Friday, 30 September 2011

On beş!

One of the exciting challenges of running overseas is trying to work out what is going in another language.

In Berlin, the administration of the event was so efficient, that it was no problem changing my entry from "power walker" to "laufer" runner. It was a little more difficult once inside the entrant's area to work out where the change rooms, bag drops, etc were in German but that's a different story.

However changing my Istanbul Marathon entry from marathon to 15km run proved more difficult. I can fortunately read a bit of Turkish: enough to say quite İngilizce biliyor musunuz convincingly quickly followed by Burada İngilizce konuşan birisi var mı?. Both those phrases are quite useless when someone answers "hayir" (no) and I end up saying "bye bye" as I hang up the phone to someone gabbling away in Turkish.

Fortunately the cafes outside my office are run by Turks so I was off to The Grubberie for a helping hand. It turns out at some point I had been running some factory but they eventually got through and after a bit of chat and a lot of me confirming "on beş" it was all sorted. In that it can't be sorted, so on paper I am still a marathon entrant I must just make sure I follow the correct signs to the finish.

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