they don't show you this on youtube.

i had an about hour to kill after visiting the church of saint nicholas in demre last week, before i had to catch the bus to tekirova via finike. i wandered up the street keeping my back to the bus station and found a park that caught my eye for having an as-yet-uncorroded bronze statue that i decided to go check out. then i noticed that the tile patterns in the park's sidewalk were interesting in their own right and sat down on a bench to copy some of them into my notebook.

up to me comes this kid with a monkey face and he starts making monkey faces at me and running around me and saying things. he was maybe five and had his shirt tucked into his pants. and then a girl of maybe six came over, and another girl of maybe seven, and they stood there, and the younger of them said:

"where are you from?"

"canada," i said.

she stood there and kind of shifted her weight from one foot to the other, bouncing her head side to side with it, and the monkey kid kind of danced around, and a few more kids drew near. and as the two girls talked to me i could see kids in the playground start drifting over.

the smaller girl reached up to me with a sesame seed in her fingers, twisting back and forth on her feet. i took the seed from her, still in its shell. knowing what i was doing i put the whole thing in my molars and crunched it and swallowed it. she and her friend squealed, causing more kids still to gather and chatter in turkish. and the girl stuck her chin out with a sesame seed crosswide in her teeth to show me that you had to bite the shell away first, then you spit the rest of the shell away, pta.

"it's perfectly good cellulose," i explained.

"where are you from?" said one of the boys.

and the girl kept handing me seeds and i'd eat the whole thing and then some of them started handing me just chewed-open seeds, damp.

and all this caught the attention of the older boys on the basketball court and they started to come over too. the one that carried the basketball as they started to come over was fifteen, maybe sixteen, into puberty at any rate, and caught my gaze with his and i panicked. nowadays you don't just have to worry about being swarmed: they record it on cell phone cameras and post it to youtube.

"where are you from?"

so i told them and told them and one of them said, "football?" and i said, "no, hockey," and they started listing soccer players one by one and asking me if i'd heard of them, which generally i hadn't.

"paris hilton?" said one from the back.

"oh yes," i said, "paris hilton."

they wanted to know: how old? married? children? fenerbache?

and all the while the monkey kid kept dancing around and poking at me until finally i grabbed him by his belt end and everyone else laughed and the kid pulled back and i pulled until his belt buckle broke and he fell flat on his can, and everyone else laughed more, and monkey boy got up and picked up his belt, shouted some rude-sounding things and gave me the finger and left.

but he didn't leave all the way: he just stood off at a distance and circled and kept looking and me and gesturing. i kept trying to coax him back and finally another kid chased him down and brought me the belt and i tried to fix it: it was fixable, you just needed pliers to do it. monkey boy's dad would be able to do it. i gave the belt back. i said i was sorry. soon monkey boy was patting me on the shoulder, no harm done. his pants had an elastic waist anyways.

the older kids showed me their english books and pointed to the questions they'd been assigned that day. and they asked me what i'd been drawing and so i showed them and they started trying to read the pages, and one of them came across a sentence describing the statue of mustafa kemal attaturk and one of them pointed excitedly and said, "mustafa kemal!" and asked me if i knew about him.

"cumhuriye," i said, which means republic and which strangely is one of perhaps 50 turkish words i know, and they liked that.

they asked where i was staying i showed them the stuck-on olive oil labels on the front of my notebook -- "Laleli: Burhaniye, Balekisir." and they asked where was i going tonight and i told them i was catching a bus to Finike, and they discussed, and next thing i knew it was decided that they were going to walk me to the bus station and soon.

so we set off towards the bus station and one kid of maybe thirteen kept tugging at my sleeve and saying, "time, this way," and he kept tugging at me when i would stop to write bits of poetry in the others' school textbooks. the bus station was about five minutes away. it was dark by this time and only the older boys were left. when we arrived the oldest talked to the owner of a nearby candy stand and procured for me a chocolate wafer bar, which he handed to me after pulling open its wrapper.

"turkish," he said.

then a bus arrived and the boy who'd tugged at my sleeve pointed to it and read for me: "fi-ni-ke." i hustled to give about three of them my email address and one of them took a picture of us all with his cell phone camera, and each one of them shook my hand and i stooped to let them kiss me on both cheeks. i got on the bus.

the same kid as before yelled at the window: "paris hilton! paris hilton!"

the bus pulled away and the kids all waved from outside, as the people on the bus looked at me and out the window at this gaggle of turkish schoolchildren in school uniforms. then to finike down the long black road. when two buses pass each other here on the highway they flash their lights and honk their horns.