My new friend

For all of the great experiences we've had on our travels, there's one thing we rarely experience: meeting locals. I know that can be one of the most valuable things about seeing new places, but at least in my case I'm not prone to initiate conversation with people I don't know, plus there’s the natural skepticism of getting scammed that comes from living in big US cities.

So that's a bit of background for an interesting experience I had on Thursday night in Istanbul. I decided to go for a walk from my hotel to a nearby 7/11 to get a bottle of water, and as I was walking a guy turned to me to ask (in Turkish) if I had a light. When I told him I didn’t speak Turkish and didn’t have a light, he said "oh, you look like a Turk!" (which, by the way, I must have heard four or five times...being of Norwegian descent I don't think I look even remotely Turkish—let's just say men seemed a bit swarthier and mustachioed than your average Northern European--but it seems to work as a conversation starter). He proceeded to introduce himself as Mehmet (or Mohamed?) from Tehran, and he was out for a walk just like me, he was here for business, his government was crazy, I should come visit Iran and see how friendly people are, etc. At this point, alarm bells started going off, but another part of me thought it wasn't a big deal to be having a conversation with someone I didn't know--isn't this the kind of travel experience I seldom have? Besides, we had Spanish friends who vacationed in Iran last year and said that, indeed, the people were overwhelmingly friendly and constantly invited them into their homes, so what's the big deal, right?

I finally decided I was just going to get my water and head back, but he insisted that I had to have a drink with him as his guest. Moreover, he had met a girl the night before who wouldn't come back with him to his hotel, so maybe I could come with him and we would tell her we were on business and she would think he was more credible (I wasn't entirely clear on this concept). I kept insisting that no, I wanted to go back, but he insisted that it would be a goodwill gesture to have a drink with him and despite having an increasingly weird feeling about it, the little voice in my head kept saying "don't be so uptight, this is all part of traveling and meeting new people".

So the next thing I knew, I was following him through the back streets around Taksim Square to have a drink. We finally came to a neon-lit nightclub, at which point alarm bells were at Defcon 5. Let me quote from a section of my guidebook that I had read titled "Cheap girls, pricey drinks":

Just as in London’s Soho, the area around Taksim Square is dotted with seedy clip joints—the kind of bars that get few satisfied customers to recommend them and rely on touts to bring in the business. Anyone naïve enough to be led into such a place quickly finds themselves making more friends--particularly of the female kind and possibly Russian-accented--more quickly than they ever imagined possible. It's the usual drill: the hapless visitor has everybody's drinks charged to their bill and when that bill arrives what looked like Coca-Cola is alleged to have contained whisky and is charged at $100 or more. It's a mugging, and if you don't pay up events, as they say, can take a nasty turn for the worse.

So with that in my mind, I stopped at the door and said I wasn't going in and was heading back. He got quite upset—why was I doing this to him, we would only go in for a minute, why did I walk all the way there if I wasn’t going to go in, this is a bad thing to do to someone, etc. I'm still not sure whether or not he was a hapless victim who really thought he was going to get someone to go home with him and was angry with this backstabbing American who he thought was a friend but wouldn't help him out, or if he was a tout who was pissed off that he wouldn't be able to bilk this naïve American.

The bottom line is that I was finally able to extricate myself from the situation with no harm done and immediately called Gretchen, who was shocked that I could be so stupid and gullible. What was I thinking? I tried to explain my thinking about meeting new people, but that didn't seem to carry any water with her--besides, in this case she was right.

(Interestingly, the next night I was walking back from dinner in the same area when someone asked me for the time--of course telling me I looked like a Turk--and then proceeded to tell me he was here from Iran, and did I know there were lots of nightclubs nearby where I could see ladies dance, etc.? Luckily this time I was smart enough to say no thank you right away...)