When Things Don’t Go Right – Tragicomic Moments of Two Years
What a strange thing they call ‘Social Media’… People seem so happy, so carefree, that everyone seems to have taken their bikinis at 38 degrees and is constantly nibbling on their organic watermelon! Sometimes we wonder if we are the only ones in this world who are worried and have problems in their lives! Of course, this is a joke, and everyone prefers to share their good times rather than sharing their bad moments, and we do so most of the time.
Naturally, we do not always experience good things.. Sometimes when things go well, while we are biting our organic watermelon, sometimes we face various problems in this ‘living abroad’ process we have chosen! Sometimes we laugh at them, sometimes we worry, but the end is always the same; it is solved somehow!
We thought, from the beginning to the end (even in chronological order), what kind of tragicomic events happened to us in these 2 years, how did we react, how did we solve them, we decided to write them down! You know, as much as what happens to us, it does not happen to you; Don’t be surprised if at least 1-2 of them come, you are not alone!
Everyone’s problem, of course, is to themselves and dear life, we start our list by saying that we don’t get bigger ones, we’re okay with the little ones!
1-) While Umut was applying to SAC, where he is currently doing his master’s degree, he sent the application documents to the school by mail.. Result: He mistyped his e-mail address with stress! The men chose Umut and informed them by e-mail. Of course, when we did not receive the e-mail, they thought that we were not shaking them and chose someone else instead of Umut! Just to our luck, another student canceled that day and they took Umut to a Skype interview on the same day and chose him instead of that student.. So by chance we tore it up!
2-) While I was applying for a graduate visa, I had to open a blocked account and for this I had to make an appointment with the consulate and have my documents signed.. I completed everything, but the consulate did not make an appointment for signature.. While giving my visa documents, I did not have the most important document, the blocked account document.. The guys called and asked if I was kidding.. I explained the situation and they kept my visa inside for 4 weeks, I gave the necessary document 4 weeks later and got my visa.
3-) Before moving to Frankfurt, we went to Brazil for 2 weeks and 2 days after returning from Brazil to Istanbul. then we moved to Frankfurt. On my way back from Brazil, I forgot my wallet at the hotel in Rio with all my IDs, my lawyer ID, money and all my bank-credit cards! When we realized it was too late and we didn’t have a chance to go back to the hotel. I got on the plane like that and when I came to Istanbul, I didn’t have any documents except a passport.. I was like a berry. This is how I moved to Germany ‘naked’. I brought all the money I will use for 5 months by putting it in a purse.. My wallet arrived 9 months later, with all the money in it gone.
4-) While looking for a house in Frankfurt, we applied to an advertisement we saw on the internet and we agreed on the price.. When the men asked for the deposit in advance, while I was going to the bank to deposit the money, Hope got furious and googled the pictures of the house.. The house is in Berlin, not Frankfurt, and it turned out to be a house for 100 euros per night. It’s totally fraud. I was depositing the money on the cashier at the bank when Umut noticed this and called ‘don’t pay’.. Fortunately, I got the money back from the cashier and I was able to get out.
5-) Of course we couldn’t find a house before we moved to Frankfurt.. We were guests in the house of an acquaintance whom we have not met before.. We visited nearly 30 houses in the first week and none of them accepted us.. Then, by chance, the owner of a house we went to, liked us very much and even though he had rented his house to someone else, he canceled it and gave it to us.. The reason was that the woman was a leftist prisoner in Germany at the time, and Umut liked her leftist mustache very much Later we learned that the woman married a Turkish person twice just to be able to give citizenship and they divorced this woman after she got citizenship.. Our dear host Anna took great care of us in Frankfurt. When we left Frankfurt, we were mostly sad to leave our house.
6-) During the first time we moved home and when we didn’t speak any German, I downloaded H&M’s online application and looked for something.. Then I did not receive anything because I do not understand German (assuming) I left the application. Since I gave the address of the house when I became a member, they started to send advertisement envelopes to the house from time to time.. Between the envelopes, something like an invoice was coming out, but we didn’t shake it.. Then one day, something similar to an enforcement document came from a law office in Frankfurt Later, when we researched, we learned that when shopping online, you first buy the product and when they ship the product to your home, they put the invoice inside.. Later, you went to the bank and paid the price of the product with that invoice (it doesn’t keep it alive in Turkey!).
While I was browsing the German application, I bought 1 pair of tights, but I didn’t notice! Those tights came home and Umut saw it in the mail and brought it home and forgot to tell me because he didn’t care so much, and I didn’t notice the new tights in the rush to move. we had to pay euros. If we didn’t realize it, the house could also be foreclosed!
7-) One day before Umut’s temporary 3-month student visa expires, the foreigners office in Frankfurt made an appointment and they said come and get a new one.. We arrived at the appointed place at 19:00, the appointment time, but a-ah! door wall everywhere. Closed! Then it turned out that the officer who wrote the e-mail wrote 19:00 instead of 10:00 and the office was closing at 16:00! Thus, we could not extend Umut’s visa and he became a fugitive.
To fix it, they said come early the next week and we were at the door of the foreigners office at 5 am.. We thought we’d be the first to arrive. But there were 100 people in line before us, and by the time it’s our turn, those daily numbers are gone! The next day, we woke up with the immigrants in front of the building at minus 10 degrees.. We extended the visa in the morning, but we were sick for the next 10 days.
Another officer in the same foreigners office kicked an Indian friend of Umut out of his room by saying ‘winter’. We don’t know if we could have stayed calm if this had happened to us.
