Hakan

We arrived around 2 PM today in Aleppo (Haleb), Syria, after spending one night in Goreme, Kappadokya (Central Turkey), where we saw some ancient underground caves and hillside caves, early Christian frescoes, and a heckuva good sunset.

We left Goreme for Keyseri, where we would catch a bus to the Turkish border with Syria at Antakya (Antioch), but we had about 4 hours to spare in Keyseri, a rather large, industrially important city with a definite flavor of Soviet-style architecture and Soviet moustaches. We put our bags down in the waiting area and after I came back from the WC mere moments later Kate was holding a baby and talking with local women ... I sat down and this kid sat down and started to talk to me in Turkish. The women showed us pictures of their family, beamed at us a bunch, then hugged and kissed us in warm Turkish style when they had to leave. Hakan, the seventeen-year-old kid, stuck around.

We got out a pad and pen because we had a lot of trouble communicating. He gave me a shell casing as a present, which was a bit ominous, and we gave him postcards from New York City and San Francisco with our emails on the back. He finally got across that he wanted to show us Keyseri and Kate and I stashed our bags but then we balked at the door ... who was this kid? Why was he hanging around the bus station? He seemed hurt but accompanied us back inside and took some tea with us and played "complete the square" with us on a pad. He found a young man in the waiting area who spoke English and this fellow translated for us for awhile ... turned out this kid was in earnest (the third party verification was comforting), and the English speaker gave us some key translations and clarifications. We ended up going into town for dinner with Hakan. He had assured me through the translator that he could understand me but that he just couldn't say much in English. I thought about this statement of his later on the bus and I came to appreciate it more and more; I feel that he was expressing that we could communicate on a basic level below words and that he was emphasizing this because he wanted to be friends with us.

Anyhow, it turned out that Hakan had missed a train earlier in the day, and he deliberately missed the next train in order to stay with us until right before we had to board our bus. He ended up calling us his "uncle and aunt" and insisted I smoke a cigarette with him (smoking is a bigtime male passtime in Turkey). I left amazed by his kindness and earnest desire to connect with us ... in a bus station, of all places!

Oh, another English speaker encounter outside of Istanbul (where the language barrier was surpiringly hard): on the bus ride to Keyseri we sat next to a fellow who spoke English quite well and he inspected our Lonely Planet Middle East travel guide, scoffing at the cover photo, which is of an arab smoking a hookah and smiling a jagged yellow smile. He wanted us to be sure to explain to people back in America that this picture was not what Turkey is like, and he added that there is so so much more to do in Turkey than our cursory giude listed. His pride in Turkey was very much on display, as was his kindness, as he explained how we should visit certain town on the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts. I took his umbrage at the photo to heart... it certainly seemed, from his eyes, to be a strange way to label a region. How would we like it if a North American guide book had a photo of a toothless, smiling trucker drinking a coffee on the front? His critique was immediate and emblematic of the endearing pride I've encountered in people: Ohran, our host in Istanbul, described Istanbul as a prostitute, because she seduces you but you're never quite satisfied, which I though was a description full of a self-deprecating sort of pride; and our tour guide in Kappadokya was careful to emphasize to us that he did his work because he loves Anatolian history and learning new languages, not for the money.

Here's a link to some photos Kate took in Istanbul:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/74468987@N00/

Kate's uploading more photos, which is slowslowslow, so I'm just gonna start writing about the food part of trip, because I'm hungry. Oh, I showed Hakan my Turkish/English cheatsheet and he started laughing when he saw that fully three-quarters of all the phrases I had seen fit to copy out of my guidebook were names of foods. I patted my belly and then pointed to my brain and he cracked up, nodding. So, Kate and I have been devoted to "portakal suyu" (orange juice) because it's fresh, hydrating, and full of good electrolytes (the sweat wicks right off but you feel the fatigue). I learned that fruit is "mayveh" and we got some melon, plums, fresh figs (oooooo!), and apricots. The "beyaz peynir" (goat cheese) is choice on some peasant bread or "simit" (these round seasame breads that are like the skinny cousin to the seasame-seed bagel), as is "goezelme peynirli" (a buttery, cheesy pancakey bread). Kate's a vegetarian so I've been going light on the meat, but the "pastrimi" (yup) in a grilled cheese sandwich, the "ishkender kebab," and "kofte" have all done me well. We had some "fasulye" (white beans), "patlican"(eggplant), "ashure" (special pudding), and bulgur that really satisfied after excessive cave-viewing. An interesting note is that orange in Arabic is "bortakal," which sounds a lot like "Portugal" and makes me wonder as the name is constant from Turkish into Arabic. Oh, and when we asked Orhan, our Turkish couchsurfing host, what he would have wanted us to bring from America, he replied simply, "Alcohol and pork." heh.