discoecstasy

“FUUUUUCCCCKKKKK!!!”

Our collective minds rang as the conveyor belt came to a halt in the already emptied arrival hall. The 2 scruffy backpackers and I, as if on cue, whipped out our luggage receipt and charged at the Lost & Found in a clamour.

Manned by a heavyset lady with dark, smoky eyes and a head of tight perms, she dismissed the cacophony of frantic pleas from the 3 of us as she glanced over our luggage receipts. “Domestic terminal.” she brushed us off.

Huh?

“You here international terminal. You go domestic terminal claim bags” she told the 3 of us.

“Where is that?” I asked.

“Too far to walk. Take taxi.”

I turned and marched out of the arrival hall, a mixture of worry & frustration. Just as I stepped past the automatic doors of the arrival hall into the cold and harsh light, wondering how to get a cab, I saw my name. Written on a placard. Attached to the placard were two chubby hands, and looking up, I saw Hagrid the groundskeeper at Hogswarts smiling at me. Or someone who look A LOT like Hagrid, from the barrel body to the bushy beard, down to the mess of stringy hair. But this guy is Turkish, my height, and his name is Turan. He would be my guide for the next 3 days.

I told him we need to get my bags from the Domestic Terminal stat and he gave a little chuckle and said “We try to find it.”

He brought me to the car - a black & dusty Peugeot Bipper. Climbing into the car, I spied used tissues and documents lying on the seats, the side pockets and the dashboard.

“Sorry” he chuckled. “I drive 12 hours from Capadoccia to pick you. Is a bit dirty.”

“Err... let’s go get my bags please.”

So we drove a few clicks to the domestic terminal where I bounded out of the car and sprinted to the arrival hall, waving my luggage receipt at the security. She let me through the metal detectors - beeping frantically at the amount of metal I have on me - and there it was - my shiny red metallic suitcase. Proudly displayed at the Lost and Found counter.

Heaving a sigh of relief, I yanked the luggage out of the terminal into the waiting car. Off we went on my tour.

“So” Turan said “Where do you want to go?”

“Huh?” I was stumped. “What? ... Where?”



“Yes, you tell me where you want to go, and we go there. I’m your driver.”

“Oh ... OK. Erm ... I dunno. Can you decide? What’s on the itinerary?”

It was obvious that I had no fucking clue what to do and where to go. So Turan shrugged his fat shoulders and suggested we tour Izmir a bit before going to Seljuk where the ruins were.

Izmir (historically named Smyrna) as could be deduced by my dear readers from the wikipedia link, is a stunningly beautiful seaside town that’s chock full of yuppies, alfresco dining and lovely rivieras. In it’s previous incarnation as Smyrna, it was also an important Christian city with beautiful ruins of roman columns and majestic amphitheaters still standing in it’s original places.

However I saw none of the above. Instead what I saw were crowded and dusty streets, and mud-hut slums perched precariously on hillsides. It was rough, but real. Turan drove through some meandering streets and up to an ancient Roman fort where he promised I would see the entire city laid before me.








Do you notice the layer of smog hovering above Izmir? So much for rivieras and majestic amphitheaters.

After taking a few pictures, we hopped back in the car. It was obvious to Turan I just wanted to get out of Izmir and onward to Seljuk, which is 2 hours away. And so we hit the highway.

Along the way, we chatted a bit, and this was what I found out about Turan.

1. He smokes a pack of cigarettes a day.
2. He’s married.
3. He lives in Kayseri, a town situated in the Cappadocia region.
4. He can speak Japanese, having spent 4 months in Osaka learning the language. It’s part of his OTJ training.
5. He’s a Shia Muslim - but a moderate one, “unlike the fundies in Iran” -> his words.
6. He served his National Service in the military. He was a section commander and his main job then was to go into the mountainside to kill Kurdish rebels. And he’s killed several of them.

“Why? What did they do?” I asked over a mouth-full of lamb kebab at lunch in a restaurant at Seljuk.
“They want their independence. But we won’t give them, so they resort to terrorist acts like bombing Istanbul. So we must kill them.”

At that juncture I wanted to stop him and say - then give them their independence! But I bit my tongue. I didn’t want him to draw out a pistol and shoot me in the face. Also, it would’ve been hypocritical of me because all my friends know that I support the annexation of Tibet by the Chinese. Despite being a Buddhist.

Lunch was part of my tour package, which he paid for with the company charge card. After we’ve fed ourselves with lamb, off we drove to what he described as The Greek Village.

“There are greeks living there?”


“No.”

“Then why call it a Greek Village?”


“There were greeks living there. But during independence, Greece and Turkey have politics. Greeks were killing Turks in Greece, and Turks were killing Greeks in Turkey. So the two government signed an understanding to exchange citizens so that the Greeks go back to Greece and the Turks come back to Turkey.”


“Just like India and Pakistan.”

“Yes, yes the same.”

“So ... what’s there to see at the Greek Village?”