Metro Rides and the Contemplation of Canadian Citizenship

I am still in shock. Today, I witnessed a breed of creature that I had always hoped was completely mythical or at least long extinct. That creature is the terrible traveling American. In my experience, many Americans who go abroad are polite, reasonably savvy, and respectful – however, most of my experience comes from East Asia where, for the most part, only those who are polite, savvy, respectful, and knowledgeable about traveling and local customs go. Europe, however, has long been a playground for young Americans, and I can only say that the ones I witnessed today were worse than anything I had ever imagined. To all of Istanbul, I profusely apologize for them. To all of America, I ask why did we give them passports? To the rest of the world, I hope they are not headed your way next. They were loudly and profanely attempting to navigate the fairly intuitive Istanbul metro system to “go find some f-ing weed.” The conversation promptly turned worse when they started to direct it at me upon realizing that red headed foreigner who sticks out like a sore thumb speaks English.

They asked “do you like it here?”
I said, “Yeah, I really do.”
They quickly retorted, “Well, we don’t. People through there sh*t everywhere, it’s disgusting. How long are you going to be here?”
“Until August”
“Good luck, that’s a f-ing long time.”

And so on and so forth, only they segued into far, far less appropriate topics with considerably less tasteful language and gesticulation to go along with it. Clearly ignorant of the fact that at least the nice gentleman in the suit next to them spoke English (as he politely tried to explain which direction the train was going, though they didn’t take note), they covered a wide variety of shocking topics including but not limited to female genitalia, black jokes, rape, and some jokes about Bosnia that I can only hope to forget. I can only hope they get deported before they can parade themselves around any more. As for me, I spent most of the rest of my way home contemplating Canadian citizenship, and exactly how I would even attempt to recount this is my blog – completely taking the place of countless other topics I had thought about sharing in this post. I think I’m still processing that it happened. All I can say is, if they think Istanbul is dirty, they should be forced to spend some quality time in Chandi Chowk in Delhi. India might just kill them, although they seemed to be good at avoiding dangerous situations as they claimed to have been robbed several times, which they told me was what would happen should I try to visit a whore house here – I informed them that that wasn’t exactly on my to do list. My only wish is that I knew how to apologize to the rest of the train in Turkish – that’s going on my to learn list just in case.

In conclusion: dear friends in America, I know you would never be those people, so when you find those people tell them terrible stories about other countries so that they won’t leave ours – or just send them to Mexico to chill with the drug wars near the boarder. Dear friends from other parts of the world, I promise all of America is not like that, in fact, very little of America is like that, despite what you may see on Jersey Shore.