How to get an apartment in Turkey

The idea to get an apartment for my time here in Ankara was first planted in my mind by Alice, a fellow Beloit student who had spent all of last year here at METU. She had lived in the dorms for one semester and in an apartment for the second semester and had told me that while the dorms were survivable, living in an apartment in the city was much better; and after two weeks of my roommates alarm going off every five minutes, starting at 7, for two hours I decided that she had to be right.

Though the alarm thing was really annoying it was still a hard decision; living in the dorms would give me a completely different experience than living in an apartment off campus would.
On one hand if I stayed in the dorms I would be able to spend a semester living with three Turkish roommates, whom, other than the alarm thing every morning, I liked quite a bit.
There was the Arda, the guy that slept along the same wall as me who had gotten arrested his first night back on campus by the soldiers in charge of campus security for getting in a fight with a dorm receptionist who would not let him up to girl friends room. Anil, a really nice guy with an extremely, almost manically friendly disposition who spent most of his days watching American T.V shows on his computer and whom I had spent by far the most time with of my roommates. And finally there was the guy with the cell phone alarm whose name I never learned and who spoke a little more English than I spoke Turkish, which meant that we could only communicate on about the level of 3 year olds, but who was always very nice and friendly to me.

By living in the dorms I would also have easy, ready access to the large group of potential Turkish friends that lived in the dorm with me and I would be much closer to all the buildings my classes would be in. Another factor that weighed heavily in favor of choosing the dorm was that it would simply be much easier to stay in the dorms than it would be to got out and find and rent an apartment in a country were I did not speak the language.

On the other hand there were a lot of attributes to getting an apartment in the city. For instance, were we to get an apartment it would mean that Eric and I would each get our own room, have a kitchen to cook in, greater access to the city, a place were we could host people, and we could avoid the midnight curfew at the dorms.

In the end we decided to go with the apartment, thinking that while it may isolate us more from Turkish students on campus, we could fairly easily counter act this by joining clubs and by having a cool place that we could invite people over to. Also, while living in the dorms may be easier I have found that the easiest option is rarely the best. Finally, I had never rented an apartment or lived on my own off campus before so I figured what better place to start than Turkey?

This started an epic endeavor that lasted for three weeks, resulted in 2 put-off trips to Istanbul, countless hours of work from our saint-like host students, an encounter with the incredible bureaucracy that is the Turkish government and involved more upfront cash than I thought I had in my bank account.

To start out we had to find an apartment. This was not as simple as I would have thought as there are no good, free websites to use to find them and to use a real estate agent would mean that we would have to pay about an extra $300 finders fee. So on the advice and with the help of our host students we set to do this the old-fashioned way; pounding the pavement. This involved walking through the residential area of Yuzuncu Yil, an area within walking distance to campus that has cheap apartments, and looking hopefully into the windows of the apartment buildings for signs that said ‘For Rent’ in Turkish.

After about an hour searching in this way I got a call from Eric, who was with the second half of our group (we had split up for efficiency sake) who said he had a found a promising spot. Firat, Merve and I (the other half of the group) found Eric, Orkuan and EB in an 11th floor, 2-bed room, 2-bathroom (one with a shower and one with a squatty potty) apartment with a great view of the city. The current tenet looked like a Turkish version of Jason Statham who had let himself go and dressed in a grey tracksuit and slippers. His name was Murat and after showing us the apartment, which was far nicer than anything I had hoped to find, he made us tea and we started the negotiations.

This method of negotiations was used in just about every interaction we had dealing with the apartment and consisted of our Turkish hosts deftly wrangling the price of whatever we were buying down while Eric and I stared on with our uncomprehending cow-eyes. After the bartering was complete they would usually fill us in on what had happened and ask if the deal they had struck was suitable. To these questions we would usually just nod dumbly and than go back to wondering what we did in a past life to deserve these hosts and how we could be so completely useless we were when it came to this type of task.

We decided to get the apartment, but declined Murat’s obscene offer to sell us all the furnishings for 2000 lira (we ended up getting much better stuff for a little less than half that from some very nice middle aged women who were all engaged and living together until they moved in with their new husbands). However our lucky ran out in that we did not have a co-signer for the apartment, forcing us to pay all four months of rent up-front. With all this arranged and after several days of twice-a-day trips to the ATM to withdraw the maximum amount of cash that we could we arrived on Saturday ready to move into our new apartment. There was only one problem, Murat was still there. Apparently he had understood the contract just fine but had decided that he really wanted to stay another day or two and he hoped it wouldn’t be a problem for us. No, Murat of course not, why would it be? We had only arranged our entire week around this date, signed the contract, dragged 6 of our Turkish out of bed early on a Saturday morning and had promised those lovely women to get their furniture off their hands by the end of today. I'm so sorry that we are disturbing your schedule by being here.

But there was no point in getting upset about it so we told Murat the situation and after some arguing he benevolently agreed to allow us to move our furniture into a corner of the apartment until we actually moved in. So for the next 8 hours we carried all the furniture we had bought from the women down the 10 floors of their apartment building, put it in a truck, drove over to our building, and then carried it up an additional 12 floors to our apartment. This was not quite as bad as it sounds as most of the stuff we had fit in the elevator, but the couch refused to follow this trend so we had to manhandle the thing down all ten flights of stairs and then push and pull the damn thing back up 12 stories. After getting it up to the 8th floor I began telling the couch, in no uncertain terms, exactly what I would do to it were it not an inanimate object while Eric tried to cover up his laughter at my awe-inspiring rage.

Again, words cannot describe the saintliness of our Turkish friends, they worked unceasingly right next to us all 8 hours without a word of complaint. After we had finished, we took our friends out to dinner than went down town to celebrate our success.

In an effort to make this already over-long description a little bit shorter I’ll make a long story shorter by saying that, due to several factors, including another surprise move by Murat to take everything in the apartment down to the mirrors and the light fixtures, and a Turkish super-virus that attacked Eric and I simultaneously, we didn’t end up moving in until Thursday that next week. And while living in the apartment has not been problem free (Eric has had a hilarious time adjusting to the Turkish toilet, we still don’t have internet, most of the drains are clogged, and Eric’s radiator stopped working) we made it in and as I sit here writing this, sipping my tea, looking at our bad-ass view of Ankara, and listening to Dragonforce I think I can safely say that it was well worth it.