Selcuk - Murat and His Shop

Kati and Me with Murat at His Shop

Throughout our travels, we have met people that really go above and beyond being helpful and really make our experience in a given place amazing.  Murat was one of those people.  We stumbled by his shop our first night in Selcuk and, admittedly, quickly became his favorite customers.  He was one of the best--meaning honest and fair--salesmen we've run into in Turkey.  (Don't worry, we had several outside confirmations to say that he was the best in the area)  It definitely paid off with us because we bought an absurd amount of stuff from him over the course of our stay.

He was great.  Every time we walked past his store he would invite us to sit down and have some tea with him.  In fact, it was one time when we sat down to have tea with him and a friend that his friend suggested we look for bed bugs.  And when we abandoned our first hotel in the middle of the night in search of a new place, Murat told us where to go and, once I told him why we were moving, he enlisted one of his friends to carry our  bags to the new hotel and make sure we got there fine.  The next day he even went out of his way to make sure we were happy with the new place and that they gave us a good price.  Murat really made what could have been a completely miserable experience in Selcuk into a very enjoyable one.  Plus now we have all sorts of cool Turkish stuff!