I picked up my residence permit in Istanbul yesterday.
Getting that residence permit lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. On the road I engage in a number of, shall we say, “activities of questionable safety,” but walking around with an expired visa this week was the one that scared me the most.
In Istanbul there was a residence permit that said I was here legally, but that was in Istanbul, not in my pocket. And the cops south of Konya don’t care about some story about some document waiting for me in Istanbul, they care about what they can hold in their hands.
So now I can proudly whip that thing out of my pocket and show cops a document that doesn’t need an explanation.
Again, I can’t thank enough Esra Alemdar and her colleagues at the Office of the President in Ankara. The residence permit application does not have a nice little checkbox for “essentially homeless, walking across the country,” and Esra helped me smooth that over. Thanks a million, once again!