Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [2]
Nothing convinces like examples, so I will share a few: Godfrey Goodwin, in his autobiographical book Life’s Episodes: Discovering Ottoman Architecture, relates a story about a time he and his wife were on a road somewhere in the middle of Turkey that was still meant for buffalo. The car jolted and died. He brought the car into a garage, and the next morning, he expected to be told that he would have to wait a day or two more for it to be fixed. “But not at all,” he explains. “There was the car sparklingly polished and the tank filled. We were allowed to pay for the petrol but not for the two men who had worked all night on a wreck. ‘Our road did the damage,’ said the owner of the workshop. ‘We had to put it right.’ Were all humanity like him, there would be no need of Paradise.” My husband and I lost count of the times we left our bags at bus stations and shops for safekeeping, only to be told when we returned that no payment was necessary. And we remember well how a bus driver picked us up in Izmir and refused payment, saying only that we looked like we needed a ride so he was happy to give us one, and the guy who bought us coffee just because he wanted to talk to Americans and find out what we thought of Turkey. Lastly, Bill Penzey, founder of the excellent company Penzey’s Spices (800 741 7787, penzeys.com, thirty-nine stores nationwide) related an experience he had in a taxi that he originally wrote about in his Penzeys One magazine:
You can’t be a good spice business without having really good bay leaves and really good oregano. We have found Turkey to be the best location for both of these, as well as Aleppo pepper. But this moment did not happen in the pepper fields or on the mountainous slopes outside of Izmir where the oregano and bay leaves grow. This moment happened in a taxi between Istanbul and Atatürk International Airport about a month after 9/11.
… This ride started like so many—in silence.… The driver’s English was not great, and my Turkish was non-existent, so communication was tough. He had studied to be an engineer in Germany and with my Wisconsin upbringing we were able to use a combination of a little English and a little German to get a conversation started. After a few minutes of small talk, he paused a moment and asked me where I was from.… Bad thoughts go through your head a month after 9/11 when someone who looks like he could be one of the terrorists’ roommates from Frankfurt asks you where you are from. Still, I was not going to let my thoughts get the best of me, so I told him I was an American. I was watching his eyes in the rearview mirror and I saw a sadness come over him.… For him there was a deep sadness for the victims of the terrorists … for my driver and many others I was surprised that they spoke of these deaths as though they were the deaths of their own family members. Their grief was immense, but coupled with their grief was anger. An anger that someone could have done this monstrous deed and then tried to say they did it for their religion. Over and over the driver said to me in English so I would not miss the point, that this was not Islam.…
Though this alone is a good story, it is not the moment that this tale is about … somewhere about three miles from the airport I must have been distracted by the taxi driver’s words, thinking about what he had to say. While I was looking the other way, the driver reached over and turned off his meter and quickly restarted it. We got to the airport, I looked at the meter, and for what should have been a $16 fare, the meter read the Turkish equivalent of $1.85.… It is one thing to say you feel bad about what has happened;