Right now, as Roman and I camp out behind a random petrol station/convenience store/seemingly abandoned truck stop, I'm enjoying the first full spectrum of stars I've seen in a long time; I'm enjoying the cool breeze licking my face; I'm enjoying the taste of America in my belly, in the form of "corba tavuk", otherwise known as the Turkish grocery store bastardization of chicken noodle soup; I'm enjoying the sound of America in my ears, in the form of bad pop songs being played through tinny iPod speakers.
Meanwhile, the most pathetic animal I've ever seen, a frail, limping dog, whimpers just 10 feet away from us, in vain hope of food he won't get; the owners of this station, kind enough to allow us to sleep here and even to bring us bread, watch TV only 100 feet; the "jandarma" (Turkish army), tasked with occupying and controlling this area of Turkish Kurdistan only about 300 feet; and finally, in literally all four directions, the lights of cities, big and small, which have yet to fall asleep.
It's one of the most bizarrely serene scenes I've ever experienced; and it's hard to believe that a place so ripe with the signs of human activity could be so free of it at the same time.
It was much more serene and picturesque at night, I swear
I've spent a day now in Turkish Kurdistan, and thus far our Adana friends have been dead wrong about the Kurdish people. Already today we've been offered free cay (Turkish tea), free bread, and a couple free rides.
The road to get here has been a fairly untumultous one as well, excluding our brief but memorable stay in Adana two nights ago. Yesterday, the third since Roman and I forged this alliance and decided to hitchhike across the border together, we must have hitchhiked with at least ten different vehicles, most of which were comfortably unmemorable.
Only one stands out in my mind- a beat up but comfy van, with a driver's seat, passenger's seat, and a lounge area in the back, where it looked like the seats had been uprooted and haphazardly rearranged so that they could face each other for a more communal experience. Typically for this area, nobody in the van spoke a word of English. Interestingly though, this didn't stop the giant, hairy, yellow-toothed bear of a man sitting to my immediate right from gesturing and shouting at me wildly- almost angrily- for the entire ride, while his even more yellow-toothed and wild-eyed friend stared at me with a cracked grin apparantly sown to his face.
At one point, right after crushing a cigarette butt casually into the carpet of the van with the sole of his shoe, the quiet, grinning man began to close the shades that were hanging over every window. Suddenly plenty aware that the three of them had both size and numbers in their favor, I was reminded of a specific scene from the movie Training Day, involving a game of poker, three crazed Mexican gangsters, and a very screwed Ethan Hawke. And I was honestly prepared to grab my bag and fling my body onto a moving highway if that's what it took to avoid joining that cigarette butt.
But it never came to that. Finally, bear-man, tired of gesturing liked a crazed lunatic for so long with so little success in communicating anything, borrowed Roman's Turkish-Russian dictionary and, after scanning it for a few moments, pointed to the word he'd been trying so hard to convey.
I asked Roman what word it was. He told me.
He's pointing to the word "cat".
The suddenly gleeful giant nodded excitedly and began to repeatedly exclaim the word in the broken accent you would expect of someone who had never spoken a word of English in his life.
"CAT! CAT! CAT!"
He calmed down after that and was complacently quiet for the rest of the ride, apparently pleased with himself for successfully communicating something in a foreign language. And while I never did figure out why this man had exhausted so much time and energy trying to communicate an innocuous word that carried absolutely no meaning within the context of our situation, I did find that somehow he didn't seem so menacing anymore.
As we got out of the car 20 minutes later, Roman summed up the situation immaculately:
"I think in America you call these peoples rednecks, yes?"
That sounds about right, yeah.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment