After watching the World Cup final, I was walking back to the apartment where I was staying when I decided to stop for a few midye. While eating, I started chatting with two Turkish guys who were also there enjoying a delicious late-night snack. One of them spoke good English and was quite friendly (but then again, most Turks are). He claimed that he was from İzmir but was in town on business staying at the Maramara Pera. We started walking and continued chatting and they eventually asked if I wanted to join them for a drink. "Why not?" I thought. In Ankara, I've done this plenty of times. It's a perfectly normal social thing to do when you meet people in this country. However, Ankara is not İstanbul.
We kept walking and crossed Taksim Square. This is where I started to sense that something was a bit odd. But my new Turkish friends said that this place was recommended by the people at the Marmara, so it was worth checking out. We eventually entered a door of a club on a perfectly pleasant side street where I found exactly what I expected. Largely empty except for a few unattractive women unenthusiastically dancing in the middle, this place was what you would imagine when you think of a 'touristic club' in Turkey. But I stayed, hoping for the best and not wanting to offend my hosts.
We ordered some rakı, expensive enough at 100TL but fairly normal in an İstanbul club. But then the girls came over and I knew I was fucked. They started chatting with us and asked if they could order some champagne. This is a classic scam in İstanbul: charge the foreigner for some exorbitantly priced drinks for the girls at his table. Realizing that I needed to get out of there as quickly as possible, I made up an excuse that the midye and rakı had upset my stomach and asked if we could get the check. My new Turkish friends were more than happy to oblige. It came, and the total, as expected, was a whopping 970TL. I then realized that the guys I met on the street were definitely in on the deal since they didn't even blink an eye at the amount.
I had previously hidden all my cash and debit cards in my shoes during a trip to the bathroom, so I told them I would only be able to pay with credit card. "No problem," they said. We would just go for a little walk to an ATM around the corner. At that point, I knew that I would have to make a run for it. If they couldn't get cash from my Visa card, they wouldn't be happy, and who knows what would happen then.
As we were walking from the club, I spotted a taxi on the corner. I sprinted towards it and jumped in. I handed the driver a 20TL bill and emphatically told him to drive away as quickly as possible. He did just that. When I told him what had happened in the club, he was infuriated. Like every other Turk I had encountered prior to this night, he believed that visitors to his country should be treated with hospitality and respect. The driver started insisting that we should call the police so that they could shut down the club. He said that since I was a yabancı they would do anything for me. I opted just to go home, but not before he called one of his English-speaking friends on the phone who told me that I could call him if I ever had any more problems in İstanbul.
When we reached Tophane (where I was staying), the driver turned around and gave me a very stern lecture. My Turkish isn't great, but it was clear what he was saying. "Kurds run that club," he said, "and you cannot trust them." He said that they use the money they steal from tourists to fund the PKK which is trying to break apart Turkey. My driver didn't consider for a minute that this is just what happens in big cities: people try to screw over other people all the time for their personal benefit, and they're not trying to fund a terrorist organization. But no, he repeated to me very clearly when I left the taxi, "Never trust a Kurd."
quoted from: http://beyondbridges.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/how-i-almost-got-royally-fucked-by-the-pkk-in-istanbul/#comments
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