Believe it or not!

The weather has turned really hot now.

Yesterday was a terrible 41degrees and I was wilting, standing in the hot sun, outside the Turkish consulate, when this old gentleman walked up to me, and, asked, in his broken English, if I would like to sit in his air conditioned car instead of the sun.

My first instinct was to whack him or respond with a really rude, biting retort, when he suddenly said oh! and put up his hands in mock horror and started nattering in Arabic with his hands gesturing his conversation.

I think, my look of complete puzzlement, stopped him short, or we would have continued this one way conversation for a significant amount of time. We stood eyeing each other for a while, me glaring, and, he looking most hapless (Oh, oh! Shouldn't I be the one looking hapless, I thought? The man was trying to proposition me!). I had heard so many stories about men harrassing women here, that I was ready to chop the man down if he moved as much as a foot - he was an old man, I could take him any time!

After much shaking of his head, and, wringing of his hands, in his broken English, he explained that his wife, and, daughter were also in the car, I was like his daughter, he meant me no harm, and that I would be ok, mesh mushkil...

Just then, the Turkisk Consulate door opened, and, they called me in.

I am very intrigued. I shall never know whether the man was genuinely trying to help, or would I have got into trouble if I had taken up the guy's offer.

I'd like to beileve the former, and, in the fact that there are still good people around.