I've found that the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, not just in Turkey, but in pretty much every country I've ever lived in.
Although our 12 month temporary Turkish residency application had been approved on the spot the day we visited the residency application office in Kemer in late December 2018, the official laminated photo ID residency card itself took 6 weeks and 2 days to get delivered to Kaş.
Despite the delay we were stoked when the cards finally arrived and to celebrate we decided to treat ourselves that evening to dinner and wine at Smiley's Restaurant. But before that happened we had a busy day ahead of us walking to many locations around Kaş town to buy various bits and pieces.
Touring the town
We'd received a text from Gunhan, the translator who'd assisted in our residency application process, to let us know that our resident cards had arrived, so our first port of call was his office on Kaş high street. When we arrived he was with another client so he simply handed us the envelopes, congratulated us and we were done.
Our next stop was the hardware store in town. On our list of things to buy were some specific sized nuts and bolts for the cockpit padeyes we are going to install, some rubber o-rings for the locking mechanisms of A B Sea's side ports and a pair of 120kg breaking strain bungy cords for our passerelle.
Usually the hardware store in town has everything we need but for some reason on this occasion they didn't have anything on our shopping list. To be fair they'd sold out of the bungy cords we wanted, they did have o-rings but not in the size we needed and the nuts and bolts were just slightly too small in diameter and we really needed a snug fit.
As we were already almost half way to the marina we decided to head over there and see if the marine chandler could help us fill our shopping list. They did have the perfect sized nuts and bolts, and we purchased 16 of each, but once again we were out of luck on the o-rings and bungy cords.
Trying to figure out our next move we began the walk back to town to buy our weekly fresh fruit and veg supplies from the Friday farmer's market. That was a success and with our bulging backpacks we headed back to A B Sea. On the way we stopped off at the workshop of our magical mechanic helper Aydin. His wife was there and she explained that he'd be back in an hour. Perfect, enough time to stow our fruit and veges and grab a quick lunch.
An hour later back a Aydin's workshop and using my awesome Turkish language skills (to be honest Aydin's English is better than my Turkish) we conveyed to Aydin that we required 30 o-rings and that we wanted him to visit A B Sea to see what needed doing to stop a couple of small oil leaks on the main engine and give us a quote for extending the stainless steel rails behind the helm positions. Aydin said that he'd source the o-rings and visit us when he had them to check out the work needed on A B Sea. I'll update you in a future blog about how all that works out.
The TARDIS
With now empty back packs it was time to do our normal grocery shopping. There are many supermarkets in Kaş, at least five big ones that I can think of, plus more than a dozen mini-markets. For a small town it's quite a lot. As always with so much choice there is usually one supermarket where product X is cheaper than in another supermarket and a little extra walking and shopping around could add up to quite a bit of saving over the months we've been here. But as we always use our foreign currency credit card for payment, we prefer to do all of our shopping at one place.
Our supermarket of choice is called Muhtar, but we call it the TARDIS because it's bigger on the inside, much bigger. The street frontage masks the vastness within as the building it's housed in has been built on a triangular shaped block of land. Muhtar generally has everything we need, although the fresh fruit, veges and meat are limited. But as we still buy our meat from the independent butcher that Aannsha talked about in her blog #49 and our fruit and veges from the Friday farmer's market it's not an issue. Once again with bulging backpacks we trekked back to A B Sea and stowed our goodies.
The afternoon/evening
It was now 2.45pm and we spent the rest of the afternoon posting to Facebook and Instagram and replying to YouTube comments and emails we'd received from subscribers and followers. Then with a last click on the send button at around 5.30pm we made ourselves look respectable and walked around the harbour to Smiley's restaurant. Smiley and his wife Serpil were sitting outside and like two teenagers who'd just passed our driving test we showed them our shiny new Turkish residency cards with big smiles on our faces.
As always, as we entered the restaurant, Smiley's staff greeted us like old friends, we were shown to our favourite corner table and our usual bottle of Turkish red wine was opened while we checked the menu before ordering. By 8.30pm we were all done and we wandered back to A B Sea, settled into the princess suite and watched a few more episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Around 11.30pm it was lights out and we drifted off to sleep dreaming about an adventure filled future.
Hello Greece
Before I finish this week's blog I just want to mention that Greece is only 4 nautical miles across the bay from Kaş harbour entrance. It's not mainland Greece but one of their outlying islands. Its official name is Kastellorizo, but locally it's known as Meis and now that we have our Turkish residency cards we're going to take the ferry from Kaş for a day trip over there without having to deal with visa paperwork.
We have already circumnavigated the island on our friend Jim's yacht and the small main town looks absolutely picturesque, so we're very eager to go and explore sometime soon before we say goodbye to Kaş which is not that far away now. More about that in a future blog.