16 August 2017
Eskişehir - an intro
First off, a word of warning. I'm planning on getting several blog posts out of our recent trip to Eskişehir so you may get rather bored of reading about it. But as my life mostly consists of going to the park and learning Turkish, it's nice to have something else to write about for a change!
We just spent a week house sitting for a family in a "small" city called Eskişehir, which literally means "old city". I say "small" in inverted commas because it's population is a little over 700,000. That would make it one of the larger cities in the UK (about the same size as Leeds) but it's significantly smaller than Istanbul (with an official population of about 15 million but probably considerably more unofficially).
Eskişehir is about 200 miles south east of Istanbul and 145 miles west of Ankara. If that doesn't help you visualise the location, here's a map.
Despite the name, it is actually quite a modern city in many ways, probably partly because it has two big universities. And partly because the mayor has put a big focus in recent years on developing the city and particularly the river that runs through the middle, so it has quite a European feel with pathways along the river, bridges and a tram system.
Other important things to note: it is 792m above sea level and quite flat. Why are these important? It is high (for reference, it's about the same height above sea level as the top of the Old Man of Coniston and 100m lower than the top of Cader Idris), which means that although it gets hot in the daytime in summer, the temperature drops significantly at night and the heat feels a lot drier than Istanbul. Which is really important when you live in Istanbul and weather.com is telling me that the humidity this evening here is going to be 80%. A week without feeling sticky at this time of year was such a luxury!
The flatness not only meant that we could do good walks without needing to walk up hills (always a plus with a toddler), it also meant that bicycles seemed to be quite a common mode of transport. This took me by surprise - there are so few cyclists in Istanbul (probably partly due to the hills and partly due to the fact that Istanbul driving is notoriously chaotic!) that I had naively assumed that pedal power wasn't really an established mode of transport in cities here. So it was quite refreshing to be able to see children out on the street on their bikes and old men cycling leisurely around (as well as a few people who seemed to use tramways as bike paths...).
We thoroughly enjoyed getting out of Istanbul for a week and I'm looking forward to sharing some of our experiences with you!
We just spent a week house sitting for a family in a "small" city called Eskişehir, which literally means "old city". I say "small" in inverted commas because it's population is a little over 700,000. That would make it one of the larger cities in the UK (about the same size as Leeds) but it's significantly smaller than Istanbul (with an official population of about 15 million but probably considerably more unofficially).
Eskişehir is about 200 miles south east of Istanbul and 145 miles west of Ankara. If that doesn't help you visualise the location, here's a map.
Despite the name, it is actually quite a modern city in many ways, probably partly because it has two big universities. And partly because the mayor has put a big focus in recent years on developing the city and particularly the river that runs through the middle, so it has quite a European feel with pathways along the river, bridges and a tram system.
A city centre bridge over the River Porsuk
Other important things to note: it is 792m above sea level and quite flat. Why are these important? It is high (for reference, it's about the same height above sea level as the top of the Old Man of Coniston and 100m lower than the top of Cader Idris), which means that although it gets hot in the daytime in summer, the temperature drops significantly at night and the heat feels a lot drier than Istanbul. Which is really important when you live in Istanbul and weather.com is telling me that the humidity this evening here is going to be 80%. A week without feeling sticky at this time of year was such a luxury!
The flatness not only meant that we could do good walks without needing to walk up hills (always a plus with a toddler), it also meant that bicycles seemed to be quite a common mode of transport. This took me by surprise - there are so few cyclists in Istanbul (probably partly due to the hills and partly due to the fact that Istanbul driving is notoriously chaotic!) that I had naively assumed that pedal power wasn't really an established mode of transport in cities here. So it was quite refreshing to be able to see children out on the street on their bikes and old men cycling leisurely around (as well as a few people who seemed to use tramways as bike paths...).
We thoroughly enjoyed getting out of Istanbul for a week and I'm looking forward to sharing some of our experiences with you!
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