It’s finally winter in Istanbul. The heating was on all day today, and even the window was closed for a good long time. Outside, the air feel properly wintery, whether or not the sun is out. The forecast says it might fall to -7 in the coming days, but I’m sceptical, as the forecast has almost invariably been wrong. In any case, today when the GF and I stepped out, I wore my big winter coat, bought in Thailand and always a reminder of travelling through Beijing at a time when the flu would not have you arrested on the spot. It was still a little too warm for the coat, at least when lugging groceries up the steep hill back to our flat, but I would certainly have been iced in my lighter jacket.
The great accomplishment of today was that finally, finally, we sent off the documentation for our residency application. It had nearly all been ready for a while, and simply lacked a notarised copy of our lease for which we needed to go with the landlord to the notary. We tried yesterday, but there was a wording in the lease the notary didn’t like, so we went back today and tried again. It was all fairly straightforward this time, thank heavens, though I must say this notarising business is quite a racket. Several hundred lira for a bunch of stamps. It’s even worse in the UK, but still made me think I had missed my calling, I should have been a notary and basically sat around minting money.
Another great accomplishment: my taxes are filed and I have made all payments needed till the middle of next year. It all seems needlessly complicated to me, and I do think it’s unfair that us unfortunate self-employed types have to jump through all these hoops not to mention hire accountants etc. With the pandemic the UK government is threatening to raise our national insurance contributions as well to match those of the employed, which again seems rather unfair to me given that we don’t get advantages like paid holidays, etc.