To Turkey: First Attempt

My first semester of Arabic is finished, and I decided to spend my 6 day holiday with some friends in southern Turkey.  These next two posts are rough narratives of the trip.

 

Written on the Train before making it to Turkey

 

           It’s difficult to write by pen’n pad on a shaky train when your on your 26^th waking hour.  When I started this rally, I was taking my Arabic final in Damascus.  It felt ambitious to hop on a train as soon as the test was finished, but I figured I’d get a good night’s sleep once we got to our hotel in Turkey.  This very well could have happened, had I made it to Turkey.  For reasons too boring to mention, I was missing some paper work, resulting in the Syrians not letting me out of the country.  This gave me a strange feeling of clausterphobia.

            While trying to get into Turkey, arguing with the border guards should only have taken five minutes.  But when there’s a language barrier, and people aren’t telling you what you want to hear, your general strategy often becomes repeating your point over and over until the other gives up.  Like preachers on the street, you tell them how it is, and when they retort, you tell’em again.  In our case, this was the tactic of both sides, making the 45 minute dispute a constant loop of five-minute dialogue… like that episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where they get stuck in that worm-hole (don’t act like you haven’t seen it).

            While my four friends continued to Turkey, I had to back-track in hopes of getting my paper work straightened out.  It was one hour after midnight, and one hour after I became a one-man party, when the border guards convinced a newly-arriving, monolingual Turk to give me a ride to the closest big city.  He was in his 50’s, and very jolly, laughing at everything he said.  He refused to let me pay him for the ride, so when I hopped in his 4X4, I returned the gesture as best I could by offering him one of the fancy candies I got from my new Sex-Ed teacher in Damascus (see previous post).  He refused three times, so I pulled a move I learned from the daughters of my host mother, and stuffed it into his breast pocked when he wasn’t looking.  He chuckled, and produced a twix candy bar from thin air and forced it into my hands as a trade.  Five minutes of comfortable silence passed as I looked out the window, enjoying the stars for the first time since I arrived in Syria, noticing many of the same constellations I’d watch out on the lakes of Northern Wisconsin.  This was interrupted by my driver’s inquiry, which despite my lack of any Turkish, I managed to pick out a very important word, “beer.”  “Yes,” I responded; and he reached into the cooler behind my seat, producing a large, ice-cold can of Turkish beer.  He’d outdone his previous trick with the twix bar.

            So there I was, cursing around the winding highways of northern Syria with my new friend, sucking in the night air, the clear sky, and the cold brew.  We picked up a third guy, and made a detour through the local border town to the new passenger’s house.  We got out of the car for a while in order to enjoy his dad’s company, the beer, and the stars.  It was about an hour after we left the house when I learned that my chauffer was a smuggler.  After taking a coffee break at a pull out, he ripped off the interior walls of his jeep, and began filling them with cartons of cigarettes.  Luckily, he had just finished replacing the upholstery to its rightful place when the cops pulled up.  I just pretended to sleep through the whole episode in the front seat. 

            Long story short, it turned out that I had to go all the way back to Damascus to get my paper work (another 5 hours opposite my northern destination).  But 24 hours later, I was on my way back to the Turkish border for a second try.