The flying Dutchman, the desolate and the desperate - gulfnews.com
He has a handy gig going five days — or nights, because he’s hard to pin down — a week running the reception desk of this Turkish art deco hotel that has definitely seen better days. But Samir has had better days since he moved here from Jordan a year ago. He may not be the fastest when it comes to getting your passport scanned, but he’s far from slow when it comes to the Syrians staying in the hotel. What ever you want he can fix, and it likely explains why it appears he’s always in an intense conversation on his white ear buds plugged into an iPhone 6 and if you talk to him in person, you’re interrupting a business deal of great importance. “Sure, there’s five Syrian families here. Two families are moving out tonight,” Samir offers with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, say no more look that says everything that Gulf News needs to know. They’re not moving back to Damascus or Aleppo, are they. “They’re moving on. ”. On. “Walahi,” he says. It’s from here that 50,000 other migrants have moved on, as in on to the Greek island of Kos. There, the migrants are in Europe, as in the European Union. Here, in Bodrum, while it’s geographically Europe because you’re on the western side of the River Bosporous, it doesn’t count. All of the migrants here are as close as you can get to the promised land of Europe — you can even see the mountainous cliffs of Kos rise up to the west just seven kilometres away. “Go to the bus station,” Samir says, surreptitiously sliding over a phone number on a yellow sticky note. Source: gulfnews.com
