Travel Mercies Part Üς

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Without Adult Supervision

Turkey

Since it is still the holiday season and many of you are on the road I will continue with a travel story—this time from Turkey. Our foreign word for the day is Üς (pronounced ooch), which is Turkish for three. I have always tried to learn a little of the language of any country that I am going to spend time in. I have found that one of the characteristics of the Ugly American is our insistence that everyone in the world speak English. It is great when I travel and I do have someone who is fluent or at least conversational in English, but most of the time the people from the culture that I am visiting really appreciate my attempts to learn their language and are very encouraging. Even at times when I have butchered a phrase I usually am patted on the back with big smiles for at least trying.

I have written in past about my Turkish earthquake relief efforts. I talked already about a friend of mine named Charlie who was a retired Boeing worker and was good with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. Charlie helped me set up the clinic in two different areas of Turkey. One such trip was in August and I had already been to Turkey in January and May of that same year. Our August trip was to consist of going to Adapazzarι, Turkey where the original clinic had been set up and break it down and transport it to another area of Turkey along the Aegean coast.

Our first obstacle came while waiting in the check-in line at the Wichita airport. It was as we were waiting in line that the airline that we were flying on went on strike. Literally… on strike! There were three groups of people ahead of us and they were being hurried through and given vouchers to spend the night in a hotel across the street. Well, for Charlie and I, this was just the first leg of many legs to get to Istanbul, and the timing of the airlines flight schedules were such that if we missed this flight we would not get to Istanbul for four days.

As we approached the counter the clerk, who was very upset and wanted to leave and was doing everything he could to inconvenience everybody else by a quick hotel voucher distribution, decided that he was through with the whole mess and left us standing there. At this point a young girl who more than likely was still training for the job and wasn’t nearly as gung ho on the idea of a strike stepped behind the counter and asked for our tickets and passports. After typing vigorously for several minutes she finally looked up at Charlie and me and said, “Well, I can get you there, but it is a different route.”

She then took our tickets which were to Chicago, then London, then Istanbul, and reissued us tickets to Atlanta, then Brussels, and then Istanbul. We thanked her vigorously for hanging in there for us, and flew to Atlanta only a little later than our flight would have been to Chicago.

When we got to Atlanta we became the interest of every clerk from every airline in the international terminal in Atlanta. It seems that whatever the young girl did was not actually proper procedure, and by the response of all the clerks who came from their own kiosk to ours, her actions also seemed to border on illegal. It was described to us as if we had bought a car with someone else’s check book. We were not flying the same airlines as we had paid for, nor were any of these airlines partners. Long story short, knowing the dilemma we were in and through no fault of our own we were in Atlanta and not Chicago, our tickets were honored, but we got the feeling that girl in Wichita was in a lot of trouble. I wrote a letter to the airline thanking them for her efficient, courteous, service. The bottom line was we made it to Istanbul only six hours later than we had originally planned.

I never sleep well on airplanes. I’m six foot one inch, and as everybody knows, economy seats are made for people who are one foot six inches. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but the point is I can only doze on flights. So by the time I reached Istanbul and only got to spend four hours in our hotel before we caught a bus to Adapazzaι the next morning, we were both pretty pooped.

Bus travel in Turkey is amazing. There are assigned seats for each ticket holder, and during the trip a nice porter with a white shirt and bow tie asks if you would like to have a beverage and a snack. The first leg of the trip was about two hours, and after arriving in Adapazzaι we met up with our friend Melda who let us into the clinic so we could disassemble the equipment for the eleven hour bus ride to Kushadιsa on the coast.

Melda had arranged our bus fare and travel and escorted us to the bus station so we could leave at the scheduled time, 10:30 P.M. Charlie and I had our tickets and boarded the bus and found our assigned seats and sat down. By this time we had been going with very little sleep for three days. Pretty much as soon as we sat down, we both fell asleep.

After we had been on the road for about an hour I was awakened by a gentle nudge of the porter in his white shirt and bow tie. He said something to me in Turkish which I didn’t understand, and repeating it didn’t help. I realized that Charlie and I were the only non-Turkish speakers on the bus because this bus was not a tour bus. It was a bus in the middle of the night through central Turkey for Turks.

Now to go back to what I said in the first paragraph, I had been trying to learn as much Turkish as possible, but at this point in my education I was still nodding my head and smiling, which is the universal language of the non-fluent. I went through my little mental Rolodex of Turkish words and phrases to see if I could recognize anything the young man had said to me. After an awkward moment of silence I assumed that the only thing the porter could be wanting at 11:30 in the middle of the night was to know if we wanted a beverage and a snack. I, therefore, chose the safest response and said, “No, thank you”. And yes, I said it in English because I could not remember one single word in Turkish at 11:30 P.M. The porter slunk his shoulders in frustration and shook his head and repeated what he had said once again.

Now the beauty of the Turkish language is that it has what is called vowel harmonies. Eight vowels that are arranged in specific groups so that the language actually has a certain harmony to it. It kind of sings when it is spoken. Which means a Turk can say an entire sentence and it sounds like one word to the untrained listener.

Charlie finally roused from his sleep and asked me what the porter wanted. I said, “I think he wants to know if we want something to eat.” Charlie looked up at the porter and said, “I don’t believe I’ll have any.” He had no sooner said this when the word for ticket, bilet, popped into my mind as a word within the phrase the young Turk had said to me. I said, “Ohhh… he wants our tickets,” and I began to pull them out of my pocket. The porter nodded his head vigorously, took the tickets from me firmly and deliberately, with irritation, and checked off our two seats on his clip board. Check. Check. Charlie and I looked towards each other and said simultaneously, “I don’t believe I’ll have any.”

We had a good laugh over it much to the chagrin of the poor porter. For the rest of our time in Turkey whenever someone said anything to us that we didn’t understand, we simply responded, “I don’t believe I’ll have any.” Since we didn’t have anyone watching out for us while we traveled, we dubbed that journey Our trip without adult supervision.

I used this story in my novel, Vale of Shadows, when my characters traveled by bus at night through central Turkey. Check it out at Amazon.com or bn.com, and find a synopsis at www.robdakin.com

May God Bless you until next time. Happy New Year!

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