When Words Don't Matter
When iPhone iOS 14 came out, it came with a photo widget one could set up that just randomly displays your memories. With my 25,000+ travel photos on my phone, well, it can be an unsuspecting stroll down memory lane.
One such stroll occured just now.
One of my nicest travel experiences ever was staying in the town of Nar during harvest season in 2018. I had bronchitis and was recovering from my back injury, the latter which had just happened in Bucharest just before I came to Turkey. I wrote a bit about that here, but I wrote more about the back injury and Bucharest here. I was still rehabbing when the bronchitis struck, so I wasn’t exactly Little Miss Explorer.
But this morning, this lovely photo of these two ladies, whose name I don’t know, popped into my photo widget. Despite being incredibly grumpy yesterday and mildly grumpy today, it got me to smile.
Photo: No names, no words, just kind eyes and sweetness.
It’s a warm, wonderful memory of “nothing special,” the kind of nothing special that can’t happen if you don’t get to know your hosts.
I’d been working on a pressing deadline – and this day was actually the event that led me to sort of firing that client. Every job they’d had for me was a rush deadline, which eventually wore thin when the sixth month of “urgency” rolled around, as it just happened to be on this particular day.
An aside: If you can’t organize your time appropriately as a client, then eventually you’ll be the client that gets fired – other clients prioritize and allot time accordingly. Everyone wants life balance, and organized clients are those who make that possible for freelancers like me. So, the guy got fired the next time he had a “rush,” because these lovely ladies made me realize how much I was missing out on when I couldn’t pause randomly to enjoy my extraordinary life.
So, there I was, lovely autumn day in Turkey, feeling tied to my desk, when my host, who I just called Mama, insisted I come down for lunch.
Photo: Ladies who lunch… and a few kids.
It was a potluck day for the ladies in the village and they all gathered for lunch. They made me eat All The Things, including manti, the Turkish pasta with a yogurt sauce. Then they made me take their photos.
But later, we went inside where I worked, because it’s cool in the thick stone rooms. As I was taking pictures, Mama, who didn’t speak a word of English, made me start giving them neck rubs.
You can’t tell, but I’m laughing so hard as I type. It’s a strange problem, being compelled to give out neck rubs to all the Turkish ladies.
Photo: You can see, between the group shot above, and this one, some faces are brighter and friendlier now. This is the “neck rub” segment of the day and I have made my worth known! Ha!
How it all happened, though, was this was the middle of their breadmaking week and harvest time, so Mama had been working such long days, and presumably these ladies in their homes — all preparing food, making bread, and so much more. Mama looked so tired one night that I just reflexively rubbed her neck, like I used to for my own mother when she was tired. Then I rubbed her hands for a moment.
She was so touched and just absolutely loved the massage. It made her day, I could tell.
So there we are, I’m snapping photos, and then this lady comes and stands in front of me and points at her neck. The younger woman you see on the left just above says to me, “She wants a neck rub.”
A half-hour later, my bad hands are aching, and half the ladies have had a neck rub.
I couldn’t talk to any of the women, the English was just not happening, but we had this incredibly strange and wonderful afternoon bonding over food, neck rubs, and laughter.
Photo: Harvest is HARD WORK. The Cappadocia region hits lows of -20, -30 degrees Celsius in the winter. It’s a mountain region and it’s an elevation of 5,000 feet, so once October comes, it starts cooling off fast. They pull everything from the gardens in mid-September and everything is jarred or dried for later use. These peppers are all seeded then strung up, and they hang them off the railings of the house, where they’d hang to dry for two weeks or so before putting into storage for the season. Tomatoes, eggplants — you name it. Every night there was more of this. Hence why Mama needed a neck rub!
And if you asked me if you should go to Nar to stay, I’d say no.
There’s nothing to see, nothing to do, and you need a car.
And yet it was one of the greatest travel experiences I may ever have. I doubt my trip could be had or shared by anyone.
Like so often happens with travel, it came down to all those weird little things you just can’t plan – I got sick and cared for by Mama, who I couldn’t communicate with besides being kind and smiling. I felt like one of the family. She’d pick flowers for me to make tea with for my coughing, she’d make my dinners. Her breakfasts — oh! Her breakfast. She made bread, she made her own cheese, it was divine.
By the time I left, she cried and hugged me. My harvest timing was a fluke and something I wouldn’t have experienced had I been a normal tourist and not losing my lungs with bronchitis.
My experience there wasn’t one of tourism or travel, it was shared humanity and just connecting with people on a real level, in a place where language and words don’t really matter. You can’t buy that or organize it or will it to happen. People will see your earnestness or kindness — or they won’t. Either they’ll trust you and invite you into their lives, or they won’t. And that won’t happen during busy tourist season, either. It’s an off-season thing.
Often, travel experiences are luck of the moment and no one will ever have that same experience as you just enjoyed. And that’s why I’ve never written reviews or encouraged people to go where I’ve gone.
You make your own experiences through your attitudes, timing, and awareness. And guess what? Those amazing “taken in” experiences are more likely to happen for you when you’re off the beaten path and staying in more unlikely places – and for long enough to create relationships that are more meaningful than just being a customer passing through.
Soon, probably on the weekend, I’ll be publishing a chapter from my book I wrote on my travels, and it’ll be for subscribers only — and will remain premium content. But feel free to share this or any of my other public posts. Thanks for reading!
Photo: Preparing tomatoes for making sauce. Such good tomatoes, such good sauce.
Photo: This tomato sauce would simmer over a wood fire all day long. The photo is deceptive — the pot is about 40-50 inches wide and about 16-20 inches deep. It’s just enormous.
Member discussion