The entire teahouse was drenched in warm sunlight.  Early morning shadows were cast about the room, falling off tables and climbing walls, making intricate patterns over people’s faces.  The room was full of men as well, Kurdish men who could not help but exude manliness.  They read newspapers, fingered their moustaches, took long draws on their cigarettes.  They also devoted some time to staring into me, a solitary Westerner writing his notes.

Between sips of tea I stared back, my eyes squinting in the bright light and not at all inclined to blink.  Perhaps I stared because, with a scraggly two-month-old beard sprouting from my face, I too was feeling manly.  Or maybe I stared because here in southeastern Turkey staring just seemed to be the thing to do.  Whatever the reason, the room was thick with sunlight and stares.

Many Kurds reminded me of Joseph Stalin in appearance.  Stalin, by the way, grew up a few hundred miles to the northeast of Diyarbakir, in what is now the country of Georgia.

After some minutes I offered a slight nod.  And in slow-motion unison they nodded in return, not once breaking their piercing gaze.

The teahouse in which I now sat was in Diyarbakir, a city situated on the banks of the Tigris River and home to hundreds of thousands of Kurds.  But in three weeks I would leave all this behind and return to the United States, finally completing what had so far been a thirteen-month-long journey across Asia.  Along the way I had grown accustomed to different foods and to different languages.  I had grown accustomed to stares, to uncomfortable beds, and to the unknown.  I had grown accustomed to feeling rugged.

But I had grown accustomed to something else as well—something much more valuable than ruggedness, something that often left me humbled.  You could call it the hospitality of locals toward a stranger.  Or, I suppose, you could simply call it hospitality.

The hospitality had come in a thousand ways.  It had come, for example, in the form of a Chinese man offering me a cup of green tea as our train sped through the countryside at dawn.  It had come in the form of a Malay university professor pouring me a cup of Cameron Highlands tea in his apartment in Kuala Lumpur.  It had come in the form of a fellow passenger in Pakistan who, before even telling me his name, handed me a cup of milk tea at a bus stop.  And now that I was in southeastern Turkey, exchanging a strong and silent gaze with Kurdish patrons of a teahouse, it was about to come to me again.

Myself. You'll note that the Stalin-looking gentleman in the background is about to enter a car.  I suspect he is the culprit (see paragraph below).

With my cup finished and my schedule demanding that I begin to leave the cozy confines of the teahouse, I drifted through the haze of a dozen men’s cigarette smoke and stepped up to the counter to pay my tab.  But the man behind the counter smiled and shook his head no, refusing to take my money.  Someone else—one of the men with whom I had exchanged stares, someone whom I would never know because he had already left—had already paid the bill.

Diyarbakir's old city dates to before the time of Christ.

NOTE: This story originally appeared in Chicken Soup for the Tea Lover's Soul (HCI, 2007)

Joel Carillet, chief editor of Wandering Educators,  is a freelance writer and photographer based in Tennessee. He is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia. To learn more about him, follow his weekly photoblog, or purchase prints, visit www.joelcarillet.com.