My Living Situation

Setting up life in Istanbul has been significantly harder than I expected. I arrived here on Friday Sept. 4^th and fortunately there was a second year MBA student at the airport to pick me up. We arrived at campus late on Friday and we went straight to the dormitories to get my room. I gave them my name and told them who I was and they said they had never heard of me. I was expecting to have a single room in the dormitories since that’s what the business school told me they were reserving on my behalf. Since the dormitories said they did not know who I was they put me temporarily in a shared room with some 19 yr old undergraduate chick that smoked all day long and had her boyfriend staying the night. Long story short I ended up staying in that room and living out of my suitcases for 5 days until my housing situation was figured out. The business school never told me that there are two types of living arrangements for students: undergraduates live in on campus dormitories and graduate students live in off-campus apartments owned by the university. The business school never explained this to me. All they told me was that they had a single dormitory room reserved for me which I assumed meant I had my own room on campus. What they actually meant was that I would be getting my own bedroom in a shared apartment off campus. However they never made a reservation for me either on or off campus at all. This is why the dormitories had never heard of me and didn’t know what to do with me. To make things even more confusing, the people that work in the dormitories do not speak English so you can imagine the confusion when I arrived confused about the living arrangements and they are confused because they don’t know who I am and on top of that we are each trying to explain the situation in our own languages. It was not until mid week when I finally was able to get a Turkish student to come with me to the dormitories to translate and explain to me the off-campus set up for graduate students was I able to finally get assigned to an off-campus apartment.

 The off campus apartments are about a 10-15min bus ride from campus so I asked if there was a designated person to help students move and they said no that if I wanted my stuff moved I need to call a cab. The dormitories dept. didn’t care one bit that I didn’t even know the number for a cab let alone speak any Turkish to tell the cab driver where to pick me up. Its not their job to help students with moving so they didn’t care how I moved my stuff they just told me I needed to be out of the on-campus dorm room so the person with the reservation could move in. Not knowing what to do, I went to the Exchange Programs Office and told the woman there about my living situation and that I needed someone to help me move. She said she couldn’t help me because she only deals with undergraduate students and that I would need to talk to the business school since they are the ones in charge of my situation. So I went immediately to the business school to talk to the secretary about finding someone to help me move and she told me I should go talk to the Exchange Program Office because they handle that. I told her that’s where I had just come from and that they told me the business school handles my situation and so she gave me a confused look and told me she couldn’t help me. I went back to the exchange office and told them this and finally the lady was able to find a student mentor with a car who helped me move me stuff to my off-campus apartment.

 My three other Turkish roommates had not arrived yet so I was the first one to move in. The apartment was practically brand new (Koc had bought it from a Turkish family) but in complete dissary. It was like someone had come into the apartment and purposely trashed it. There was garbage everywhere and it was unlivable. So I had to find out how to take the bus back to campus and explain to the dormitories (who again don’t speak English) that they needed to hire cleaners to clean the apartment because it was unlivable. They cleaners actually came the next day (amazingly) and cleaned the entire apartment. The next day I gathered the following list of maintenance issues: no hot water (I took cold showered for a week), no working wifi, no working phone, no shower curtain rod installed, broken front door, broken balcony door knob and broken outlet in my bedroom. Because I did not have a cell phone by then and the apartment phone was not working I had to go back to campus with my list of maintenance issues and tell the dormitories (because they also handle maintenance issues for the off-campus apartments). Over the last two weeks one by one the maintenance issues have gotten resolved only due to the fact that my Turkish roommates finally moved in and were able to communicate the problems in Turkish. The phone is still broken and I still shower without a shower curtain which doesn’t seem to bother my roommates at all. People have told me its likely I will be showering without a shower curtain until the day I move out so I should just give up and accept the fact that the maintenance people are in no rush to come install one. I am the only one in the apartment who seems to care that the shower drain is clogged and water sprays everywhere when we shower. But I’m starting not to care myself because I’m just happy I have hot water to shower with.

 The Thursday before school had started and before my roommates had moved in the dormitories told me they were sending someone to set up the wireless network. I was gone all day and was not there when they came. When I got home that night I opened my computer to see if the wireless network worked and saw that someone had broken my computer. It was completely frozen and none of the applications worked. I called the dormitories and told them that someone had broken my computer but it was a completely lost cause because they had no idea what I was saying. So imagine how I felt when I had no idea who the dormitories sent to my apartment and I had no idea what had happened to my computer and there was no one who spoke English that I could explain the problem to that actually was familiar with a Mac computer or operating system. Long story short there was no one from the IT department at school that spoke English nor was there anyone from IT that was familiar with a Mac. So I managed to find the only Mac store in all of Istanbul and take the bus to downtown to explain my problem to the technical service people there who also did not speak English. Right as I was on the verge of tears, a very nice older man who spoke fluent English translated for me to the technical service. I finally got my fixed computer back (the operating system had to be reloaded) this last Friday and paid approx $50. I still do not know who came to my apartment and do not know what happened to my computer. The technical service at the Apple store cannot explain to me the problem because they do not speak English. The password that the dormitories provided me to access my wireless network in my apartment does not work so I am still not able to access the internet. I had my roommates call and demand that someone come to the apartment this weekend to help me get connected to the Internet. No one has come and my roommates don’t really care because their laptops connect just fine.

 So I’m sure you can see some of the problems I deal with on a daily basis and how the language barrier is one of the biggest problems of all. I am completely dependent upon other people to communicate for me and try and accomplish tasks on my behalf. No one cares if you have a broken computer. No one cares if the door is broken. No one cares that the phone doesn’t work. No one cares about anything so you can imagine how difficult it is for me to be the only one who cares.