Making Friends Wherever We Go

By far, one of the coolest things about traveling is meeting people.  When you travel around the world, you inevitably end up meeting people from all over the world.  Everyone has a different story, and I think you learn a lot from all the different people you meet, even if it's just to understand a culture better than you did before.  

On our trip, we have met people from Minnesota, Boston, England, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Thailand, India, Greece, and more.  In Istanbul, we happened to meet an elderly Turkish man who we saw every day that we were there.  He must have lived several doors down from our hotel, because every day he would be sitting outside in his chair on the sidewalk, watching the world pass by.  Sometimes he would be across the street playing some kind of board game with the shop owner, and sometimes he would be helping direct a vehicle that was parking, but he was almost always there.  He spoke hardly any English, and we spoke even less Turkish, but somehow he took a liking to us.  His eyes always lit up when we passed by, and he would always say hello and shake our hands and smile and say lots of things in Turkish that we didn't understand.  We, in turn, would smile at him and shake his hand and say things in English that he probably didn't understand either, but it didn't matter because we were being friendly and he was being friendly.  It was nice to walk down the street and know that someone was going to see you and be happy about it.

One day, as he saw us approaching, he pointed his finger and hurried inside.  We weren't sure what he was doing, but a shop keeper across the street told us (in English) that he wanted to give us something.  Sure enough, a minute or so later, he emerged with a quilted cell phone/camera case for me.  It was such a nice thing for him to do that when we'd pass by later we would show him that we were using it to hold our camera.  On the day that we left, he seemed so sad.  "America?" he asked.  We told him that, yes, we were indeed going back to America.  (Considering the language barrier, there was no way we could explain that we would be traveling for another month and a half before actually returning to America.)  He kissed JB on the forehead and held my right hand in his to say goodbye.  We will, of course, never see this man again, but we enjoyed seeing him while we were there.  

Now we are off to new places to meet new people and learn new things.  Traveling the world is undeniably as much about meeting the people as it is about seeing the historical sights, and we enjoy every bit of it!