Heating our home (Turkish gas adventures)

(Justin) Being a cold winter here, natural gas is an important commodity. The apartment buildings here are heated by a gas radiator system, either centrally controlled by the building or individually controlled by the residents. In our building, everything is individually controlled and our hot water heater handles the radiator as well as the running water.There is no tank, it heats running water as it goes (similar to what we had in Moldova). The dial on the left is radiator temperature, the dial on the bottom right is faucet water temperature (the magnets are the local delivery services-- McDonalds, local grocers, water, etc.).

One nice aspect of the natural gas system is that it is prepaid, the meter outside our door tells us how many cubic litres we have left (and is a daily reminder of how much we're using). We refill by taking a prepaid card to a local office and paying cash.  If you run out, no more gas until you reload your card.

When we moved in, the apartment had sat empty for months and the heat was turned on only the day before, so the apartment was quite chilly (it was -22C the night before our arrival). There wasn't much credit left on the meter and the payment office would be closed for the next two days--the weekend.  I was rather concerned about the chill so we turned the heaters up to maximum hoping the apartment would eventually get warm (it did). The gas meter was steadily decreasing and I was concerned that we might not have enough gas at this rate to make it through the weekend. I made sure to get to the office when it opened early Monday morning to be first in line to put money on the card, or else we'd have run out that day. This was officially our first bill paid in Turkey.  

Last Saturday, we had another adventure with the gas as suddenly the faucet hot water quit working while the radiators worked fine.  I called our landlord, Mustafa bey (who speaks perfect English), and he walked me through some possible steps, including adding more water to the system. Apparently the valves are really sensitive and before I knew it I had overloaded the system and water came gushing out of pipes in our kitchen, all over the floor. Mustafa sent some of his employees over to look at it, and they tried a few more things (including putting water all over our bathroom floor) to no avail and they called a repairman for later in the day. 

We've been very pleased with Turkish service and I was eager to talk to the repairman, who knew no English (I haven't found a conversation partner yet, so I take what I can get). He discovered that the valve that allowed hot water to flow into the pipes wasn't lifting properly ("yukarı gitmez"). After taking the heater apart and blowing dust out of the connections, he got it to work again (this took about an hour). He decided that the motor pushing the valve might be going bad and if it happened again it'd have to be replaced ("değişmesi gerekir"). This procedure cost us 50 TL (about $28) and some awkwardness as I offered him tea and he used phrases to decline the offers that I didn't know and I probably didn't respond appropriately.  But I learned how the heater worked.

Gas, water, electricity, and internet are things we tend to take for granted.  Joni and I have lived places where these didn't exist or weren't an everyday thing, so we're reminded to be thankful. 

Here's the view from our living room today as we picked up another inch or two of snow. If you look at the bottom of the picture you can see that the neighboring buildings have solar powered water heaters.  

Our apartment is on a corner of a top floor, so the exterior rooms are exposed to too much, so we keep them mostly shut in order to save gas. Judging from our neighbors' meters, they use gas as sparingly as possible and probably live in fewer rooms during the winter.  The expensiveness of gas is something we had inadequately budgeted for, honestly, and we're quite ready for spring to come.

The Mall

We have a mall quite close to our neighborhood, and we went to explore it last week.  We had been there before because there is a large Super Wal-Mart type store attached to it where we can find a lot of things we can't get at the local grocery stores.  However, we decided to just take some extra time to explore the mall.  We found a toy store that had all American products with Turkish labels, which we thought was pretty fun!  Elias felt right at home.  We bought him a DVD of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in Turkish!  I giggled at the big display of Beyblades, which my nephews are really into, and they taught Elias how to play in January:

There was also a huge food court and see if you recognize any of the restaurants (Click to enlarge):

Yep, Popeye's, Sbarro, and Burger King all in the local food court!  Cracking me up.  Then right across from the food court is this big children's play area with a climbing gym, ball pit, and train ride!

