Oops.

In which meal options take a turn for the tubular.

In my general and endearing absentmindedness, I managed today to forget to go to lunch. It happens. (When I was with Third Host Family, on occasions that both parents had to work late, I frequently forgot to eat dinner). So I went down to the kantin at 2:40 to find some grub, hopefully my standard lite tost and ayran.

What I found - all that was left to find - was a chilly sosis (hot dog) and a package of Tutku cookies.

That'll teach me to forget about lunch.

CAKE

Last night, two cakes were baked. Well. Improvised. As tends to happen with my forays into the kitchen.

The first was supposed to be an apple-pear cake, but a dearth of pears turned it into an apple-apple cake. I've made it before (with pears) and love it - it's a light, simple pastry easily adapted to fit any fruit (or vegetable, one supposes) on hand. I can't wait until strawberries and peaches are in season. Mmm. The recipe is from Bread and Honey.

Apple-Pear Cake

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) + 1 tbsp. butter
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1 medium apple
• 1 medium pear
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Melt butter in small saucepan or in microwave. Grease nonstick 8-inch round cake pan (not springform [ed. note - springform is fine]) with butter.
2. Combine flour, baking powder, salt in small mixing bowl. Wash, peel, and core fruit. Cut into eights and arrange in bottom of pan.
3. In medium mixing bowl, whisk sugar with eggs until fluffy. Add flour mixture and whisk until combined. Add melted butter. Whisk until blended. Pour evenly and bake for 35-40 minutes, until top is set and golden brown [ed. note - emphasis on the brown].

The second was concieved as I was taking the first out of the oven and midway through the holding-a-hot-pan limbo to the cooling rack, when Kaaan came into the kitchen and asked if he could help...with the cake that had, moments before, finished baking.

So we made another one!

The recipe was for a lemon cake pulled from Under the Tuscan Sun, but a general lack of lemons threatened to put a kibosh on that plan...so between an orange we found in the crisper and half a lemon in a belljar in the cheese drawer, we improvised and made a citrus cake instead. The recipe called for buttermilk, which isn't available here, but we checked the Internet and came up with a substition: one and half tablespoons of lemon juice added to one cup of warm milk = one cup of buttermilk (last time I made this, I just substituted one cup of plain yogurt, resulting something rather like cheesecake).

Lemon [or other available citrus fruit] Cake

• 1 cup sweet butter
• 2 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 3 cups flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 3 tblsp. lemon juice [ed. note - or orange juice]
• zest of one lemon [ed. note - or orange - the half lemon we juiced for the buttermilk substituion was too emaciated to zest]

1. Cream together butter and sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time [ed. note - if you're forgetful and add them all at once, the finished product is not ruined].
2. Mix together flour, baking powder, and salt. Incorporate with butter mixture alternately with buttermilk. Begin and end with flour mixture.
3. Add lemon zest and juice.
4. Bake in tube pan [ed. note - or whatever] at 300 F for 50 minutes. Test for doneness with a toothpick.

And of course there's a glaze you're supposed to do, but we didn't have an confectioner's sugar, so never mind that.

Easter, Etc.

Firstly, you all should amble on over to Maeghan's Easter post, which features lovely tulip pictures (which - ahem - I took with her camera because mine is still out of commission). Also, the word "tons" spelled "tonnes," which always makes me laugh.

The weekend was uneventful. On Saturday, Maeghan and I trekked to Bakırköy and window-shopped. Sunday, I spent the day with Third Host Family, which was fabulous. I got there at noon, just in time for breakfast - when I lived there, no one stirred before 11:30 on a Sunday; it's nice to see things stay the same - and visited friends of theirs. Then to a bazaar for vegetables (carrots and lettuce and eggplant and cucumber and strawberries and pears, oh my!) and a brief stop at the best baklava/ciğ köfte place in the world ever. No exaggeration. Then back to the house to make mondo salads and soup and about eight different desserts (sweet tooths? Us? Nah) and Flight of the Conchords on CNBC-e.

No eggs were involved, but it was a very good Easter.

Kindness of Strangers (part - wow - III)

So I posted last night about the saintly neighbor woman who brought over salad and fish for dinner last night, yes?