Since Frankfurt is a small city, you can go everywhere by bike.. So the bike is a vital thing for us. One day someone stole the valve of my bike (!) and the tire was flat.. I had to change the tire because the bike inner tube is adjacent to the valve.. But that inner tube is no longer produced.. We bought the inner tube 3 times but it did not fit. We transported tires from Istanbul, it did not fit again. I couldn’t ride a bike for 3 months. Finally, we borrowed the valve of a bicycle parked around the house! Of course it did right away and after 3 months I got my bike! I think this is a chain and the person whose valve we took (ç) will also (ç) get a valve from another bike!
9-) My phone was stolen while I was shopping at the supermarket.. I noticed instantly and told the shopkeepers. By the time the police arrived, the phone had already been ringing.. The police gave his phone number and asked us to call if anything happened.. We went home, tracked the phone, and located it.. We immediately called the police and explained the situation.. While we were thinking ‘heh, they’re going to bring the phone back now’, the police said that he was sleepy and hung up the phone.. We could not reach again. The phone was gone and never came back, with hundreds of photos in it that we didn’t back up. This was the first time in Germany I wanted to throw myself out the window in anger.. A year ago, Umut had deleted the photos of our Thailand trip from his phone without putting them on the computer.. At the moment, we only have 3 photos together from Thailand.
10-) When depositing my school’s 2nd semester fee, the bank deducted an extra 15 Euros.. As such, my semester wage was paid 15 Euros less.. Instead of warning me by sending an e-mail at school, he waited for me to notice it myself.. Well, naturally I didn’t notice!? One morning I received an e-mail stating that ‘I was dismissed as a student because I paid the fee incompletely and my entire registration was deleted’.. In that madness, I called the student advisor and said things like ‘I’m in a taxi, I’m coming, are you crazy bro!?’. Just like I had a nervous breakdown, the woman corrected the situation in 15 minutes out of fear.
11-) We never encountered racism on the street.. But in the German Stock Exchange, where I did my internship for 3 months in my first year, my roommate and also my manager, the lawyer, started to harbor a terrible hostility to me from the moment he heard that I was Turkish.. For 3 months, he only asked questions that he thought were humiliating (do you still travel with a donkey in Turkey, your mother is wearing a turban, ah! how is she not wearing a turban?, you wear a turban on the street, I guess you don’t drink, etc.) and she enjoyed it.. In the afternoon, when the whole department was going to the cafeteria, he specifically told them not to invite me.. I ate alone for 3 months. After a while, I got used to not wearing it, because racism is the shame of those who are racist.
12-) It was the morning of July 16, and the day we returned to Turkey after finishing the first year, was from Munich.. We were living in Frankfurt at the time.. On the night of 15 July, our flight was canceled and we had to stay at the airport for 2 nights in Munich.. Fortunately, THY arranged a hotel at the airport and paid for the beers we drank for 2 days.
13-) We got married on August 20 and went to Cuba and Mexico with our friends (4 people went) on our honeymoon.. While returning to the hotel at night in Cancun, Mexico, 100 meters from the hotel, Umut and Erkan came to the toilet as a side effect of alcohol.. Deciding that they couldn’t hold it another 100 meters, they ‘made it’ to the green we were passing by, to put it bluntly.. Meanwhile, the police car passing by on the street noticed this and stopped and demanded ‘300 Euros as a punishment for peeing on the street in Mexico’! When we said that there was no such penalty and that we would not pay, they immediately handcuffed Erkan and put him in the car.. After 40 minutes of negotiation, they went down to 200 Euros and Erkan had to pay. Thus, he went down in history as a ‘200 Euro peeing Turk’.. That 200 Euro was also soup money for those cops.
14-) The second year passed somehow and we decided to move to Munich in May.. We found a job in Munich, but the harder it was to find a house. 3 weeks before our move, a Turkish living in Munich said that he would rent his house to us and he promised emphatically that there would be no problem.. That being the case, we stopped looking for a house too.. 3 days before our move, he sent a message on Facebook saying “I gave up on giving you the house, Pasha, my heart wanted it”. While we were wondering if we should go crazy, go crazy or look for a new place, we set out and went out for a beer.
The next day we rented a 15-day flat from airbnb.. In this 15-day period, we were able to find only 1 house.. Its owner was Turkish, he was going to Konya for 6 months.. He rented us his house for 6 months and we still live in that house.. We have to move at the end of October, but we are not thinking about it right now.
15-) Singles pay the most taxes in Germany. You pay less tax if you are married. If you have children, you pay much less tax.. Since our marriage certificate is not in German (naturally), they still haven’t registered us as married.. We had a sworn translator make a German translation and delivered it to the required place, but we still seem to be single.. Naturally, we pay many times more taxes. We’ve learned not to be angry about it anymore.. With luck
16-) One of the necessary procedures to start working life is to get a Social Security Number.. So we applied for it and they told us they would mail it home. Just on the day when the mail would reach us, one of the neighbors in the apartment was offended by the fact that ‘our name is written crooked on the bell’ and removed our name from the bell! So, the mail came, but when he couldn’t see our name on the bell, he came back.. Then it disappeared. Yes you know is lost. We searched the necessary places but they said it was ‘lost in the mail’. And because it’s our fault, they don’t resend. Now we say ‘hmmm’ to such things.
17-) As a bonus, two of our friends, who didn’t know that there is a huge fine to use torrents here before coming to Germany, were paid 2500 Euros and 2200 Euros to their homes for downloading a series from torrent. Euro fine came. they had to pay. We didn’t know it when we first came, but we managed to delete the program without being punished.
And many more that we hadn’t thought of.
* Obviously, as long as we continue to live in Germany, this list will go on and on.. Stay tuned.
Loves!
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