Let me be clear: Excluding constants that my wife cannot control, like the season (hence the temperature and air conditions in potential destinations), ticket prices (how desperate she is to own an airline company of her own, you can imagine), or security issues (she’s among the billions that do not understand that the best time to visit a country is right after a terrorist attack, for that is when the security is the highest and the armed forces are the most alert), it is my circumstances that dictates our next destination – where the circumstances do not include my tastes or preferences but things I cannot control.
She loves to travel. Tell her that she has two options: She has to have a surgery but after that she won’t be able to travel around the world, or not have a surgery and I don’t know, see Machu Picchu and die right on the seventh day at 15:42 sharp, she would start packing up. Travel, quote, “isn’t just [her] passion – it’s a lifeline for [her] mental health”. She is always happy to plan her next trip – to the extent that if there is no planned trip, she needs to plan one and if she is not planning one, she already is in depression researching if suicide by sleeping pills or painkillers is less painful. Tell her that we might, not that we surely but only might, even if one in a million chance go see the penguins, and she’s already looking at Antarctica map for how to go there, where to stay, and what to eat.
Quoting once more, “luxury travel [is] not really [her] thing – [she]’d rather stretch [her] budget to do more. That said, [she] do[es] have a hard rule about clean, private bathrooms. Non-negotiable”. That, though, is an innocent lie: Cool weather, the perfect one if you ask me, is a no – and cold, of course, is a no-no. She’s a summer girl and am a winter boy. I’d rather be cold than hot, I can take snow on my face lot easier than sun over my head. Her? Non-negotiable. She’d rather risk being the lunch of a lion in Tanzania than enjoying the peaceful chill of Himalayas in Bhutan. Not that she wouldn’t visit Bhutan, surely she would – but, as long as conditions can comply with the rules.
Temperature is but one of the many differences we have, and the list is not to be publicized. The reader might just be reminded that, we are an ordinary couple following the universal rule: Opposites attract. What I am is what she is not and vice versa. Look at her site, which I quoted just two paragraphs above, and you will find, for example, the differences between our writing styles: She writes more seriously, trying to add kind of humor in it. She is more fun than me, though. I write, at least try, to write more naturally and humorously. And I am the not fun one. Even our real life characters are opposed when things come down to writing, and go guess the extent of it.
I like women, she likes men. While we differ at this very core, how similar can we be?
My circumstances, I said. I hate visa procedures, because of which I am yet to revisit Budapest after eight long years. I mean, yes I am a Turkish citizen, but my diploma is directly from Hungary. Well, indirectly in a way but I have a Hungarian diploma I don’t know in which drawer. Let me tell you a story: There was a training of CoE, and I was not much willing to participate due to health issues. On Wednesday I decided to go. On Thursday I went to the consulate, with only a letter and maybe one two more papers, lacking even a photograph. On Friday I got my visa thanks to the letter from CoE, and on Saturday I flew. Now, I need to give them my family’s CV even, begging them to let me in to see Budapest once more and only for a weekend, trying to ensure that I am neither a terrorist nor a potential asylum seeker. If I was, ladies and gentlemen, I would be in those darkest of my days. Not that I am in broad sunlight now, but am in a much better condition. If I was no trouble to you back then, why should I now be? I was young back then, willing to see Europe. Now, no more. Why should I belittle myself, only to see do not know what?
Yeah. So, my circumstances. Most of the countries which I can visit either visa-free or with visa on arrival are, well, those that I’m not much eager to visit – except one for sure, to which we will come later, and few others are, “may or may not be seen anyway”.
But, that is me. For her, things are totally different. Those countries that she did not yet visit or plan are the ones that are in war or have the active potential for one. Passively, all countries are civil war candidates anyway, but I am not going to show off my expertise on political science or sociology here. We are talking about my wife.
Limited with the countries that I can freely visit, and her own preferences, things are not so easy for her. Consider a scenario: We are in a room. She is looking at her screen and I am looking at mine. She turns to me, has a smile. I turn at her not, without a smile.
– I found our next destination.
– Where?
– X.
– Why not Ethiopia?
– Dangerous.
– Colombia?
– Cold.
– Bhutan?
– Expensive yet.
– Tanzania?
– You wouldn’t.
– Damn. I wouldn’t. But I don’t wanna.
All happy families are alike, said Tolstoy. We are, well, at least in terms of our relationship, a happy family. And you know how happy families work:
In the end, she is right. But, after all these years of training and carving and whittling and sculpting, I am not even halfway close to being a proper husband as Don McMillan is. I go through the five steps of grief with each destination, at times skipping some. Above, you saw the first step: Denial. Now let us look at anger phase.
