Retro-blogging IstanBulgaria Part 3: The Carpet Salesman Incident

From Friday, Sept 18, 2009

3:17 pm -- It's hard to blend in when walking around here, even among the tourist crowds, so a lot of people on the street will stop me to ask me where I'm from or try to guess. People have been calling out, "Konichiwa!" or sometimes, "Hey -- Korean?" So far I usually respond to the former with a bland English "Hi," and the latter usually leads to a guessing game, which approximately plays out in this order: Korean? --> Japanese? --> Singaporean? --> Taiwanese?/Thai?/Vietnamese? It's generally a friendly kind of exchange, but the bottom line is that I get pegged pretty easily as the Asian tourist stereotype. Granted, it probably doesn't help that there's always a big camera dangling from my shoulder.

But that brings up the Carpet Salesman Incident, which happened this morning, just before meeting up with S/N/A/A (the first arriving group). At the time, I was walking around Sultanahmet again, exploring more side streets and shops in the last couple hours I had to myself. It turns out there are Turkish carpet shops on almost every street, catering specially to the tourist clientele. As you walk by the shops, the owners are invariably calling out to you, trying to get you into their stores so you can buy yourself a carpet. And they're super-persistent about it.

Anyway, I wandering near the tram station, and all of a sudden, this middle-aged guy on the street stops me and asks me if I'm Japanese -- cue the usual guessing sequence. After the expected try-try-again on his part, I reveal the answer (Chinese), though he guesses pretty quickly that I'm American too. He starts making small talk with me and asks me how people like Obama in America, if I've seen New York City, what it's like, etc. He then (surprise surprise) eases into telling me that he's a "businessman in the area" who sells carpets and has his shop nearby -- would I like to see it?

I tell him as clearly as I can that, no, I'm not interested at all in buying right now, and I have a meeting scheduled with friends very soon (completely true). He says that that's okay, but that I should just come have a look and tell my friends if I liked what I saw. In retrospect the smart thing to do obviously would've been to end it there, but at the time I figured that (a) it was broad daylight, (b) the shop was right across from an outdoor restaurant with plenty of tourists sitting around, and (c) I'm a little interested but I've already been firm about not buying. So he leads me into the shop -- it's not too big -- and there are display cases of jewelry off to one side, while lots of big Turkish carpets hang everywhere else.

The encounter then starts to get shady: he motions for me to sit on a couch that puts me mostly out of view of the street. Very quickly, he offers me a small glass of hot apple tea, explaining graciously that this is a gesture of Turkish hospitality. Which is nice of him, except that he repeatedly encourages me to drink and finish the tea, with an insistence that really puts me on the defensive. I only pretend to take a sip (post-trip addendum: for the record, I tried apple tea later and it turns out to be quite good). To explain something about my state of mind: at this point, I'm remembering a story told to me about a friend of a friend who was on vacation and woke up, ostensibly after being drugged, with his wallet and passport gone.

The man talks to me about nothing in particular for a while (some several minutes, probably). Then, another, more athletic-looking man comes into the shop walks into the room. Around this time, I'm feeling distinctly intimidated and am vaguely reminded of some ominous scene from a mob movie, and I start to get really uneasy. The original carpet salesman introduces the second man as his brother, who starts trying to make small talk with me. As this happens, I'm planning a hasty exit, which is partly blocked by Man #2. Both men continue to insist that I stay for a while and just finish my tea, and I'm telling them that I really can't stay for much longer.

After a few minutes of this, during which I'm starting to get quite nervous, my phone rings -- I hadn't planned to use it because of the exorbitant roaming charges, but I'd left it switched on in case I needed to check the time. The ringing turns out to be a text from Qtel, the Qatari phone company, just sending me info on how to use my phone here in Turkey, but it gives me the pretext I need to slip away. I tell the two men that I'm really sorry, but I have to go: my friends are here and they're waiting for me. They insist some more that I stay, but after refusing as politely as possible, I quickly slip out the door and speedwalk back to the main road as fast as I can.

Anyway, everyone's been arriving now on schedule and all's well. It's easily possible that I was overly paranoid -- being pushy and hospitable are both pretty common practice for vendors around here. Still, this was before I'd regrouped with everyone, so it wasn't the best time to be taking chances. At any rate, it was kind of a weird morning.