It's not free, but at about $1.70 to get in, you can bet we're going to be spending some time there!

The huge escalators were a hit by themselves!

That's Justin & Elias going down!

So all these things made the mall about our favorite place ever!

*Note: This mall has 5 floors and countless stores, with an underground parking garage, not to mention the supermarket right in it.  However, I later heard someone who has lived here for many years call it a "small" mall.  Apparently they get much bigger in this city!!!  I'm both frightened and intrigued.  :)  For Ankara folks who may want to know, this small mall is the 365.

Fun in the Kitchen

I've always enjoyed cooking and experimenting in the kitchen, so I'm having a lot of fun learning what foods I can get here and trying to figure out what I can create with them!  When we first arrived, our good friends who live here brought us a bag of groceries to get us started, which was so thoughtful and helpful!  Justin also could navigate the grocery store pretty well, so he picked us up a few staples too.  So our first full day in Turkey, we ate grilled cheese sandwiches and corn for lunch, with sliced apples on the side.

Then we had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner!

Justin had found these premade refrigerated meatballs at the store, and we just combined them with the pasta and sauce our friends had given.  The peas and carrots we found frozen at the grocery store, so it turned out to be a simple AND delicious meal!

The pasta sauce is expensive and hard to find in a jar, though, so today I attempted to make my own with what I could find at our local store (and the Italian Seasoning I had brought).  It wasn't too bad for a first attempt!

Elias and I also made our first attempt at banana bread a few days after we arrived.  (He and I always made it together at home.)  He likes the measuring and mixing, but his favorite part is licking the bowl!

I thought I'd point out a few things from the above photo, especially for those of you who have lived overseas before and might have such questions.

• Starting from the left side of the picture: The bread pan is really long and narrow.  It ended up cooking about the same length of time as a 9x5 pan, although with the temperature conversion to Celsius and my weird convection oven, who knows how it really compares?!  
• The white bottle is refrigerated milk!  (Many countries only have milk that is kept unrefrigerated on a shelf, and that's what we were expecting to find here.  Even the shelf-stable milk here isn't bad, but the refrigerator milk is DELICIOUS and not very expensive.  Win!)  
• Then in the red bowl up front, we made our own brown sugar by mixing white sugar with molasses. 
• The oil is sunflower oil - they don't have vegetable oil or canola oil here, so that's what we've got for a light oil!

It baked up very well though, and was DELICIOUS!  (In fact, some of the best we've ever made.  I suspect it's because we used real sugar - we used to use Splenda in the States.)  Elias approves!

Going Downtown

Yesterday we braved the city bus system for the first time and went to the downtown district of Ankara! (Well, Justin had ridden the buses before, but this was Elias' and my first time.) It was fairly easy to navigate - the trick for me is going to be learning where to get off to get where I'm going! If Elias sits in one of our laps, he rides free, so that's a bonus. It was fairly crowded, but I was touched when a Turkish gentleman got up so that Elias and I could have his seat. We'll do just fine here! :)

We just wandered a bit taking in the downtown scene. It was definitely faster and busier than our neighborhood! Elias took it all in stride, though.

He enjoyed all the pedestrian bridges, tunnels, escalators, and various other fun ways of getting from one place to another on foot! We also ate at McDonald's, so life gets no better for that little man. The Cheeseburger Happy Meal here looked EXACTLY the same as in the States, minus the apples. He even got a toy with his meal, probably the same one you'd get at a McD's in the States right now (Humpty Dumpty from Puss in Boots).

I thought I'd branch out a little and try a Turkish menu item at McD's called the McTurco. It was two beef patties in a pita with lettuce, tomato, and a sauce kind of like barbecue sauce. Yummy!

So we enjoyed getting out and exploring a bit more of the city - we're excited to live in a place like this!

