Since I had a second snow day from school, I decided to make it my priority to get my phone up and running, once and for all!  Ilker was extremely helpful and sent me a list of banks to help me find a place to register my phone.  As per his advice, I headed to Sultanhamet where he said that I would have more luck finding people who speak English at the banks.  Even though it was easy to find this area since I am familiar with it, getting there seemed to be the only easy part of this task!

Seriously, my day was super frustrating because I still had no luck with the phone at all!  After going to three different banks, they sent me back to Turkcell, but by then it was already after 4:00PM, which was a problem because I need to be there before 4:00PM to register my phone.  Therefore, now it will have to wait until Monday because that is the first working day that I will be able to get there before that hour.  PLUS, it is going to be ridiculously expensive.  It will be 115TL to register my phone (the fee has increased for 2013), 25TL to register it with Turkcell, and 55TL for a SIM card.  At this point I am asking myself, do I really have to have a phone here?  Yes, I realize that I could just buy a new phone here, but it is just rather obnoxious because the phone that I have is a really nice phone and it is virtually brand new since it has hardly been used!

Besides my stupid phone issues, the scenery was amazing, especially with a blanket of snow, so I tried to at least enjoy that as I attempted to get my phone working.  Since I was in more of a touristy area, more people did speak English and they asked me some funny things about where I am from and such.  One guy asked if I was Italian or German, and when I laughed and said that I was neither he asked if I was French.  However, I really did my best to avoid speaking English because I am really wanting to learn Turkish, and going out to do things is an excellent opportunity to practice!

On my way home, I stopped at the little grocery store to buy a few things.  Now that I have been in there a few times, most of the people who work there realize that I do not speak Turkish, so it is a pretty hilarious experience each time that I shop there!  Lucky for me, they gave me a bunch of delicious samples of the amazing Turkish food that they sell, and we laughed a lot as I did my best to use my Turkish to explain what I needed.  Even funnier is that the cashier lady grabbed my Turkish/English book and was trying to explain to me “öğrenmek,” which she wrote down on a piece of paper.  When I got home, I looked it up and learned that it actually means learn!  Yes, indeed I am learning Turkish, a little bit everyday!