It’s no secret that I love taking pictures of my coffee cups, particularly when they are full of yummy coffee. One of my favorite coffee cup pictures hails from an almost tragic experience in Kos, Greece.
When you live in a foreign country, you live on a learning curve. Every experience is more difficult and more frustrating. Not that it is bad. It is just different.
While we lived in Turkey in 2014, the country underwent multiple regulation changes as to how foreigners could obtain resident visas. It seemed that every time we spoke with a foreigner also going through the process, we needed or didn’t need a different set of papers, we needed to go to a different office or see a new official.
Then we realized a big problem. The visa office was booked full. Our appointment to get our resident visas was scheduled for only days before our tourist visas expired. So on top of the uncertainty as to what foreigners needed and the officials constantly asked for additional paperwork or for the paperwork in a different format, our deadline was quickly approaching. We would leave the office with a checklist of items to obtain, and return the next week needing a whole new set of items. We felt overwhelmed and stressed, to say the least! If we failed to obtain a resident visa before our tourist visa expired, then we would be in the country illegally. Matt and I tried to remain calm and not fear Turkish officials kicking us out of the country as the days crept towards our deadline. It wasn’t as easy as a “border run.” If your visa expires in Turkey, you have to leave the country for 90 days.
We spent weeks tirelessly traveling back and forth across a city of 20 million people to get random paperwork translated and notarized, contacting officials, returning to the visa office only to be told to find additional paperwork and to be shoved to different lines, tracking down additional paperwork in opposite corners of the city, and revisiting the same offices again to get paperwork notarized for a second and third time.
We visited the arrived at the office for what felt like the umpteenth time. The officer looked up at us, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Üzgünüm,"meaning, “I’m sorry.” He decided that we had to leave the country. We explained that the office was full, and that we had tried to get it all completed in time, but no one knew what we needed. He stood by his decision that we had to leave Turkey.
He wrote us an official letter explaining that if we exited the country for 3 days, we would be allowed to re-enter and obtain our resident visas.
We packed a small weekend bag, locked our apartment, and headed to the coast to take a ferry across the Mediterranean to Kos, Greece. At the border, the official looked at our passports and called his superior. The officer then asked us to step out of line and to follow him to his office. The officer raised his voice, “You’ve been here too long! Your passport is dated for over four months ago! You cannot come back into the country until after 90 days have passed!”
Of course, this was all in Turkish, and we were trying to translate what he said. He realized that we were trying our best to understand. So he went to get a translator.
The translator made it clear. We could not re-enter the country until after 90 days had passed.
He officially kicked us out of the country.
We got onto the ferry, and took a deep breath. The officer found us on the ferry and demanded that Matt follow him off the boat.
I sat alone with my pulse racing for over 10 minutes wondering if my husband was coming back or if they had thrown him in jail. Finally Matt returned, and explained, “They just wanted to reiterate that we couldn’t come back in the country, even though we have an official letter."
There we sat on a ferry, crossing to a small Greek island with only a few days' worth of clothes and no promise that we would be allowed to return to our home in Istanbul or what would happen in the next few days.
I was 8 months pregnant by this time, and we had no idea what the next week held. So, we did what any pregnant couple would do on a Greek island. We rested! After a few days relaxing next to the pool, taking long naps in our room, and enjoying the island, we boarded a ferry to re-enter Turkey by a different border crossing. Sneaky? Yes.
We anxiously waited as the line crawled through the terminal. A group of Australian college students on holiday immediately in front of us were denied access to the country. Matt and I exchanged glances as our pulses raced. The guard looked at our visas and letter and replied, “No.” He then asked his colleague who told him to call their supervisor.
The guard exchanged heated words with his supervisor on the phone. He angrily hung up the phone. The supervisor told him to let us through. With a huff, he stamped our visas.
Matt exhaled his breath that I'm pretty sure he had been holding since the officers asked him to follow them off the ferry 3 days earlier.
The very next day after arriving home in Istanbul, we returned to the visa office and successfully obtained our residence visas!
