I remember the first time I paid an electricity bill for a home abroad. It was in a little office on a street corner on Isla Mujeres, a spit of an island in the Caribbean. We had just finished building our villa there and I was paying my first bill.
Outside the sun was reflecting off white coral sand blinding the tourists already befuddled with golden beer and the bluest sea you ever saw was doing its picture postcard thing. Inside the ramshackle single story building it was rather different, an ancient fan laboured in time to Brittany Spears’ “Hit me Baby one more time” which was on continuous loop and the staff peered suspiciously at the gringa from behind scratched and elderly plastic screens whilst their computer’s whirred noisily, the fans clogged with dust and salt. It was brilliant; I was paying my first bill in a proper foreign land!
Paying bills makes it all real, the owning a home abroad thing. More real than the first glass of wine on the terrace – you’ve drunk wine on a hundred terraces. More real than the estate agents handshake when your offer is accepted – we’ve all had handshakes of dubious integrity! More real than the suave foreign lawyer making your name sound exotic and enticing as he formalises the sale – my Mother used to love listening to our Spanish lawyer say her name, it made her swoon! Nothing makes it more real than paying that first bill, yourself, alone, in a foreign language.
These days bill paying isn’t quite such a traumatic rite of passage for the new expat as it used to be. Here in Kusadasi Aydem, the electricity people, have shiny new offices, with doors and a roof, and whilst they may ask you for every form of identification including a map of your Mother’s genome they are much more efficient than they used to be. Even out here in the village they generally get round to reading our meters every two months when a quartet of eager young men turn up with digital readers that they plug enthusiastically into the meters. They produce a nice bill on thermal paper which sometimes turns totally black from exposure to harsh sunlight by the time you find it pushed under your door, but fortunately they now send you an email as well if you register for online billing.
The internet has meant a huge reduction in the culture shock that used to accompany bill paying in your new country. I now pay everything except my water bill online. Aydem send their bill every two months (or four if they’re really busy drinking tea or it’s just too hot to go out), the phone is on direct debit, the internet the same. My gas is delivered by Yusaf from down the village shop and paying for it is a painless business. The only stroke of eccentricity comes from with the water bill which is issued infrequently (sometimes every two years) by Engin, the Muhtar’s apprentice, who has a smart brown uniform and a broken down bike. He travels around the village and the outlying farms reading meters and writing up bills in his careful round handwriting and then refusing payment because he hasn’t got any change or it’s not the right type of day or it’s too soon or because the money might be heavy!
Paying your water bill can be quite a challenge as Engin constantly refuses money. I spent six months once trying to force the 40 lira I owed the village on him. It was contributing to my background guilt level, nagging at me because I hadn’t paid it, and yet every time I bumped into Engin he would wave me away, smiling, saying “Sonra, sonar” (Later, later). Eventually I trapped him in his office and he had to take the money and laboriously write out the receipt – the main reason for his continued refusal to accept the payment I feel.
With online banking now so universal most new home owners will find the ongoing business of bill paying easy. However, the first bill remains a reminder of how difficult it used to be, because generally you can’t set up an online payment for anything until you have received that first all important bill. So you will still, just once, run the gauntlet of long queues in a labyrinth of offices, of freezing cold or steaming hot corridors of identikit offices and the exasperation of clerks who know what you are trying to do is simple so could you just let them do it for you.
Even if it is a little easier than it used to be paying that first bill is still a thrill, because it’s prosaic and normal and it makes your new life in a foreign land as real as life in your home country. So approach it with a sense of humour, approach it with patience because you’ll need it, approach it with every piece of paper you have ever been given in relation to your purchase and when it’s paid go and set up online banking with direct debits or money transfer and be grateful you won’t have to do it like that again!
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On a side note, the hit counter on this little website of mine is nearing 95,000 unique hits. This is pretty amazing for a little village, of only 600 inhabitants, in the middle of nowhere where nothing much happens, unless you’re a goat. So thank you for stopping by, whoever you may be, and I hope you find something to entertain you.
I have this little piece of code that runs on the website and records the people who come here; where they come from and what they were originally searching for when they found this site and it makes fascinating reading. My grape cake recipe brings in people from all over the world – I hope they’re trying it themselves. Last night someone found this site whilst looking for ornamental gates in Turkey – still not sure that was the most relevant search result Google ever threw up, but there you go, must have hit the algorithm somehow. And every day for the last week someone with an IP address in Manchester has dropped by for a leisurely browse – either they are copying the site word for word, which seems unlikely, or they are really interested in Kirazli. Dear person from Manchester, if you have any questions just drop me an email, I don’t bite.
LOL at the Water Bill comments. I pay all my bills online except for the Water Bill. The water is provided by the complex, and when I tried to pay them the first time – they said they’d send somebody to read the meter. It’s been two years – and we’ve never been billed – what is it about water bills?