We arrived in Urfa. Lavender headscarves and kunefe shops crowded the
streets--a quietly unnerving change from cosmopolitan Turkey.
This sense of unfamiliarity grew as we walked towards Abraham's birthplace,
the stares of local Turks and Arabs and Kurds revealing a distance between
us and them.
"Hell-o. Can you fill out a survey for my brother?"
We wrote about our incomes and our traveling habits while we sipped chai.
Both the Agricultural Economics department of Harran University and Ahmet
were very curious about us. We responded and responded and responded some
more when Ahmet invited us over to his friend's house for the night.
While the three of us chatted brokenly with the three of them, they
placed a big metal pan on the floor. Ahmet slowly ground bulgar and
tomato paste together until the bulgar was indistinguishable from the paste.
The cig kofte was delicious.
The next day, we got a call: "we miss you! We want to see you again!"
This was the same thing we heard a week later, as we waved to them from our
bus to Istanbul.