Throughout life we all encounter moments that make us smile, chuckle, or — at the very least — question our life choices. These little absurdities are the raw material of the best stories, the ones where we nod along thinking, “Yeah… that happened to me once.”
A few years ago, my brother-in-law Joe and I were road-tripping across Turkey — chasing ancient ruins, surviving mountaintop blizzards, and getting our broken-down rental car pushed to military checkpoints by cheerful truckers. No matter how remote the spot or how dire the situation, the people we met were invariably curious, kind, and eager to share tea, stories, or a push-start.
One late afternoon we were racing the sunset to reach some prehistoric rock carvings. Twilight was closing in fast, so we asked a pair of Belgian hikers coming the other way if we were on the right track. “Just around the corner,” they said. Perfect.
We pulled into the empty parking lot, jumped out, and spent the last usable light marveling at the mysterious millennia-old etchings. Simple shapes, yet somehow still baffling to modern minds. We snapped a few grainy photos in the gloom and headed back to the car—only to find a very enthusiastic, tail-wagging dog circling it like he’d been waiting for us all day.
He had a collar and looked well-fed, clearly someone’s local pet who’d learned that parking lots = tourists = snacks. We didn’t have much in the way of proper food, but we did have one very large, very cursed cardboard box in the back seat.
Earlier that day we’d stopped for gas and spotted a tempting display of Turkish delight in the shop window. It looked exotic, smelled promising, and was dirt cheap. “Big box, lasts us days,” we thought. Famous last words.
The first bite was a crime against confectionery. It tasted like someone had melted down a tire, mixed in rosewater and regret, then dusted it with powdered sugar for plausible deniability.
The aftertaste veered hard into industrial cleaner territory. Diesel would have been an upgrade. We suffered through one piece each, declared it unfit for human consumption, and exiled the rest to the trunk with plans to dispose of it at the earliest opportunity.
Fast-forward to the carvings parking lot. On my way to yeet the box into a bin, I spotted the dog. Curiosity got the better of me: would even a dog eat this garbage? I tossed him a chunk.
He leapt, snatched it mid-air like a pro outfielder, and devoured it with obvious delight. Then he looked at me with pure, pleading Labrador eyes: more.
Joe and I exchanged glances, shrugged, and spent the next ten minutes running a full-contact game of Turkish-delight fetch. The dog was acrobatic — leaping, spinning, skidding, chasing every sad, gelatinous cube like it was prime rib. We laughed until our sides hurt, amazed that something we couldn’t choke down was apparently canine Michelin-star cuisine.
Eventually the box ran dry. We gave the dog a final pat, said goodbye, and drove off to find our hostel for the night.
Later, in the common room, we bumped into the same Belgian couple from earlier. Beers were opened, travel tales swapped, the usual backpacker bonding. I mentioned the friendly dog at the carvings and how we’d spent ages throwing him our awful Turkish delight.
The Belgians lit up. “Oh, we met that dog too!” one said. “Super friendly. We fed him a bunch of snacks we didn’t need anymore.”
I grinned. “Yeah? What’d you give him?”
They exchanged a look, then one of them answered casually:
“A very large bag of prunes.”
……
The room went quiet for a second. Then it hit us all at once.
Somewhere in rural Turkey, a very happy dog had spent the afternoon mainlining industrial-grade Turkish delight followed by an industrial-grade laxative chaser. I still wonder to this day — did he survive the night? And more importantly… did his poor owner ever get the carpet clean again?
Moral of the story: never trust a dog’s taste in snacks. And maybe don’t feed random strays your unwanted groceries.