I Was Deported From Turkey

I wish that title was an exaggeration.

It’s not.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering why the blog has been so quiet. Maybe you follow me on some other social media (Facebook? Instagram? Twitter?) and you’ve noticed that I was in Amsterdam for an awfully long time.

Well, here’s the full story.

About a month after I arrived in Turkey and two weeks after I moved into my flat, I applied to get a resident permit. Though Turkey’s tourist visa only allows you to stay in the country for 90 days out of 180, it is relatively simple to get a year-long resident permit. You don’t need to be employed, you simply need to prove you have enough money to support yourself.

However, due to high demand there’s a backlog to get a resident permit—the earliest appointment was April 30^th, nearly two months later. My tourist visa was expiring AND my parents were visiting around that time, so I looked into what exactly getting the permit would entail. I was reassured that, once I had the appointment, it was okay if my tourist visa expired—it’s a normal occurrence, since it takes so long to get the appointment.

In the meantime, my parents decided it would be dandy to turn their Amsterdam layover on their return trip into a weekend-long family trip. We would be leaving after my resident permit appointment, so I figured it would be no problem.

Boy was I wrong.

I realized a week before my appointment that they don’t issue you the resident permit the day of your appointment—you have to come back to pick it up a week later. My family was already in Istanbul at this point, and plans couldn’t be changed, so I started quietly panicking.

Also, even though the central police station spends all day issuing visas to foreigners, barely anyone speaks English. So in order to get my permit and make sure that I would be able to leave the country for the weekend, I needed to find a Turkish person to come along and help out. Luckily a friend of a friend was willing.

So I prepared everything, went through the whole (long, tedious, confusing) process, and got approved—I was supposed to come back on May 8^th for my year-long resident permit.

That’s three days after I was to RETURN from Amsterdam.

So we explained the situation to the policeman who approved my resident permit and asked if I would be able to leave the country over the weekend.

He said yes—all I needed to do was to show the paper stating that I was coming back for my resident permit on May 8^th. I would have no problem.

He was a police officer. He was responsible for issuing my resident permit. I believed him.

So, I left the country.

The first sign of potential problems actually came before I got on the plane to leave—I was forced to pay a fee for overstaying my tourist visa, even though I showed my resident permit receipt. It was 5am and our flight was leaving and I was in a panic… so I paid and got on the plane.

In retrospect, this was a mistake. The border people were only looking at my expired tourist visa, not the paper from the resident permit police.

I found out how much of a mistake it was when I tried to re-enter Turkey. I did just what the officers at the police station told me to—I gave the passport control officers my resident permit receipt and explained that I was going to pick up the actual document three days later, just like the paper said.

But instead of being stamped through, I was taken back to a small office room in the airport. The humorless border policeman there told me that because I had overstayed my tourist visa, I wouldn’t be able to enter Turkey again until August, and they were going to send me out of the country.

This is when I started to full-on freak out.

But wait, I protested. I have a resident permit. I have to pick it up on Wednesday. How am I supposed to do that if I can’t enter Turkey?

They didn’t know. They didn’t care.

They were sending me out of the country—to Amsterdam, where I had just flown in from.

Where I knew one person.

Except the next flight wasn’t until the following night—until then, they would hold me at the airport.

I spent the next 24 hours in a small windowless room in Sabiha Gokcen Airport that smelled like McDonalds and cigarettes. I slept on an unpleasantly stained couch with no blankets. At first I was alone—somehow I forced myself to sleep—and then I was joined by two nice Mexican girls who were studying in France, and a woman who I am almost positive was a Russian prostitute.

The border police brought us meals and tea and water bottles. We weren’t under arrest… we just weren’t allowed to leave the room. I spent my time pacing, frantically calling anyone who might be able to help, trying to read or sleep, and generally having a drawn-out panic attack.

This was the worst part. Being held for that long is awful. I didn’t know if I’d ever get back to my computer, my contact lenses, and all my other belongings; I didn’t know if the life I’d built up over the last three months would be inaccessible to me. All I wanted to do was go home—but I couldn’t go ANYWHERE.

After those 24 hours ended—after losing a day, after not seeing the sun, after my family had already arrived home in CALIFORNIA—I was put on a plane back to Amsterdam.

I spent nearly every morning for the rest of the week shuttling to the Turkish Consulate in Rotterdam to arrange a special visa that would allow me to re-enter the country and PICK UP MY RESIDENT PERMIT, which was waiting for me at the police station.

Let me just spell out this catch-22: To get my resident permit, I had to be in Istanbul. But I couldn’t enter Istanbul without my resident permit.

This is bureaucracy at its worst.

Luckily, the woman at the visa window in the Turkish Consulate must have taken pity on me (or recognized the absurdity of the situation), because after weakly protesting that I wasn’t a citizen of the Netherlands and therefore not exactly covered by the jurisdiction of the consulate, she issued me a temporary, single-entry visa anyway.

By the time I received the visa, I’d already been in Amsterdam for over a week. A few days later I flew back and spent the whole three hour flight gnawing at my nails, trying to breathe and attempting to convince myself that everything would be okay.

I got off the plane.

I went to the passport counter.

The woman looked at my passport.

Asked me some questions.

Called a man over. He asked me to walk with him… back towards the border police offices.

My hands were shaking so hard that I had to stuff them in my pockets. Oh no. It’s happening again. OH GOD PLEASE DON’T PUT ME IN THE ROOM AGAIN.

My passport got handed off to another guy, who made another call.

This can’t be happening.

He asked me to come with him.

I followed him…

…to the passport window, where my passport was stamped and returned to me.

I’m not kidding… As soon as I had that stamped passport in my hands, I ran.

I was so flustered and relieved I actually forgot to pick up my checked bag and had to go back for it.

I MADE IT BACK TO TURKEY.

AFTERMATH

Obviously this experience was hugely stressful, especially for a high-anxiety girl like myself. But I learned a few things, too.

First of all, DO NOT TAKE CHANCES WITH TURKISH BORDER POLICE and DO NOT PUT YOUR FAITH IN TURKISH BUREAUCRACY. Leaving without my resident permit booklet was, frankly, stupid. And unfortunately, the incorrect information I got about leaving the country without the booklet came from the Turkish Police, who obviously (in retrospect) had no idea what they were talking about.

Second, Amsterdam is a lovely city to get stuck in. I will be writing about it a lot more here (heck, I have a week and a half of pictures instead of just a weekend’s worth!), but for now suffice to say that a walkable city full of delicious food and nice people speaking English was probably the best  place I could have been during this stressful time.

Third, regular people are wonderful. My one friend in Amsterdam hosted me for the first few days I was there, after I showed up on her doorstep in the middle of the night. The rest of the time, I was hosted by a few excellent Spanish guys who were friends of a friend of a friend of a friend—an absurdly long chain that led me to some genuinely nice guys. You never know who might help you out.

Lastly, I learned that Turkey is the place I want to be right now. Maybe this sounds simple, but for me it is significant. This time I really had to fight to get to Istanbul. Before I moved here, my focus was not on Turkey as much as it should have been… instead, all my energy was spent on ending my long-term relationship gracefully. Now I had to decide whether or not it was worth the time, money, and work to get to Istanbul, and the answer was overwhelmingly YES. Perhaps this is a small gift, but it is a gift nonetheless.

So please, learn from my mistakes. Don’t mess with border police. Don’t take chances with your resident permit.

And please, for my sake, don’t ever get deported.