Last week I happened upon the granddaddy of all stories. Let me tell it from the beginning.
Friday night I went into the city with Charlie, Joe, Kim, and Natalie and ended up smoking nargili on the patio of the fourth floor of an English-style pub. The nargili was actually very good, much better than any sheesha I ever had in Egypt. While there, Joe and Charlie started chatting with some of the other people on the balcony, including some guy with dreadlocks who wants to be a shaman. We smoked and chatted and relaxed after a long week of work, and finally around 12:30 we were ready to head home.
There is a bus system that runs to and from the school every hour, but one of the guys they had been chatting with offered to drive us back in his car, since it was on his way and he was actually a Bilkent student. In what was in retrospect a moment of poor judgment, the six of us piled into his little new Mercedes. I had the sublime priveledge of sitting on Natalie's lap. I think our driver must have told Charlie to open the glove box, because he did, and inside he found a set of brass knuckles. Incredulous, we all started asking why he had them. His response was simply that you need them in Turkey. I didn't entirely follow the thread of the conversation, but shortly thereafter I was lazily gazing out the side window, in a happy haze, when I noticed a black VW on our right that seemed to be getting rather close. And then it hit us. Not hard, just a very intentional bump, followed by some punches aimed at Joe and Charlie through the open windows of the moving cars! Our driver stopped (in the middle of a very busy road) and five guys jumped out of the other car and dragged him to a grassy divide, where they began punching and kicking him like there was no tomorrow. I was honestly afraid for is life. Joe and Charlie jumped out and ran over, but by the time they got there a bunch of men in business suits were already putting a stop to it. It turned out that these men were, in fact, the police. They all talked with a great deal of animation for quite some time. Us three girls, meanwhile, were glued to the backseat of the car, gazing wide-eyed and without a clue what was actually going on.
Eventually they all got back in the car and everyone headed to the police station. In the car, our driver revealed that he had, in fact, used the brass knuckles on the other guys! Luckily, they got lost in the grass and no one could find them. Once at the Turkish police station, the six of us headed into an office and took a seat. Our driver came and went, talking on and off with the police officers. For whatever reason, I was hard put not to burst out in laughter, and the officers kept having to come over and tell us all to be quiet (everyone was quite interested in piecing everything together). About ten minutes later, they let us all go, along with the guys from the black car. I got to see some very colorful prostitutes on the way out, and we had a police escort for about half the drive back.
By not you’re all wondering what actually happened. I was too. The best that we could figure, our driver had cut off the other car at some point, and their response was to beat him up in the middle of the road. Once at the police station, they discovered that our driver was over the legal level of alcohol (something we had not known) and therefore decided that if he filed charges they would have to charge him with drunk driving. So instead, they just let everyone go. Mind you, they had him get back in his car and drive home over the legal limit, and with six people piled in a car meant for five at the very most.
What a night.
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