Sitting in a Turkish police station next to an accused criminal is not how I expected to spend my Thursday night. Even less did I expect the night to end with a pratical joke played on me by the Turkish police.
At about 5 p.m. in the Istanbul neighborhood of Taksim a constantly packed with hundreds of thousands of people and lined with dance clubs, Turkish meyhanes (traditional bars), upscale clothing stores, fancy restaurants and street performers.
With my friends and fellow exchange students Renke and Stijn, I waded through the mass of humanity in Taksim that night. Like many students studying, we were perpetually broke. As a result, we didn’t have patience for taxi drivers who only seemed out to make a quick buck from foreigners. When one such cabbie stopped for us and quoted an outrageous price for a short cross-town ride, I said something mildly insulting to him and sent him on his way. We took the bus instead. Unfortunately, none of us knew the address of Negma, the Istanbul hotspot we wanted to go to that night.
Not wanting to roam around aimlessly, I asked the first person I saw for directions—a young Turkish police officer standing behind a tall barbed-wire fence. When I started speaking Turkish, his dark demeanor lifted and his face lit up.
It turned out the police officer, who introduced himself to us as Mehmet, had no idea where Negma was, but he invited us into the station for tea. Stijn, Renke and I conferred for a few seconds, but then decided hanging out in a Turkish police station would probably be more interesting than anything else.
The station consisted of one large, bare room with a kitchen, an assortment furtiture, and a TV blaring Turkish music videos. There was an overweight, older-looking police officer slouching in front of the TV. The video he was watching featured a barely dressed female singer shaking her hips Middle Eastern-style to a thumping techno beat.
Mehmet immediately got to work making us tea. While we waited, we sat next to a young guy in street clothes who looked about our age. He didn’t open his mouth and looked a bit terrified.
Mehmet served all of us and we started up a conversation as best we could with our limited Turkish. I managed to learn that he was a fan of the Fenerbahçe football team and was from the coastal city of Adana, but nevertheless believed that Turkey’s most beautiful girls come from the city of Izmir. After a short while, Stijn, Renke and I couldn’t conjure up enough Turkish to keep the conversation going. The other younger guy entered the conversation, and began to act as a translator. It turned out he was being held in connection to a crime. This added to the surreal atmosphere of the police station. What were we doing here? Hadn’t we seen Midnight Express?
By two in the morning, we foreigners were about ready to hit the sack. Mehmet called us a cab. When the taxi came, we kissed our new friends on the cheek, wished them well, and got in our cab.
The cabbie turned out to be the man with whom I had gotten angry at earlier in the night for trying to rip us off—a bad sign. He was as unpleasant as I recalled from our earlier interaction. He was also clearly out of his mind with anger at having to drive us, but seeing as Istanbul’s finest had our back, there was not much he could do but whisk us home at a heavily discounted rate.
As we got closer to the university, my friend Stijn was cut off mid-sentence by a loudspeaker that came blaring at us from the side of a road. Something was seriously wrong. I couldn’t understand the blaring Turkish, but the cabdriver could, and he stopped the car. Three police officers rushed around the taxi and demanded we roll down the windows. They started growling questions at us in Turkish: “What are your names? Where have you come from? Show us ID!” We all hurriedly produced our student IDs. I tried explaining that we were students at the local university. The officers didn’t believe us. They violently motioned for us to get out of the car.
I looked one of the cops in the eye, held my ID next to my face, and screamed in my best Turkish that I was a student and they had no business harassing us. My voice was trembling, my wrists were twitching, and English expeltives were racing through my head as I struggled to put together the Turkish sentences.
And then the chubbiest and hairiest officer pinched me on the side. Baffling me by flashing a gigantic, goofy grin. All the officers were laughing hysterically. Mehmet had gotten his friends to play a joke on us. We all breathed a sigh of relief and laughed our way back to Superdorm (the unintentionally ironic name of our dormitory).
The police were never out to screw over us foreigners Midnight Express-style. In fact, they never showed us anything but heart-warming hospitality. The best way to deal with your fear of something is to just sit down and have tea, preferably with scantily-clad Turkish music video girls shaking it in the background.
