The minibus to Gündoğan

 It was a hot August morning.

The minibus was turning sharp curves of the narrow winding road like a raging bull. 

Giant cacti and bougainvillea were sprawling on hills where white houses with blue frames were scattered. 

In the minibus, retirees, tourists, and kids were travelling from their houses to downtown Gündoğan. 

The driver was a soft spoken man with blue eyes. 

Occasionally he had to press a button to reset the ticket reader mounted on a pole next to the passenger door. 

Commuters who had blue plastic cards held them against the machine, but sometimes it malfunctioned, forcing the driver reset it. 

To the driver’s and passengers’ dismay, resetting the reader took long time, with an animated hourglass appearing on the screen, creating anxiety among passengers entering the bus. 

Almost everyone had an opinion about the ticket reader. 

“It’s not reading, can you reset it again?” cried one woman, her voice muffled by a face mask, holding a large beach bag on her shoulder. 

“Is there anything we (Turks) do that works?” protested another one. 

The minibus took a left turn and entered a straight street shaded by tall needle pine trees. After a minute’s drive it entered the terminal area where it stopped. 

Passengers raced to get out, almost toppled out of the minibus, took their face masks off in relief as if surfacing from a deep sea dive.