A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Mall...

Do you ever think that strange and random things only happen to you?  Sometimes I feel like this.  The most awkward and bizarre things seem to happen to me all over the world...Since I moved to Turkey, here are a couple of true events:

One of the first days I was here, I decided to go to the mall...no problem.  I found out which buses went there and patiently waited in line (yes, there are bus lines here).  I made it to the mall without incident, did my shopping, and patiently waited in line to come home.  I was one of the last ones to get on the bus that day.  First, let me explain how the buses work here in Ankara.  There are two kinds - EGO buses which work with a ticket type card that you put into a computerized reader, and Halk buses which accept cash only.  The bus I got on that day was an EGO bus, so I dutifully took out my card and stuck it in the reader.  It wouldn't go in properly the first time, so I tried again.  Success! Now, usually, after deducting your bus fare from the card, the reader pops your card right back out again.  Well...this didn't happen.  My card was stuck.  After a few frantic seconds, it popped out.  Then, the entire system shut down.  Yup.  I broke the bus.  Well, not me particularly I think, but my EGO card.  When the reader popped my card out, I couldn't pull it out - it was partially stuck.  So I tugged at it.  Then the bus driver tugged at it.  Then we cursed at it in Turkish and then English.  Finally it came free.  When it came free, the electronic reader turned itself off.  The bus driver explained that he had never seen anything like this in his 10 years of bus driving experience.  Goody for me.  So, he did what any self-respecting bus driver would do - he turned on the 4-way flashers, and turned the bus off then on again.  Theoretically this was a good idea - but with buses, it doesn't work so well.  The bus wouldn't turn back on!!  Meanwhile, I was still stuck standing at the front of bus with the eyes of all the other frustrated passengers on me wondering what the hell I did to the bus!  After some more cursing, and some panicked turning off and on of the bus, it finally started up again.  My card popped out as it originally should have, and I moved to the first available seat with my head down as the bus lurched back on its way...

Another fun moment happened in December while on a little holiday in Harran.  My travel buddy H wanted to have the experience of sleeping in an authentic "bee hive" style dwelling.  Sure, I said - sounds like fun!  I should have known this part of our get away would be cursed when we tried to get a dolmuş (dole-moosh) from Urfa to Harran (a dolmuş is a minibus that is half the cost of a normal coach but also half as reliable and 100% less comfortable).  We got to the bus station where the dolmuş leave from and found where we had to wait.  There was one minibus parked there so we asked what time it would be leaving.  The driver explained he wasn't going to Harran but that the next bus would be leaving in 30 minutes.  Ok, no problem.  We went inside and found some hideously overpriced tea and pastries and waited.  After the requisite amount of time passed, we went back to the same place and saw the same bus and driver - turns out he decided to go to Harran after all.  He said he would be leaving for Harran in 20 minutes.  So - we waited some more.  When we were finally on the road, we started off in the wrong direction.  So I asked, in my halting Turkish, just exactly where we were going.  The driver's brother needed a ride home from work, so first we would do that, then we would go to Harran.  Awesome.  After a bumpy, bone-jarring hour on the road, we finally arrived in Harran and were greeted by our hosts.  He took us in his antique Renault (you could see outside through the bottom of the closed door...) to our "bee-hive" accomodation.  It was dark when we arrived so maybe I couldn't fully appreciate the uniqueness of the bee-hives because when I saw them I just wanted to cry.  Or maybe it was the lack of doors that made me want to cry.  Or maybe it was the sorry state of what passed as the "guest" bathroom.  Or maybe it was the fact that it was December 17th, we were in the middle of a desert where the temperatures get close to freezing at night, and we were being shown to some homemade (but meticulously clean I must admit) mattresses and blankets on the dirt floor of the doorless bee hive house.  Although I didn't speak to H for about an hour, or until the initial shock wore off, we both laughed it off and said it'd make a great story for our friends back home...Indeed.