The time they delivered water to my door

Author's Note: still figuring out Blogger formatting. Yikes.

Here in Izmir, “everyone” (for some limited expat definition of everyone, I imagine) gets water delivered to them. The water from the tap, while fine to consume, tastes a bit chlorinated.

I drink a lot of water (#singerlife) and so on Day 3 here, when we were almost out, a nice delivery man showed up with more water. Here are the things that went wrong from there:

1. Who is at the door?! We live on the 3rd story of an apartment building with a couple big doors on the ground floor. The doorbell rang while I was home alone. Fortunately we have a video system (!) to show me a picture of who was at the outside door, and it happened to be a man carrying a large jug of water on his shoulder. So, that clears that up. Earle must have ordered some more water for us to address my extreme thirst.
2. Security system button mashing. How do I unlock the door from here? Literally, no idea. I’m sure it’s possible. But which button is it? I tried all 3. I mean, it’s probably the middle one. One of them worked. What is the third one?!
   
3. Button mashing can only get you so far. There’s one door to get into the yard, and one to get into the actual apartment building. They both have locks. Once the nice delivery man entered the first one I could hear him struggling 3 doors below with the second one. I tried mashing the buttons again but I wasn’t sure what was/wasn’t working. So I ran down the stairs to let him in manually.
4. Wait, how do I say hello again? You know when you’re new at a language and in times of high stress, everything goes out the window? Just, gone. Useless. I did get “Daire dokuz?” right (Apartment nine?) which at least reassured us both we were in the right place.
5. “Boş?” So then he gets up to the door and is clearly uncomfortable coming past the threshold especially without a clear next step. So he goes, “...boş?” (Umm...okay….I know about 200 words of Turkish and boş is not yet one of them.)
6. Google Translate, panic mode. So I pull out my phone and try desperately to find Google Translate (must remember to put it on my homescreen)...I type in “bos” because I can’t get the ş character (must remember to set that up too), no dice. I hand it over to him and he types in a longer phrase, not totally sure what, but Translate asks me if I mean su damacana borusu, which translates to “water borer pipe”, so I’m like, oh! Do you mean this thing? And walk him past the threshhold to our water stand (duh). Boş, as it turns out, means “empty”. I may never know if “water borer pipe” was intentional, but it got the job done.
7. Hmm, this here pot seems like a good place for extra water. So then he switches out the jugs, but the old one is still about 20% full. I can’t just throw good water away. So, more panic mode, how about this nice cooking pot? And he pours the rest out into a pot, now just a place we store the good water.
8. “Umm..money?” So I’m smiling and thanking him and showing him the door because clearly I think this is some sort of Postmates / UberEATS / Sprig (RIP) situation where everything’s been paid for ahead of time or something...but in retrospect, of course it’s not. So he goes, “...money?” and I’m like thank goodness for English. Although para (money) is one of my ~200 Turkish words, as is sekiz, which means “eight.” Great, I owe him 8 lira. Communication victory!
9. So I’ve got this 100… I have ₺5 in coins and a ₺100 bill. Hawkward. Now, ₺100 is only $29.06, so it’s not actually a super big bill, but things in Turkey are priced at roughly similar numbers as the US / San Francisco (e.g. ₺9 for a sandwich) so ₺100 goes pretty far. So I try to gesture that I think I have some money upstairs.
   
10. Mad dash to the 2nd floor.
    This wonderful apartment of ours has two floors, and I knew Earle had some pocket change upstairs, but clearly this man is uncomfortable enough in an apartment alone with me - so I point up the stairs and fly up, grab a ₺5 bill, and fly back down to hand it over with some coins. At this point he has backed back over the threshold. Only the toes of his shoes are visible.
    
    
11. Do I tip?? I don’t know. No idea. Apparently at restaurants it’s not common, maybe one lira occasionally. So I didn’t want to do add to the confusion because I wouldn’t know how to explain myself if he were like “no, only 8”. Must clarify with some locals. If so, I'll tip double next time I guess.
12. “I didn’t order any water.” So, minutes later, I’m explaining this saga to Earle and he’s all impressed that I ordered more water, and I go, wait, you didn’t order it? He didn’t order it. I certainly didn’t order it. SORRY NEIGHBOR, WHOEVER YOU ARE. SORRY WE TOOK YOUR WATER. I’d order you more water but I think I should study a lot more Turkish first.