Well, today, she brought over this:



The Turkish name is - and forgive my spelling - aşure, or wheat pudding. It's the dish that Noah and his family, according to legend first ate after emerging from the Ark (remember how I talked about the Koran and Old Testament being fundamentally the same? I wasn't kidding). It's a wheat base, with beans and fruit cooked in. Hardcore applesauce meets fruit cocktail. As I understand it, cooking is rather labor-intensive, as every ingredient must be cooked separately before they are combined the end. The one the neighbor brought over was liberally topped with cinnamon, walnuts, and pine nuts.

Legend says that because Noah ate the dish in celebration of the convenant with God, it's a dish of thanksgiving. And yes, I am giving thanks.

I just put a lemon cake in the oven. It's officially hers.

Kindness of Strangers (part II)

My host family is out of town this weekend, so I am, of course, partying it up - which in my case, seems to consist of sitting around in my pajamas, drinking too much Turkish coffee and watching Dr. Horrible on YouTube (through a proxy, natch). It's not terribly exciting.

So I was a bit surprised when the doorbell rang this evening and disrupted my short-term hermitude.

It was the neighbor from across the hall, whom I have spoken to perhaps once, and she came bearing this:



It was quite delicious.

Those little fish look a bit dubious - I believe they're fried anchovies - but they are very good. Just be careful - the little bones are pokey.



Next time I make cookies, she gets first dibs.

Bread Lines

There's something about waiting in line for food that brings out the worst in people. I am firmly convinced that the USSR would have lasted quite a bit longer if so many people hadn't spent so much time standing in cold, huddled lines to pick up their biweekly cabbage ration.

Just sayin'.

Anyway. Lunch at school works under the same principle. There are two venue options: the yemekhane, or the cantin. The yemekhane is buffet-style and features good hot food and free slices of bread. It also costs $150 TL/month - almost exactly $100 USD, which is half again as much as my entire monthly stipend, not that I've ever actually recieved my stipend - but that's another post. Suffice to say that the yemekhane is so far out of my monetary reach that you'd need binoculars to see it.

The cantin is the other option. It's essentially a wide and varied a la carte - you can buy sandwiches, burgers, soft drinks, tea, coffee, kofte (mystery meat on a bun), etc. Rather than the orderly buffet of the yemekhane, it's a wide window opening to a small kitchen with about four beleagured employees, tearing around and delivering food to a mass of hungry, squabbling humanity waving $5 TL notes. Seriously. At anyone time, between five and twenty people will be crammed into the window's opening, extending their arms piteously inward, shouting demands for hamburgers and cola - and that's not counting the other forty people crushing in around them. It's bedlam. It's horrible.

I am not, by nature, a pushy person. I can be mean, and I don't mind digging my heels (or claws) in - but only if someone else starts it. So I carefully make my way to the cantin window, and politely order my tost (and juice, if I'm feeling indulgent). I smile. I say please and thank you. If I've been waiting a while, the cantin employees will ignore pushier customers and ask me what I want - although I've been ordering tost long enough that they usually know what I'm going to say. And I find myself now being routinely undercharged. The employees ask me how my day's going. It's a highly pleasant interaction in the midddle of a small riot.

I never bought my lunch in high school in the US - a habit dating back to junior high, when I couldn't reach the trays in the buffet line and started bringing sandwiches from home out of necessity. In high school, I typically brought an apple and some peanut butter. A granola bar, if I was feeling hungry. And that was that. Occasionally a friend and I would traipse down to the cafeteria if strawberries were in season, and we'd spring for cookies if it'd been a rough day (roughly all of spring semester of senior year). But we were hardly common patrons of the school kitchens. I don't remember the sort of craziness in the cafeteria there. I never paid enough attention. I can't remember if I ever said thank you to any of the cashiers.

I hope I did.

Mundanity! (Part I in a series!)

Breakfast this morning:

• one (1) kiwi, sliced and peeled. Usually I eat them with the skin on - to the amusement of my host family, who were slightly (but nicely) horrified when I reassured them that it was only a little like eating a mouse;
  
• one (1) chunk of beyaz peynir, which is a crumbly soggy white cheese, a little like feta that never quite made it. It's an acquired taste. I didn't like it for a month or two after I got here; and
  
• one (1) thimble-sized cup of Turkish coffee

It was a good meal.

Lunch:

• one (1) tost - sort of grilled cheese, squashed into supermodel thinness by a Foreman-style grill. That's how you get grilled cheese here. It's pretty good. And I get "lite tost," because it's on whole-wheat bread. Yum.
• one (1) cup ayran - a yogurt-based drink made by combining water, plain yogurt, and salt. I didn't like it until Lela made it for lunch once, and I've been a fan ever since. There's something about food prepared with intent and affection that can make the most repulsive grub taste wonderful.*
• one (1) segment of a caramel chocolate bar.