First Days

We've had a good first couple of days getting settled into our new home. The apartment is beautiful and we are so thankful for how convenient it was to have a furnished place to come home to! It is on the 4th floor (which is the top floor) of our apartment building, so we have quite a few steps to get here, but it's good exercise, and the view is amazing! Here's the view from one of our rooms:Although completely furnished, the apartment was still lacking quite a bit in just simple household items like extra linens, many cooking and baking items, etc. However, we've been able to find almost everything we wanted just in the couple blocks around our house! That's so great! We have several great grocery and general stores just around the corner, so that's incredibly convenient.

On Sunday morning, Elias woke up sick and was yucky all day. He was slightly better on Monday, much better on Tuesday, and completely well today. That made for a bummer couple of days, though, because we couldn't get out with him, not to mention how completely not fun it is to be sick or clean up after someone who is! He's a trooper, though, and bounces back quickly, so we're back in stride now. Here he is playing with his Thomas puzzle on Monday morning:
So right now our focus is language! Although Justin is functional, he still has a lot he wants to learn to improve. And I'm starting from scratch but already making some great headway with concentrated study. It's so much easier when it's all around you! Elias is even getting a start with words Justin is teaching him, and Justin has been showing him some Turkish children's television on a station called TRT Çocuk (pronounced cho-juke). He has found some of Elias' favorite shows dubbed over in Turkish, such as Dinosaur Train and Chuggington. However, Elias even loves the Turkish shows he's never seen before. Look at him laughing at one of them!

Traveling Tales

We have arrived in Ankara, and our first day has been fantastic! I thought I'd do a little write-up of how our travels went, since so many of you were thinking about and praying for us as we went.

We spent several days before we left doing some intense thinking regarding our packing, because we wanted to limit our baggage to 6 pieces. The Lufthansa website said that each passenger got one free bag and the second for each of us would be $70. We really didn't want to pay more than that, and each bag could only be up to 50 pounds. When we packed up our Missouri house, there was WAY too much stuff that we had initially set aside as potentially traveling with us, so that meant we had to make some hard decisions about what could go and what could stay. After lots of packing, weighing, unpacking, reweighing, etc., we finally had 6 completed bags that were all exceptionally close to 50 pounds. We had no idea how heavy the airport scale would actually make them, so we just did our best and prayed either they'd all be under 50 or the person at the check-in counter would give us grace. Here we are at the counter with all 6 of our bags:
We arrived at the LEX airport on the morning of the 2nd, and we went to check in. We got our boarding passes and then began getting our luggage weighed and tagged. I put the two heaviest (according to our scale) first, so that if I had to take something out, I'd have time to do that while the rest were being handled. The first one weighed in at 49.5 pounds. SCORE! Then the second, 49.5. YES!! Then the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth... ALL weighed 49.5 pounds! We couldn't believe it! We'd achieved maximum capacity without going over! That was nothing short of a miracle.

Then, to astound us even further, the check-in attendant (whose jaw was on the FLOOR after weighing those bags!) tagged all our bags and sent them off on the conveyor, and he never said anything about paying for the extra bags. So we asked him what we owed, and he said the computer would've asked for payment before it printed the tags, so since it didn't, he wouldn't charge us anything. WHAT?! We had perfectly packed bags and they ALL get to fly free?! We were giddy with joy - what a perfect way to start our trip!! We felt completely covered in grace.

So we hugged our families goodbye and boldly set off to face the unknown! My mom took a picture of our plane taking off:
Our first flight from Lexington to Charlotte was short and uneventful. We got to Charlotte and had a 3.5-hour layover before our long flight across the ocean. We were very pleased to discover that the international terminal was connected to the one we landed at, so we didn't have to go through security again in order to reach our gate. We hadn't gotten boarding passes for the second two flights when we checked in for the first, and so the first thing we did upon arrival was head to our gate in order to get our boarding passes. We were some of the first to check in, and we mentioned to the attendant that we were traveling with a child and were hoping to find some way to make him comfortable enough to sleep on the plane. She couldn't put us in first class, but she did give us a row of 4 seats to ourselves, so we had an extra seat where Elias could stretch out and lay down. What a blessing that turned out to be!

