Turk Hospitality
The store keepers provide service and goods with a smile – even when you don't have enough change. Ask for directions and you'll get led to the exact place.
- It was hot. My eyes – infected – bulged, teared and squeezed shut against the ultra-white sun. I sat down at a shaded cafe to wait for the bus. The waiter sat next to me and offered me tea. I declined, and so, as many other Turkish shopowners and attendants and strangers have done, he started to talk: How do you like Turkey?
- Yuppie Nomad and I got of the bus in some fishing town and found that the otogar (bus station) was really just a random assortment of large vans parked along a cluster of streets. We needed to catch two more connections before Bodrum, a seaside resort town that hugged the southern Turkish coast. We were greeted by a man – dark bushy mustache like a squirrel's tail –
- with two sacks of corn slung over his shoulders. After he saw our arched eyebrows and heard the magic word "Bodrum", he grabbed my hands and zigged zagged through the traffic, interrupting his fellow townsmen from their backgammon games for directions to the correct bus. Once we got on the bus, he mopped his damp brow and waved good-bye. I hopped off the van when it stopped in town. The hostel lady was going to wait for us to withdraw money from the ATM before dropping us off at the Ephesus ruins. Running out of film, I popped into a souvenir store. The owner, a dark and large man, greeted me – smiling. No, I'm sorry, you don't have film? I don't want copper plates – only film. No problem, no problem, he smiled. He woke his teenage daughter up, and for the next ten minutes, she led me from store to store in the small town to find 35 mm film. Once I popped the roll into the camera, she skipped off – and I ran off like a crazy trapped rat to find the van.
The store keepers provide service and goods with a smile – even when you don't have enough change. Ask for directions and you'll get led to the exact place. Walk across a shop and offers of tea ring out (except in the touristy areas where they're just fronts for carpet touts). Hotel and bus touts will offer you answers and sometimes even referrals for their competitors. Say no to an expensive menu, clothes, trinkets or admission fees and be greeted with a smile, a nod of the head, and a hearty "Good bye!" (and sometimes a "Where are you from?")
To summarize – Turkish people are among some of the nicest people I've met. It's as if everyone follows a code of hospitality here (an adult versus the ebullient and child-like kindness found in Laos). And by everyone, I mean men and women in big cities – I've yet to interact with women in the more conservative towns.
Compare that to Vietnam, where stony stares are the norm for strangers browsing through shops, touts and travel scams operate on most street corners and it's a "buyer beware" kind of environment, from market produce to high-end fashion. Heavens forbid you sit down at a cafe and not buy anything. In a country the size of New Mexico with a population of 80 million, space is too precious to be spent on hospitality.
To be fair, Turkey is better off economically than Vietnam, and I've met plenty of kind people in Vietnam. And perhaps the cultural differences in Vietnam – Confucius family bonds and Communism's holdovers) – makes people there more wary and hardened... But man, does it feel good to be in a place where kindness is so natural and where I don't feel ripped off with every purchase (and of course, everything that I'm paying here is five times the amount in Vietnam)!
How do I like Turkey? C'est magnifique!