Again: a good meal.

--

* Sorry, Dad: I love you to pieces, but all the love, affection, and bribery in the world will not prompt me to eat your pot roast. I'm sorry, but that's how it is.

Kurban Bayrami

Before I start this, you're going to have to dredge up something that doesn't get mentioned too often: that the Christian Old Testament, Jewish Torah, and Muslim Koran are all fundamentally the same words. Interpreted differently, to be sure, but there's more in common than there is different.

Anyway...you'll remember the story of Abraham and Isaac: that God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and that Abraham got pretty close to doing so before an angel swooped down and told him that no, a sheep would work just as well. Sunday School was generally pretty mute regarding the conversation around the dinner table in the tent that night, but I always imagined that Isaac at least got a new tricycle out of that ordeal.

In the Muslim world, there's a holiday to celebrate the event. In Arabic, it's "Eid al-Adha" or "عيد الأضحى," but in Turkish, it's the far more pronounceable (in my opinion) "Kurban Bayrami." Those who can afford to do so purchase a cow, goat, or sheep from one of the thousands of improvised stockyards set up around the city and slaughter it. One-third of the meat goes to the poor, one-third goes to family and friends, and one-third is kept to be consumed throughout the year.

I spent a twitchy week or so trying to delicately ask my family how, precisely, we were going to do this - were we just going to lead a goat into the back parking lot with a bread knife? Stranger things have happened - but as it eventually transpired, on Monday morning, the menfolk went to mosque and then took the cow to a ritual butcher to be, well, ritually butchered. There are prayers, and then the animal is slaughtered according to the halal method - by slicing the jugular (bloody as this sounds, research suggests that halal slaughter is far more humane to the animal than many other methods. Sorry, it was a rainy afternoon and I was poking around Wikipedia). Of course, things don't always go according to plan. Throughout the day, there were periodic commotions in the street below as escaped animals pranced through the streets. Most were quickly apprehended, but I understand that there are a few unclaimed goats wandering in some areas.

Now, a cow is not terribly cheap, all things considered, and most of my host dad's family lives in the same apartment complex, so the whole family pooled their money for the cow, and divided up the meat accordingly. Which is why I came home from wandering around Beşiktaş with a friend, walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and found roughly one-quarter of a cow laid on on the kitchen counter. In pieces. The kitchen windows were open, and it was really, really cold. For refrigerative purposes, apparently. My host family explained that the meat had to rest for a day or so (My host mom: "It has to sleep!") before it could be processed.



Anthony Bourdain: beat this.

Later that evening, the host family and I trooped upstairs to my host dad's parents' - my host grandparents' - apartment in order to "process" their meat.



Which mostly seemed to involve cutting it into small bits. I offered to help, and my host dad declined: "You will get your hands bloody!"



As a deterrant, it may have backfired. They don't know me that well yet. I kept pestering until someone finally handed me a knife.

We took periodic breaks from slicing and dicing to fry up bits of our sacrifice in olive oil and eat. You know how those kid-comes-of-age-on-farm books invariably contain a scene where the main character drinks fresh milk and reflects that this is probably the freshest milk s/he has ever tasted? Yeah, I got that, but with meat. I chewed and reflected on how the thing had only been mooing a few hours ago. It was good beef. We processed the fat similarly, and then the fat was fried in olive oil, too. And eaten.

You know, I'm not sure that it qualifies as heart-healthy if it's fat that you're frying in olive oil.

I took a break from the slicing and dicing to go hang out with a friend, and discovered when I arrived home that all of the meat had been cut into one-inch chunks and frozen. Not a steak remained. I nearly cried. I am a child of the midwest, after all, and that is not what you do with a good steak.



My host grandmother took a look at my face and handed me a plate of baklava.

A plate of baklava makes everything better.


-

In case you're so inclined, this article does quite a good job of explaining the roots of Kurban Bayrami; it's a short read and I really do suggest that you take a look.

-

This first picture came from my host grandparents' balcony (I had to step around raw meet to get to the window):


This was taken with a 15-second exposure out my bedroom window at about 1:30 AM local time.

Toast!

I made French toast tonight!