– You took me to Y before!
– Didn’t you like it?
– I might have, but didn’t wanna go in the beginning.
– Oh come on…
– I don’t wanna!
But grief has more steps. I don’t bargain, generally, for at least I am trained enough to know that bargaining does not help. I mean, why should we enjoy the cool of mountains where we can rather walk under the equatorial sun, where sunrays come at a 90 degree angle and pass through our skulls to burn our brains? Where’s the sense in that? And if you think I am exaggerating or making up a scene, I urge you to know that once we were, in Singapore, sometime in spring, at 13:00 or so, walking on a riverside, quote, only to walk on and enjoy the riverside, unquote, as if there was something to see or do, where there was neither a tree nor nothing to at least divert some bit of the rays going through our skulls. Hence I go to the fourth phase.
– Their food is shit.
– You’ll survive.
– I am not interested.
– This one you will like.
– I hate sun.
– You’ll wear a hat. By the way, we’ll need these vaccinations and these creams and these covers and these what nots so that we won’t die a stranger in a strange land.
– Why the hell are we going, then?
– I wanna?
Once you are in depression, you are one step away from acceptance. Hence I accept my fate – and my attempts to return to the third phase, which I intentionally skipped, never works.
– At least this?
– We will see.
– Okay. This then?
– No.
– This?
– Over my dead body.
I know that I love her alive body. Having no experience with her dead body, I am not much inclined to test it out. I carry a scientific brain in the end, and am a rather autistic one, preferring what I know over what I do not, and I dare test that hypothesis not. Not while am alive, at least. Once am dead, I sure will want her, dead or alive, by my side still and that is just when it is okay when the former is acceptable.
This is how I hit the road – and, yes, it is me who found her the site’s name. It took a long while, I guess over three months, to come up with something that is rememberable. Later we saw that someone else liked the idea and “borrowed” it as well but, hey! Originals linger, right? Being the artistic and creative one in this relationship, as well as the carrier, watchdog, food-disposal-unit, and the bearer of some other common husbandly duties, it was my bad that it took so long but you better see the positive: She has such patience, otherwise we’d not still be married, and she manages to handle me somehow albeit I have no idea how. Don’t ask her please, I doubt she knows either.
That’s how I hit the road, I said. Because I am more taken, even dragged to where we went, than willingly or joyfully, I was more like, “this is it”? I’m not the travel buddy she’d dream of, that I know. That’s how I experience the countries, a total of don’t know how many, that either she took or dragged me to:
Isn’t it funny that, albeit I built an app exclusively for her to paint countries and so on, and now am building one for her to make her itinerary and what not, a full traveler package, I used mapchart.net’s very simple and useful painter here?
So. Now that you know how I get to see the countries, you know why I look in the worst possible way to each and every country, trying to find what is hidden behind what is seen and how, I think, they try to deceive us foreigners. I must admit: It was up until visiting South Korea that I did not think of sharing these experiences, because of which not only Hidden Korea was the main book, and which takes the most space here, but also that I, sadly and regrettably, do not have enough visual evidence with and about many of these countries.
This book has three chapters. In the first chapter, I reveal the hidden Korea to the world, maybe risking my life if not only becoming persona non grata. In the second chapter, I share hidden stuff from the other countries from the map above. In the last chapter, I change personality and become a (more) proper sociologist and political scientist, and share, this time with less visual evidence, what I saw where. I will discuss religion, food, potential political future, and everyday life, the much of those I could observe and experience. I will leave little to no room to the experiences of the others as well as researches and informatics and such, simply because this is my book and these are my experiences.
Now I wear my proper sociologist and political scientist hat: My two primary academic interests are sociology of religion and democracy. With the former, I am more interested in finding how far can human mind go in its quest to give a meaning to itself. Don’t worry, I might be a social so-called scientist but am not your everyday social scientist and you may actually grab a thing or two from me. With the latter, I spent more than half of my 40 years life officially studying it, practically every aspect of it, and outside the traditional academy boundaries. Hearing “I have no further counter-arguments but I still do not agree with you” has been my highest level, and it will be for you to decide if I am right or wrong with my arguments. Again, do not worry, I won’t drag you into meaningless discussions but I will have to throw at you some basic stuff to make my cases clearer.
I really hope that you will not regret reading this book, and I really hope that once you are done with it, you will have some smile on your face, and more stuff to discuss with whoever that might be. Happy reading!
