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Did you think that I’d forget about the last of the Turkey posts?  Nah, I’ve just been too busy/lazy to grab the pictures I needed to tell the stories.  Today I thought I’d share a funny story that happened our first full day in Turkey.

The street that we stayed at was a pretty typical, busy Turkish street.  One of our friends was picking us up, and so he had parallel parked on the side of the street.  Keep in mind it was a Sunday morning, and Turkey has the same weekend as we do.  I wouldn’t expect they’d go to church or anything, but you still don’t expect heavy construction, either.

Yet, while we were there, they were doing some construction on the street…looked kinda like they were replacing some pipe.  And this construction started Sunday morning.

After he parked and we hung out for a bit, we went out to the van.  This is what we found:

Except that 2-foot wide, 6-inch deep moat was all down the side of our car, blocking us completely from the street.  There had been no effort to block off these spots from people parking in them, they just did the construction anyway, blocking lots of cars in.

The sidewalk wasn’t wide enough to drive on, so what are you to do?

Well, here’s what we did.

We moved rocks into the ditch (“rocks” really being the concrete that had already been cleared out.

See, we’re slowly building a bridge for the wheels!  Of course, by “we” I mean a few of the others…I was too busy laughing inside the van!

And then what made us laugh the hardest happened:

One guy decided he’d just go pick up a big piece of concrete and haul it the 50 feet to our vehicle.  From the way he was straining, it had to weigh 80 pounds!

There were also several Turks standing around helping and gawking!  So that’s our very-Turkish problem, and our equally-Turkish solution.