In part because there was a ton of bread leftover from the Thanksgiving feast, and in part because French toast just sounded good. Unfortunately, Host Mom gave me the green light to begin cooking before checking with Host Dad to see if he was hungry. He wasn't.

Carrying an egg in one hand and mixing bowl in the other, I stuck my head in his office door. "Pisiriyorum," I said. "I'm cooking. You better be hungry."

A little while later, Host Mom peered over my shoulder to get a look at the skillet. "Oh, I know what that is," she said. "But it is a breakfast food."

"Well, yeah," I said. "Except when it's for dinner."

(This sort of exchange happens frequently enough that it doesn't really perturb her too much anymore.)

And true, you can't get maple syrup in this country without paying an arm and a leg for it, so we had it with strawberry jam, and we had it in between the soup and the salad, which was kind of strange. And egg yolks are startlingly orange in this country (I shrieked the first time I cracked one), so it was hard to tell when the toast was finished cooking.

But my Host Dad, whose appetite had been lacking only twenty minutes before, mysteriously recovered enough of one to have seconds, so all in all I'd pronounce it a success.

On Thanksgiving

The exciting parts of yesterday started not to long after I'd dragged myself out of bed, pulled on my school uniform (no, I'm not posting pictures. Not yet, anyway), and was midway through making breakfast, coughing gently all the while. It was possibly this coughing that prompted my host mother to sleepily poke her head into the kitchen to inform me that I'd better go back to bed, as I'd been coughing badly in my sleep and she was taking me to the doctor this afternoon. I protested that it was just a head cold - admittedly a head cold that'd hung on for a week or so, and didn't seem to be getting any better. Host mother wasn't having any of that, put the milk back in the fridge and sent me back to bed.

Later that afternoon, she and Host Dad bundle me into the car (wearing two T-shirts, two sweaters, and a parka) and drive to (the inaptly named, as it turned out) Universal Hastanesi, or Universal Hospital. Where I present my insurance card to the triage secretary, who promptly hands it back, shaking her head. I point to the phone number on the card, indicating that she should to call that number. The insurance that Rotary exchange students are required to buy is taken everywhere. Nope, they won't call. Why? Because it's an international number. Yes, of course it's an international number, I'm an American exchange student and my insurance is from the US. This is "Universal Hospital," what do you mean you aren't authorized to make overseas calls? Look, it'll take two minutes, just call the number. Please? No.

I call my Rotary adviser. She talks to my host mom. My host mom barks in Turkish before digging out her cell phone to call a friend who works in Radiology. Radiology Friend and her supervisor come find us. They talk to the triage staff. They go and find the manager of the triage staff. Nope. No can do. Rotary advisor curses over the phone. "Your insurance is valid in Bangledesh, for heaven's sake," she says. "This is ridiculous. What if you were bleeding or something?"

"Yeah. I know."

Rotary advisor sighs. "Amy was in the hospital with dystentary earliler this year. Let me see what hospital she went to. They might be easier to deal with."

In September, Amy came down with a particuarly nasty local version of Montezuma's Revenge. I'm glad my sickness is nowhere near that serious. Host family and I spend the intervening minutes exchanging glares with the staff of Universal Hastenesi.

Rotary advisor calls back. "Amy was at Florence Nightengale Hastenesi. Mention her name when you give them the card so they can check their records. Good luck."

It's a short drive to Florence Nightengale, and once there, the process is remarkably fast. The insurence is no problem. Amy? Yes, they remember her. Copay? Deductible? No, of course not. Need to see an ENT? Certainly, he's right upstairs. Want to see what the inside of your nose looks like? We have a handy endoscope right here!

My host mom and I joke that, now that she's seen the inside of my nose, ears, and throat in close detail, we have no secrets anymore.

In the end, they diagnosed a common cold, advised rest and fluids, and wrote a prescription for some (delightfully fizzy!) cold medicine. Well, that was comparatively easy. Also, the guy working the Emergency Services desk was cute in a David Tennant kind of way, but without the skull. Fortunately.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company's current production of Hamlet.

Image courtesy of cerysromana.livejournal.com

From the hospital, we made our merry way to a local mall (this city has malls the way some cities have, oh, park benches. I've never heard of so many Swatch stores per square kilometer), where Host Mom and I stopped at a pharmacy to fill the prescription and from there swung by a Starbucks. Yeah, I know. Drop it. "Where's host dad?" I asked.

