Hitchhiking Turkey Solo

At a bend in the road we stop, and a four- and a five-year-old, one standing, one squatting, have a quick peeing competition. The girl wins, pulls up her panties and runs to jump back into her seat in the car.

We approach Gazi Antep - an uninteresting, grey cluster of a town. Houses of brick and cement, unfinished, plastered, unpainted. The woman and her kids are going there. The driver, a guy in his early thirties and her cousin, says he will get her home, then put me back on the road.
As soon as we are alone, I have reason to be annoyed: There, I put so much effort into getting a lift with a family, showing that I am perfectly respectable and neither looking for a date. But still, so tediously predictable, as soon as the protecting female presence is gone, the fucker hits on you again. But it is okay, it happens to be around lunchtime: As usually I say, "No thanks, I really don't need food", but still he insists. Takes me to a (fancy!) restaurant, orders a kebab.
I remonstrate that I prefer to eat vegetarian, but that is an unknown word in these latitudes that has an absurd ring to it. The guy, some Mehmet or Ahmet or Ömür or Eser, has already ordered Adana for me. Since I seem to be insisting I don't want this, he orders Chicken Kebab next. Oh great, I wanted a meatless meal, and instead they killed two animals for me. Now, it is already dead, it is already there, so I dig in. While I am munching away, Mehmet or Ahmet or Ömür or Eser tells me I have pretty eyes. I take another swig from my lemonade, and dig my fork into the salad. He tells me I have pretty lips. I roll a mint leaf into the warm folds of Turkish pita bread together with a piece of my spicy Adana Kebab. He tells me he is looking for a girl-friend. I grimace a smirk and before I dig my teeth into the kebab roll, insist I don't need a dessert. I let him pay the bill, make him drive me back to the highway. Ciao ciao Mehmet or Ahmet or Ömür or Eser.

Unfortunately, it takes forever for the next decent lift to materialize, I wait forever by the roadside. I let a few cars pass, because there is only guys in there, and quite frankly, I simply can't be bothered. Then at some point, boredom gets the better of me, and the following car that comes, I stop. It is a single guy, a village man, who, with his salt-and-pepper hair, looks around 55, or maybe 45. Village life in the South East can be hard and makes people age faster after all. The man probably has around six or seven kids, coming from around here. Thing is he tells me, "I am 27 and unmarried". I can't be arsed to put energy into fending off his absurd advances and ask to be let out a few kilometers on. So there I am again, with my thumb out.

The next car that stops is a family with seven kids. I feel inclined to wave them on, but they insist I climb in with them! The driving dad is a chatterbox: "We Muslims, we wash five times a day! But you guys, you are dirty! You" - and he makes obscene hand gestures, meaning, I assume, 'you guys fuck' - "and you don't even wash!" I don't think it is up to a squatter to try to change his ideas on this one, so I mostly just let him talk. Finally, even though I am a dodgy, dirty European, he thinks he found one point we certainly agree on: "But the worst are the Jews! You Germans, you did it right, you heaped those guys into ovens!", and he pantomimes someone shovelling corpses into a furnace.
I am too lazy to tell him about the 1950's when Konrad Adenhauer apologized profusely for the Holocaust to all the concerned communities, or the modern political situation with Germany's government being an eternal yes-man for all Israel ever does. I just tell him that I personally thought the shovelling business was a mistake (to put it mildly).