The flight was long, but Elias did as well as could be expected. He fussed when we put his pajamas on and told him to go to sleep, and then it took him quite a while to fall asleep, but he did end up getting a little over 4 hours, which was about half of the flight. So that was great! Justin and I didn't get any sleep at all, but we rested quite a bit and were able to function well enough to get us the rest of the way.

We landed in Munich at about 8:15am local time, and we had a 3-hour layover there. The airport wasn't very user-friendly, but they did have a little place called "Kiddieland" that had little rides you can pay to ride like the ones you see at a grocery store. Elias was thrilled to just play on them without paying, and that was the majority of our layover there.

The last flight from Munich to Ankara was about 3 hours, and we were all extremely tired by then, but it passed without incident. Before we left Kentucky, Justin had gotten Elias a new train toy that was going to be his special new toy for the airplane, and that was a major stroke of brilliance. Elias played with that thing for seriously half of our total travel time. We just put down the tray table in front of him, and he played with his trains! So this is what he did for most of the final flight too, and then we landed in Ankara!

We quickly made it through the visa checkpoint where we purchased our tourist visas, then through passport control. We bought carts and waited to see if our baggage made it. Our three suitcases came on the conveyor, but alas, the three trunks didn't. So Justin went to find where to report lost luggage, and as he was waiting in line there, I saw a door to the side marked "Oversize Bags." (In English!) Just as I glanced at it, I saw some workers wheeling in our three trunks on a cart! Yahoo!!!! They hadn't been lost, just set aside as too large to go on the conveyor! So we got all our luggage, and our friend Nathan who lives in Ankara with his family was waiting for us outside with a rented van to carry us home. The trip from the airport to our home is about an hour, but Elias and I were enjoying our first views of Turkey!

We had a small complication because we hadn't expected to arrive so soon - we didn't really think all our flights would be on time or that everything at the airport would go so smoothly! (Oh we of little faith!) This only meant that our landlord wasn't at the apartment to let us in. So Justin managed to ring a neighbor and get them to buzz us into the front door (just the first of MANY times I am so thankful for his functional Turkish!!), then he hauled all the luggage up the 3 flights of steps to our front door, and he sat with them to wait for our landlord. Meanwhile, Nathan took Elias and I home in a taxi to his house, where we had a joyful reunion with his family, who are dear friends of ours. When his wife, Rachel, learned we were coming, she even whipped up a quick dinner for us! What a blessing!

So the landlord did come and give Justin the keys, and after dinner, Nathan brought Elias and me back in a taxi to our new home! Elias was so tired that he fell asleep in the taxi on the way home, so we just brought him straight in to bed, and he slept the night away! Justin said he and Elias were both up in the middle of the night because of the time difference, but they went back to sleep, and I slept right through it all! Our first day has gone VERY well, and we love our new place! This post is already long enough, so I'll post more on that another time. But we are so extremely thankful for how smoothly our travels went - we appreciate everyone's prayers!

Leaving on a jet plane (three, actually)

As I write this, I'm reading Tweets from people in Ankara about the weather, it's currently -4 Fahrenheit there. Snow is expected with a high of about 32 degrees when we're expected to arrive on Friday.  This is the contrast from the sunny, 62 degree day we've had in Kentucky. Europe has had a suddenly severe winter to contrast with the U.S.'s balmy weather. Needless to say, we'll be bundled up running from the airplane to the shuttle bus on the tarmac.

We've packed our life into six suitcases and we're ready to go.It has been a long couple weeks of driving a U-Haul through the Ozarks and half of Kentucky, visiting relatives in Kentucky and Tennessee, and downsizing our life to six bags.

If you had to shrink your life down to six bags weighing less than 50 pounds each, what would be in them?  If you're like us, most of your stuff will belong to your kids.

We look forward to our first update from Ankara. We hope to be sharing exciting news of some potential business opportunities in the next couple of weeks.