Yesterday was Friday, and hence a pretty quiet day in Hawler. Not only are many of the shops closed, there appear to be even fewer of the limited number of taxis passing in front of "Skokal Zakaria". Anyway, I decided to take Mu along and try to catch one of those elusive taxis and do some much needed grocery shopping (major grocery stores are open at least).
Click, my front door latched behind me at the very moment that I realized I hadn't picked up my keys. ****! The shameful part is that the only way to get back in (or so I thought at the time) is to call Abdullah, the building maintainance guy, and try to explain to him in a language he doesn't understand (English) that he needs to come help some silly foreigner who is absent-minded enough to lock herself out... AGAIN! After a frustrated call in which I couldn't understand any of what Abdullah was saying, I had to ask Mu to call him back and ask in Turkish or Kurmanji. Abdullah explained to him that the master keys had been handed over to the chief university administrator... OK, so I called her, but her phone was switched off. What to do? The university administrator could possibly leave her phone off for the entire weekend...
We chose to ring Tf's doorbell. He said there was a bucket of keys on the first floor. So barefoot, he tiptoed out of his apartment looking like he had just woken up (at 5:30pm) to take me 3 floors down to the storage unit with the keys. Sure enough, there were buckets of keys, but none of them the right ones. So finally, Mu -whose idea it was to ring Tf's bell- ventured out onto Tf's balcony, stepped up on the spare canister of gas for the oven and balanced precariously on the ledge of the balcony. Hugging the wall dividing Tf's balcony from mine, he managed to manouver himself around it and over the ledge onto my balcony. While it was a big relief to not have to spend my weekend locked out of my apartment, it is slightly worrisome that it is so easy to break in... and that none of the security staff noticed this event taking place.
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1 comment:
You write very well.
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