I chose to live slightly dangerously, staying in Turkey all the way through the 90th day of my visa. I counted and counted and recounted until I was sure that January 25th was the 90th day after October 28th, when I arrived. Once I was confident enough in that, I booked my plane ticket to Sofia for January 25th. Had some issue arisen that caused me to miss my flight, I might have been in a very tight spot indeed. But I had paid rent through the 28th, and I wanted to waste as little of it as possible.
I got to the airport without issue a few hours before my flight, checked in, and then proceeded to passport control. I gave the man at the counter my passport and tried to act casual as he flipped through it looking for my visa sticker. He found it and immediately froze, leaned back in his seat, and started counting numbers on his fingers. After a moment he collected himself and looked up before rattling off a sentence in Turkish.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t speak Turkish. Do you speak English?”
He looked at me for a moment. “You do not speak Turkish?” I nodded. “Well, Mr. Schupack, what have you been doing in Turkey?”
“An academic project,” I answered.
He looked at me doubtfully. “Do you have any documentation?” I thought for a moment, and then remembered a Watson Fellowship ID card I had been carrying in my wallet for six months. It was faded and scratched, and hadn’t looked particularly impressive to begin with. I pulled it out and handed it to him, and he looked at it briefly before handing it back. “Do you have any official, TURKISH documentation? A residency permit?”
“No,” I answered, “I don’t.”
“Well isn’t that in-ter-es-ting?” he asked. I didn’t reply but looked very intently at a curiously deep crease midway up his forehead. After an awkward silence he continued. “And what was your project about?”
If ever there was a time when I didn’t want to try to explain and justify that I have been funded to spend a year studying board game cultures, it was then.
“Turkish culture,” I answered.
He sneered. “You’ve been in Turkey for 90 days studying Turkish culture, and you don’t speak Turkish?”
I nodded meekly, recognizing that his condescension might actually have been justified. He continued to look at me.
“Well isn’t that interesting? I hope you have a good flight…Mr. Schupack.”
Trotsky's former home in exile, on the island of Buyukada off the coast of Istanbul.
Burrrrrn.