Part Two: Ze Chermans

"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!"

Now I was staggering out of the park, my leg covered in blood, shaking wildly from shock and adrenaline, with my pants essentially shredded all the way up my leg, to the point where I later realized I was basically mooning all of Turkey when I took my coat off. (At least I wasn't wearing particularly scandalous boxers.) Oh, and did I mention I had no way of contacting my mother, or indeed anyone else? Also, I didn't know anything about hospitals in Istanbul, except that Anadolu, where my mother was speaking, was in Asia, about an hour and a half outside the city. (I didn't even know its full name, Anadolu Sağlık Merkezi; there's also an Anadolu Hastanesi, no relation.) This is the stuff adventures are made of!

The man who saved my day from utmost misery just happened to be another foreigner having a nice walk in Maçka Park that fine day. At least, I assume he was a foreigner—he spoke near-native English, which few Turks do because misguided nationalism in the education system makes it almost as tricky for them to learn a foreign language as it is for Americans. At the time, I assumed he was a German, because of the advice he gave me, but that, of course, might not have had anything to do with it. The advice—the best I've gotten in a long time—was this: "Take a taxi to the German Hospital—Alman Hastanesi." Dork that I am, at the time I actually thought, "how interesting, the Turks have clearly taken their exonym for 'Germany' from the same source as French 'Allemagne' and Spanish 'Alemania'." (Seriously, I thought that.)

If I hadn't had this advice, I would have just told the taxi driver "hospital", and do you know what would have happened then? Well, for starters, the driver might not even know the word—the only English phrases Istanbul's taxi drivers can reliably be expected to know are "Where you from?", "Istanbul, traffic problem!"1, and "You have girlfriend?"—though presumably the mass of blood and ripped pants would have gotten the idea across. The most likely result would be a trip to one of the state hospitals, which will be the subject of Part Three. Let me just say this: visiting an emergency room in one of Turkey's public hospitals brings the phrase "developing nation" a whole new level of meaning.

A selection of taksis. Despite my first impressions, not all are evil!

I know for a fact that the driver wouldn't have taken me to Alman Hastanesi if I weren't stubbornly insisting on it, because he didn't actually know where it was. He had to stop and ask for directions. Repeatedly. Me, I was just sitting in the back on what felt like an enormously long voyage—my sense of time was still borked as I came down off the adrenaline spike—and pondering the fact that here I was, in a Turkish taxi, one day after swearing them off for life after being robbed blind by a good thirty lira at least2. (I decided to just play along with God's sense of humor on that one—He's bigger than me.) This driver, however, didn't rob me blind, nor even rob me sighted. In fact, when we finally got to Alman Hastanesi, the meter read 5.10 YTL, and he gave me fifteen lira change for a twenty. Can you imagine an American taxi driver just ignoring seven and a half cents? Turkish taxi drivers, unlike Americans, don't expect much in the way of tips—the customary solution, as I understand, is just to round up—but I wasn't going to let a crooked taxi driver get 35 lira or more off of me over the fare, while tipping a straight one -10 kuruş. Granted, insisting on taking only five lira back in change—a 200% tip—was probably overkill. But dammit, he was a Good Driver, even if he didn't have a clue where he was going, and had restored my faith in an entire industry, and I'd been bleeding in the poor man's cab, and also I wasn't really thinking entirely straight, but the important thing was that overtipping him felt good. Feeling good was at a premium at that point in the day.

Mind you, I regretted it slightly when I realized I now had in my pocket five lira (~$3.75) and about thirty dollars US, and that I was standing outside the emergency room of a private expat hospital. I knew what I needed:

• to have the wound cleansed and dressed
• possibly to have it stitched up
• a rabies vaccination
• a tetanus vaccination
• possibly antibiotics

In other words, not a short list, and I didn't know if Turkish private hospitals, like American hospitals, are bound by anything more than mere "ethics" to help everyone who comes to the ER, regardless of their ability to pay. If I'd had access to my mother and her connections (which, as Part Four will document, are pretty damn impressive) I wouldn't have worried—but I didn't. I worried.

Still, I hobbled towards the arrows that said "Notaufnahme/Acil/Emergency", knowing that at least one of those words applied to me. ("Acil", pronounced not unlike "agile", certainly didn't, and I was hoping Nosferatu wouldn't get involved.) I walked in and went over to the receptionist, who didn't speak English but did understand my body language, if you will ("hello, I am bleeding on your floor"). Within a heartbeat, I was in a private room, surrounded by a bevy of nurses. By the end of the second heartbeat, a doctor who spoke decent English had arrived. Maybe six or seven heartbeats after that, he'd dressed the wound—stitches were impractical, because of the nature of the wound(s)—had given me a prescription for antibiotics and told me how to go about getting a rabies shot. And then the bill... conspicuous only in its absence. Despite the fact that I was a (formerly) well-dressed American, clearly well enough off, and that I'd never mentioned that I was underweight in the pocket region, they didn't charge me. I can't imagine that you could get that kind of service for that kind of price at any American hospital (though I'm obviously a Hopkins loyalist, I know its limitations!), except maybe a very small place, not corporation-affiliated, in an isolated and poor rural community... but not in a city of 15+ million. It was astonishing.

However, there's only one hospital in Istanbul that does rabies vaccinations, and it wasn't Alman. My next stop would be Sağlık Bakanlığı Şişli Hastanesi, a very, very, very, very different hospital indeed.