Phones and other foibles

Turkey apparently welcomes with open arms anyone who has money for the visa fee, and it generally seems much more open and easy-going than China in that sense.

Then someone mentioned to us that the government likes to use (when necessary) mobile phones as listening in and positioning devices, just to keep an eye on things.

Then we said we wanted to buy SIM cards for our mobile phones. Our new (expat) friends looked worried - "Did you buy those phones in Turkey?" they asked, "because otherwise you won't be able to use them."

We were puzzled because we could see the same phones as ours available in the shops. Its not about the technology, obviously.

Everyone assures us that our phones will be blocked - not the SIM, the phone - after a short while. They said at one time there were a number of staff members carrying their SIM cards around asking to borrow other peoples' phones to make calls.

So we bought SIM cards anyway, thought we may as well start there - phones are a bit expensive here, and our phones are quite nice ones. We put in the cards and tried to phone each other - no luck. Someone else did manage to phone Peter - maybe we can receive but not make calls...

In the end we went out and bought a couple of cheap, bottom-of-range Nokias (still about $100 each) and inserted our SIMs.

Still no luck!

We started looking at other people's phone numbers, and realised they all seemed to have an extra digit to ours, a '0' at the beginning! Oops.

So I've put my SIM back in my friendly familar little Samsung flip-phone, and (with the numbers correct) it works fine.

Not that that is necessarily "it" - yet. The others who had their phones blocked said it happened after a couple of weeks. So we will wait and see - I may yet still have to go back to using the Nokia brick.