It was a foggy, rainy night when the Moscow-Istanbul flight landed at the Atatürk International Airport (I had had to choose the Yerevan-Moscow-Istanbul route in order to get to a seminar I was going to attend on time). For the first time in my life as I entered a foreign country, my heart filled with irrational fear.

I didn’t know what lay ahead - who the Turks were, what adventures I was going to have in the coming seven days.  I thought, maybe this really was a stupid decision, but I had to admit that it was already too late. Resolution 106 submitted to the US House of Representatives was not a problem for me but for my parents, relatives and friends, who were worried about my safety. At first they laughed off the news of my decision to attend the seminar, and then they tried to talk me out of it. It didn’t work.         

Representatives from six countries - Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Morocco, Estonia and Finland - were to attend an international seminar entitled Accept Me as I Am organized by the Turkish NGO GENÇTUR with the assistance of the European Union. The main topic of discussion was to be discrimination in its various manifestations - from racial, religious and social to gender, ethnic and other kinds of discrimination. I was really interested in both the topic and the seminar but I also had another serious reason for going to Turkey - I wanted to get into a country, especially under these “dangerous” circumstances, that had been closed to me not because of the closed borders and the absence of diplomatic relations with Armenia, but because of some other psychological barrier. I wanted to discover for myself Turkey and contemporary Turks with the help of this symbolically dangerous situation.         
    
Before my departure, in order to set my parents at ease, I even wrote a letter to the seminar organizers asking them for assurances that I would not be threatened. Their response went like this: “The US Congress is unable to disrupt the centuries-old friendship between our countries.” They even promised that one of the volunteers would meet me at the airport and accommodate me in his home for the night before going to the seminar site. I had to persuade my parents for another few days and promise them that I would not spend the night at the house of a strange young Turkish man. But it was in vain… his very name contained a threat - Osman.    
    
I got off the plane and found myself in an airport, every wall of which reminded you that it was named after the great Atatürk. Among the group of people welcoming visitors I saw a young man holding a sign with my name on it. It was Osman.

In the parking lot Osman suddenly noticed that he didn’t have his car key and asked me to wait there while he went back to the airport area of the airport. Doubts immediately began to cloud my mind- this was starting to look dangerous, perhaps he had something else in mind, why should somebody leave his keys in the waiting area? But I had no other choice but to wait for Osman. 

When we got to his home, father greeted us half-asleep and went back to bed. Osman’s mother had gone to bed earlier; she had made up a bed for her son on the floor, in order to provide their guest from Armenia with the comfortable bed. I found this display of hospitality to be too much and my doubts grew. However my weariness was stronger and I fell asleep, forgetting my parents’ warnings. A week full of unforgettable impressions on the soil of our “closed” neighbor lay ahead.

Seda Papoyan