Residence Permit, continued

Waiting.

Today I finally took care of the final steps which are necessary to get my residence permit. I paid 50 Lira at the Kaymakamlık (don't ask me what it means), because it would be way too easy for those foreigners trying to get their residence permit if they could pay the money at the police station. Since everything was labeled in Turkish, I asked some official-looking man (who was about half as tall as me) where I should go. The midget obviously didn't speak English. Luckily, some Turkish girl was kind enough to translate, and after a while, I knew where I had to go (gotta love Turkish girls). I was welcomed by an unfriendly-looking woman, who didn't really talk, but since she took my money and gave me some document in return, I figured that she knew what I meant. Now that I had all the documents, I went back to the police station. I arrived five minutes before they closed (5pm, lazy bastards!) and managed to hand in my documents. My risk of getting deported has now decreased by about 60% (the remaining 40% account for the fact that I'm still not holding the residence permit in my hands, plus police arbitrariness [this is Turkey, after all]).

28 Days Later (well, almost)

Dedicated to noone in particular.

I just noticed that it's been three weeks since I wrote my last blog post. Three exciting weeks, as I would like to add.

My courses started, finally. I was slightly amused about the fact that people didn't understand the registration system or failed to get into the courses they wanted. Although, the system was terribly overloaded and the registration page could not be accessed for quite a while, I managed to get all the courses I wanted. I'm taking three Political Science courses (International Law, Politics and Society of the Middle East, Fundamentals of Political Economy), plus one Sociology course (Sociology of Law) and I'm also following a Turkish course for beginners (which reminds me of the fact that I still have to do my homework for tomorrow and that there will be a mid-term exam next week, awrrww).
Only later I learned that many people picked courses in a more strategic way that I did, resulting in a three-day weekend. Well, you can't have it all (as in: fuck you guys). In any case, I'm very happy with my choices. Many of the courses require active participation, which makes studying a lot more entertaining. On the other hand, we also have to read quite a lot (and these two folders only account for two of the courses).

Studying all day, partying all night, drinking coffee instead of sleeping.

At least I can use my workload as an excuse for excessive partying (ha, as if I'd need an excuse for that).

The university even has a canteen which offers vegetarian food (however, it is not available every day or time for some reason, I still haven't found a pattern, so if anyone knows more about this mystery, please tell me). When you eat there, you just have to be careful about the cats: They are hungry. Always. I like cats a lot, but I'm not willing to share my food with them (and if I would, there wouldn't be anything left for me, because there are so many).

This is the only picture I had. Usually, there are more.

 I've spent a lot of time with writing music lately. I can proudly announce that I have written my first complete guitar solo :) It's based on a dream I had a few years ago. I uploaded it on Soundcloud, although that is not the final version, I've made some changes after that, including a harmonised part with a second guitar for the outro, and it's obviously supposed to be played a bit faster, but I'm still working on that. Still, I think it sounds pretty fancy and I'd love to hear some feedback (no pun intended).

Today I had my residence permit appointment at the police station. I'll have to go there again because I didn't bring all the required documents, but apart from that, it went pretty good. I was slightly worried when I asked the first guy whether he spoke English, as he replied with "English? Nooo.", but my permit application was handled by another guy who did speak English. If I manage to get the permit soon, I might actually not get deported, which would be great.

Oh, and I also met billions of new people.