Our Turkey Tour’s Final Dinner

It’s tradition that we have a kind of sharing time with skits, poems, and songs with dessert after every tour’s last supper. As a thanks to our guide, Mine (pronounced mee-nay), I wrote this little collection of images and insights she organized for me and our group. The festive dinner was a wonderful capper for a great tour.

Olive Pits on My Breakfast Plate
Stacking olive pits on my breakfast plate, I sort through the sounds, flavors, and feelings that are my souvenirs of Turkey.

As I stand in the basket of my balloon, the rhythmic bursts of flame punctuate Mustafa’s jokes while warming my wide eyes. Illogically, the stripes on his epaulette make me feel safe as we lift off.

On the market square, hourglasses of sweet chai and the clatter of backgammon dice among unshaven men — men who may look scary to people who never leave their TV — make it clear: We’re all children in the same playground.

In the mosque, I struggle to get comfortable sitting cross-legged on the well-worn carpet. The imam explains that the mark of a good call to prayer is how the muezzin stays in the right mode. Spending time with him, I ponder why craving to understand and be close to God drives societies apart rather than bringing them together.

In the market, the old woman — her deep wrinkles evidence of a life lived close to the earth — earnestly tries to sell me a leech swimming laps in an old plastic water bottle.

In the hammam, sprawled with five bus mates on warm marble, like slabs of tourist meat in wet underwear, I surrender to my burly Turk, ready to be tenderized.

Stepping into our hotel with flowers lavishly bedecking the lobby, someone asks, “Was there a wedding?” The man at the desk says, “No, a circumcision.” For many Turks, a circumcision is the greatest party — “like a wedding without in-laws.”

In this remote corner of Turkey, many men still take macho to dizzy heights. At the corner tobacco shop, when buying cigarettes, they choose the pack that reads “Cigarettes can cause death by cancer” rather than the one that reads “Cigarettes can make you impotent.”

Walking across town to the home where the family was preparing a traditional dinner feast, I noticed children in

the field bursting with joy and laughing wildly. I thought, “Happy kids.” Then I realized they were laughing at me — a big, gawky American man walking through their vacant lot wearing baggy pants with a floral (and decidedly feminine) pattern. I’m hoping the joy of baggy pants — perfect for when you want to be naked but can’t — will follow me home.

Good travelers strive to get out of their comfort zone. And the hallmark of a great travel experience is that when a trip does get us out of our comfort zone… we actually find ourselves in it. When we travel, like that balloon lifting off a wild Anatolian field, we are — at least for a while — free from the bonds of our culture and ready to experience our world with a different perspective. What becomes of that freedom and perspective after our balloon touches down is up to each of us.