Christmas in Turkey seemed like a great idea for everybody except my dad. He kept talking about all the things that could happen and the struggle that we would have finding a place to stay, and the fact that we would definitely have trouble getting Christmas presents (only to my mom though, my brother still believed in Santa). 

December 2011 until January 2012 was the date, and we stayed there for about 3 weeks, though we were only supposed to stay there for 2. Here’s why.

I was about 8 years old, so I didn’t remember much, but I do remember visiting tons of places. We went around bunches of hotels, shops, and got plenty of taxis when visiting Turkey. We crossed the border from Asia to Europe (or was it the other way?) on a very colorful bridge. At one point, I remember meeting up with one of my friends, Tolga, who I had known in the country that I was living in at that time, Iran, which is also the country that he had left the year before. I was having a blast. We visited tons of different attractions in Ankara, like going to museums, visiting castles, and so on.

Christmas came around, and as usual, I was quite excited. The thing is, I wasn’t quite prepared and had written my list (1 item: a Samsung) 2 nights before Christmas, in a hotel room. Frankly, Santa didn’t get the letter, because I was devastated when on Christmas, I didn’t get any type of phone (I really don’t remember what I got). Instead, though, our aunt/babysitter, Aunty Stella, got the exact same phone that I had put on my Christmas list.

Suffice to say I wasn’t in a good mood for the rest of the day.

Anyways, after that whole Christmas snafu ended, we simply enjoyed the rest of our time in Turkey. 

Weeellll… for most of the time. 

I remember us walking for about 2 hours, visiting sights, and doing plenty more of that, and like anybody probably knows, people under the age of 9 don’t do very well walking for an extended period of time. That is, to say, my brother and I were angry and hungry (hangry for short). My brother had been whining for the past 45 minutes, and I (as the most mature one) was keeping quiet for as long as I could without bursting into tears about my hunger. My mom must have been sympathizing with us, because the next thing I knew, we were at a restaurant, getting ready to eat.

I noticed 2 ladies walking into the shop, but I wouldn’t have cared if I wasn’t hungry. Still,  the food I could smell took all of my attention. My mom had put her handbag down next to her, and my dad was about to pray for the food. After we prayed, my mom checked for her phone inside her handbag. 

But her handbag wasn’t there.

I noticed the two ladies walking briskly out of the shop, without a meal, but with a very familiar looking handbag. As those thoughts were going through my mind, my mom already knew what had happened, and was shouting ‘My handbag! They stole my handbag!’

I had sprinted out of the restaurant before I had even heard my mother call me, until, in a louder voice than she had even screamed about her handbag, my name rang through the air. 

“IKE!! COME BACK!!”

I stopped, looking confused, because the two ladies were still in reach, and hadn’t even gotten far!

I came back to her, and she was delirious. 

‘What if they had a gun? What would you have done? What would I have done?”

I was still slightly bitter because she didn’t let me catch them. I was visualizing myself returning with her handbag with a big smile on my face, but that wasn’t going to happen. My mom was still in a craze, and I didn’t know why she was until I heard 3 words come out of her mouth in the deafening sound of everybody in the restaurant trying to figure out what happened.

“MurmurmurmurmurhandbagmurmurmurmurmurphonemurmurmumrPASSPORT!’

I’m not sure whether I realized the importance of her passport then, but now I’m pretty sure I would have run straight back up that hill to find those ladies.

Without the passport, how would my mom get back to our house in Iran?

How would she get anywhere?

I remember how much my parents asked the shopkeeper to play back the security cameras, and my mom wondering whether she had left it under the chair (which she hadn’t). There was a whole issue around what happened, and I’m pretty sure it ended with the shopkeeper saying he didn’t know how to play back the video, but I’m not sure about what the solution was, so she told me later on, when the issue was resolved.

Apparently, there was a Kenyan embassy in Turkey, and apparently, she knew someone from the embassy, so she was able to get them to go back to Kenya, get her a new passport, and bring it back so she could come back to Iran with us. It was a 2-week process, and nobody was happy about that, but we all worked through it.

To this day, she never puts her handbag away from her sight, and always puts it on a chair where she can see it.

Me? To this day I’ve been wondering whether I could have caught the culprits if my mom didn’t call me back.