TheTrip

The trip to the Gallipoli is a round trip of 700kms. We did it over two days with the second day visiting Troy. I’m met at 6am and our tour group consists of Aussie sand Kiwis. There was the young couple on a quick trip to celebrate varsity graduation, another young couple doing a big trip before getting married early next year. The middle age couple who had a week in Turkey before back to London then returning home after 4 years away. The Aussie family of four doing a major tour of Europe. Then last but not least little old me. My little cultural sensitivity radar was on high alert after the young kiwi woman said that they had been in Istanbul for two days and she was sick of hearing Turkish as they hadn’t spoken to any English people for two days… I wondered how our English speaking Turkish tour guide took that.. There was only one other major time during the entire trip where we let ourselves down as countries. It was later in the day, admittedly we were all pretty tired. We were heading up to Chanock Bear and stopped off at the Turkish memorial. Some of the group didn’t even get out of the van and a couple of others did a quick oncer around the site. Now our guides are Turkish, they lost over a million people during the war, they are an incredibly proud and patriotic people so I was feeling a little uncomfortable about the lack of respect some of the others were showing. I don’t think it was intentional. So I lingered a bit, last one back to the van. I picked up a few common names on some of the graves and guessed that the alay (sp)and tabir (sp) were equivalent to oum and abu in Arabic (mother of..father of..) So was able to have a conversation with our guide as to whether I had picked it. Part of this was interest for myself and a part was to show that we did care about their history as much as ours.