14 When in Turkey learn the hand gesture for souvenir vendors

Breakfast at the hotel courtyard was fantastic. They kept bringing more and more dishes to our table and they were all delicious. We asked the waitress how to say hello and thank you in Turkish. Armed with these two important words (marhala and tesekkuh ederim), we left the hotel to stroll in the marina, located in front of the hotel. To the right of the hotel—in fact, right outside our hotel window, there were thousands of little shops.

We watched the ships and cruise ships in the marina and decided to check out the shops. We were soon bombarded by invitations to enter the shops by very aggressive male Turks. We were doing our best to fend them off with our two Turkish words. It didn’t seem to be working and at one point, Jeff commented, “I think I’m ticking them off with ‘thank you’.” That set us off into a fit of laughter. We kept the hilarity until we arrived to the hotel, where we asked one of the men about what had occurred.


Apparently, when we were saying hello, we were encouraging the vendors and when we said thank you, we were blowing them off. He then showed us a hand gesture to get them to stop bothering us. That’s the last time we’ll try to be so polite!