Host mom stirred her coffee. "Grocery shopping. Do you want a brownie?"

Yes, in retrospect, that was the best possible way to distract me. The brownie was good, too.

Once we got home, host parents hustled the groceries into the kitchen before shutting and locking the kitchen door.

Well. That was unexpected.

I tapped on the door. "Can I come in?"

My host mom opened the door a crack, grinning fit to be tied. "No. We are being sneaky!"

I started to clue in when the guests started arriving an hour or so later. There was probably a smell to give it away, too, except that I was so congested it was a miracle I was still breathing at all.

The roast turkey on the table, though, was a dead giveaway.





Same for the mound of mashed potatoes, the roasted vegetables piled around the turkey, the tureen of pumpkin soup - sweet honey mustard, they made pumpkin soup. My dad's specialty, which I'd mentioned in passing maybe a week and a half ago, and they remembered enough and cared enough to make it. And tracking down a turkey couldn't have been any easy feat, either. And there was pilav, and dolma, and carrot salad, and probably more that I'm forgetting. Sweet roast pumpkin with walnuts for desert with Earl Grey tea.



I'm not going to say that I cried, but I will admit to tearing up a little. The only thing missing was the Macy's parade on TV, and let's face it, there are only so many times you can watch a giant Snoopy balloon drift past buildings before it loses its thrall.


As at every Thanksgiving, I gave thanks. But I don't think I've ever meant it more.

Attack of the Killer Vegetables!

I think that Lela was amused, if not terribly surprised, when, having been sent to the corner market for bread and yogurt, I came back with bread, yogurt, the world’s largest cabbage, and a sheepish grin along the lines of “He followed me home. Can we keep him?”


Is this, or is this not, the most humongous cabbage you’ve ever seen in your life? You could play regulation basketball with this sucker. And they’re all like this. I vaguely recall a biology teacher attempting to convince small snot-nosed freshmen (including myself) that back umpteen million years ago, the Earth was richer in oxygen and things simply grew bigger: ferns the size of Douglas firs, turtles that could peer through a second-story window. I do vividly remember an illustration of a badger the size of a Ford Focus.

If these cabbages are any indication, monster badgers are just around the corner. Keep your eyes peeled.


This is Lela in the pictures, by the way. She's pretty awesome.

In which a cake was successfully made!

I've been feeling rather cookish lately, which is like being peckish but with a desire to create attached. I found a recipe for "Dutch Apple Cake" on another blog, and apples are certainly available at the moment...and thus, I made a cake! (Yes, I'm surprised, too!)


It might be more correct to say that I improvised a cake. Host Family is rather (that is to say, totally) lacking in measuring implements, and my estimation skills are notoriously nonexistant, so I wound up finding two spoons of different sizes and designating one a "teaspoon" and the other a "tablespoon," and using a drinking glass as a measuring cup. Furthermore, proper oranges aren't available at the moment, so I used a mandarin instead, and the recipe didn't specify what sort of oil should be used. I wound up using what might have been sunflower oil; it was that or what I was pretty sure was olive oil, and I couldn't see that one working out at all. Oh, and I didn't have a "tube pan," and used a pie plate instead.

If you look closely at the recipe (you scrutinizing Internet detectives, you!), you'll notice that the cake cooks for quite a long time at a very high heat. This rather unnerved Host Mom, who checked it every ten minutes or so to make sure that I wasn't setting fire to her kitchen (I wasn't). The cake raw batter had a consistency rather like fresh cement, and I was sure that the final product was going to be better suited for projectile warfare than human consumption, but it ultimately turned out delightfully well:


Unfortunately, as it happens, I'm the only one in the house who likes Cake with Stuff in It - other members of the household found the apple chunks rather off-putting. But no matter; more for me, and I have a recipe for for double-chocolate brownies lying around here somewhere...

The Land of Golden Arches

Okay, so I had McDonald's today.

Forgive me, you salvage-the-rainforests, save-the-sperm-whale, defeat-the-beef-industry former classmates of mine (Libby, I'm looking at you). McDonald's has been a reluctant staple of my existence since I was, as they say in Wild Oats, knee high to a corn muffin. Not to mention that Happy Meals were the progenitors of most of my toys when I was small. And how better to compare life in Türkiye to life in the USA than by sampling common cuisine?

Not that I'm feeling an overwhelming need to self-justify here, or anything...

