The story behind this aisle exit seat

Look at that luxurious leg room!

I am just over 6’1, with most of my height in my legs. As a result, most airline seats, particularly on budget airlines, are a tight squeeze for me. For reasons not entirely known to me (I have a few theories that center around the fact that I’m a white man) airline employees have been kind to me on this trip. I’ve gotten free exit row seat on three flights, from Amritsar, India to New Delhi and from Almaty, Kazakhstan and Tashkent, Uzbekistan and back. Exit row seats made me vastly more comfortable on these short flights. I also got an exit seat on a longer flight, from Istanbul, Turkey to Lyon, France. On this flight though, I know exactly how I got my extra leg room. It’s a bit of a rambling story, the type of thing that I think only happens at that point in traveling when you feel comfortable meeting strangers (though not complete strangers) in foreign lands.

The story of this exit row seat begins with my cousin Monica. She lives in Oakland, California and worked for a few years at a well known restaurant in Berkeley where she met Daniel who lived for a year in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I’ve never met Daniel but when I was in Almaty he connected me with a few of his friends. I ended up getting dinner with one friend, Aysa. After dinner we went to a hipster patio bar where some of her other friends were meeting for a going away party for Tolgene, who was moving to Berlin the next day. Aysa’s friends, like most of the people I met in Central Asia, were friendly and interesting. One of these friends was a guy named Yeremuk who had a friend in Istanbul that he said I should meet while there. So this could happen, Yeremuk and I connected on Facebook.

The next day I got to the Almaty airport at the crack of dawn. While waiting in line for passport control I saw Tolgene, Aysa’s friend moving to Germany. It turns that not only were we on the same Pegasus Airlines flight to Istanbul but his window seat was right next to my middle seat! Random coincidence #1. About an hour into what was aiming to be a pleasant if cramped flight, a crewmember calls out over the loudspeaker “is there a doctor on board” in several different languages. An hour later, now two hours into a five hour trip, the plane starts to lose altitude and a canned announcement comes on in English and Turkish, but not Russian, the language most likely to be spoken by Kazakh passengers, telling us to buckle our seat belts and prepare for landing as we will soon be on the ground. I guess those doctors weren’t as helpful as they needed to be…

Aktobe, Kazakhstan. Never thought I would know where this city was...

When we landed I determined with the help of my phone that we were in Aktobe, Kazakhstan, a city not far from the Russian border, proud owner of an airport with two jet bridges. I ran up data charges as we sat on the ground for almost three hours. It was pretty much what you would expect for an emergency landing except there very little information about what was going on. We did see an ambulance on the runway and a family deplane. Next the cabin crew had to match each piece of luggage in the overhead with its owner. They did tell us we had to refuel which seemed like it took a lot longer than it needed to. By the time we arrived in Istanbul I didn’t care how late we were, I was just happy to be able to stand up and stretch. As we left the bus to the terminal (it was a European budget airline after all) I said goodbye to Tolgene and wished him good luck in Berlin. I cleared immigration, got on another bus to the city and then into a taxi who took me to my hostel and royally ripped me off using a combination of a fake meter and sleight of hand with the money I gave him. I was pissed but not enough to fight him for it so I kicked the door on my way out. I was back in the real world after two months in Central Asia.

After a nap and a bit of a recovery I messaged Yermek to see if his friend was willing to meet up with me. As a solo traveler I can get lonely spending long periods of time by myself and have found that meeting locals in the places I am visiting is a great way to experience a city in a way that most tourists don’t get to do. Yermek gave me his friend’s name, Bekir, and his number. Immediately Bekir invited me to join his friends to join their Saturday night festivities: dinner, drinking raki (a Turkish alcohol a lot like Ouzo), and live music with dancing.

Getting to the restaurant to meet Bekir was a bit of an adventure; I had to go back to Istanbul’s Asian side and I took a few Google Maps aided detours along the way, but when I finally made it Bekir, as is the Turkish custom, was a fantastic host. He ordered some local cuisine for me, got me a glass of raki with water and some kind of salty root juice, and made sure I understood how to drink these things in a way to prevent getting a hangover. Soon the band started playing and people made their way to their feet dancing their hearts out to traditional Turkish music.

The dance party

When the band took breaks or my hosts wanted to go outside to smoke I talked to Bekir and his friends about life in Istanbul. Eventually the topic of their jobs came up. It turns out that this evening came about in celebration of one friend who was moving to Sweden with a Visa but no job. He, and Bekir and one other friend there, all currently worked for Pegasus Airlines. Coincidence #2! I was starting to think the universe was sending me a sign that I was meant to spend a good good deal of my future time or money with a certain Turkish budget airline. To top this all off, the friend moving to Sweden had been the one to approve the refueling of my flight in Aktobe. Coincidence #3! It turns out my inclination that the refueling had taken too long had been correct, since Aktobe is not a Pegasus destination he had to go through a few extra steps to get us our fuel. We toasted to this bizarre series of events and then continued to talk and dance. I am pretty sure I talked about how Trump lost the popular vote but still managed to win the election and they definitely talked about how Erdogan was ruining Turkey.

At the end of the night, I reluctantly got into another Istanbul taxi. As I said my goodbyes Bekir told me to send him the flight information for my Pegasus flight leaving Istanbul. As long as he did not have to catch a flight to Germany he said we could meet for coffee at the airport. He also said he would be able to get me an exit row seat for that flight. A few days later as I boarded my flight to Lyon with a venti Starbucks coffee in my hand (the first Starbucks that wasn’t a Via I’ve had since leaving the United States by the way) I stepped into my seat with the luxurious amounts of legroom and thought about the random series of events that had brought me to this moment. I realized this is the kind of thing that only happens when you travel and probably wouldn’t have happened to me if I were traveling with someone else.