I mentioned in a prior post that McDonald's does this nifty thing here where they deliver. I don't know if this is common in other cities, but in Hometown, you would be more likely to see a giraffe tapdance than a Vespa with a Mickey-D's delivery box strapped to the back. And so of course I had to try it, and my anne was kind enough to call in an order for a cheeseburger with fries and a Coke today at lunch.

The meal arrived probably fifteen minutes after she placed the call. I managed to get a picture of the back end of the delivery guy's bike by hanging halfway out an upstairs window. Just sort of imagine a Vespa where the bush is:



The meal itself is pictured here, along with a copy of Under the Tuscan Sun (my preferred literature of the moment):



And I would just like to point out for the record that ketchup packets are infinitely easier to open here than they are there. In the US, it's taken as a given that those silly little ketchup packets are either a) for strictly decorative purposes, or b) intended as the playthings of small children who would like nothing better than to stomp on them until they give way. Not here! Even with fingers greasy from fries, the packet opened with absolutely no fuss or dramatics.

The meal itself tasted remarkably similar to a USA McDonald's meal. The food was a little on the cool side, presumably from the transit over, but that was the only discernable difference, as taste goes. And I'm pretty sure they gave me more fries than I'd have gotten in a USA McDonald's - no complaints there!

And to think! Burger King delivers! Arby's delivers! Subway delivers! Pizza Hut, Dominoes, and Little Caeser's deliver! So much to try, and so little time! But now you'll have to excuse me, as we break fast shortly and we're having dolma, with pilav and güllaç, and I'll take those over fast food any day of the week.

Ramazan

Author's note: This was actually written two days ago, but due to editing, scheduling conflicts, and general laziness, is only being posted today. The Author apologizes, and warns you to expect the same in the future.

Today's the second day of Ramazan. As I was writing this entry, I hadn't eaten or drank anything in thirteen hours, and rereading it after we broke fast, found that it didn't actually make any sense. So I rewrote it.

The way it was explained to me, Ramazan (Ramadan, in the US and possibly elsewhere) serves to make Muslims understand what the poor must endure. Adherents abstain from food, drink, alcohol, and sexual activity during daylight hours. However, it's worth mentioning that Ramazan moves forward ten days every year. People here speak fondly of fasts in the winter, when daylight hours are much shorter.

Fasting Muslims arise before sunrise (around four in the morning) for sahur, the morning meal. To my knowledge, there isn't a set menu: eat what'll get you through. In my family, we ate soup, pasta, cheese, bread and honey; I know another family here that eats granola, and another that doesn't fast at all. It all depends on the person. During sahur, we watched the Ramazan programming on TV. I can't understand very much of it (or any of it, actually, as my vocabulary is still rather limited to vegetables and the odd adjective), but Anne tells me that it's a university theology professor discussing the origins of Ramazan. I would also like to mention that Coca-Cola has a really excellent Ramazan-specific ad that has been airing this week. Unfortunately, YouTube is blocked here, or I'd go looking for a link. Y'all should go see if you can find it, because it is worth watching.

When we finished, we cleared the table and went back to bed and slept until around eight. Then Anne and I left the house for her office, and Baba for his. Today I met up with another Rotary exchange student I'll call Amy (names of course changed) and we wandered in the area around her office for a few hours. I also got a mildly hilarious sunburn. Those sunglasses did, in fact, block sun very well. I look rather like a confused raccoon.



Around three, Anne and I left the office and braved the traffic home. The congestion on the roads has gotten worse since I've been here, thanks to residents coming back from holiday for schoool and work. Furthermore, thanks to the fasting, tempers were running a little high and concentration was a little marred. We passed no fewer than four accidents on the way home. Most were pretty minor - a vegetable truck stopped, the sedan behind it didn't - but it was a sobering sight.

One the way home, Anne pulled over outside a fırın (bakery) and handed me a coins. "Say to them, 'Bir sıcak pide, lütfen.' It means 'One hot pide, please.' Repeat it: 'Bir sıcak pide, lütfen.'"

I repeated it a few times until I got it right, and got out of the car, clutching the coins in in a death grip.

Luckily for me, I was the only customer in the bakery. I approached the man behind the counter. "Bir sıcak pita, lütfen...?"

He hefted a pide (a sort of a spongy focaccia about the size of a medium pizza crust) and showed it to me. I nodded, and handed him my coins. He counted them, looked up sympathetically, and said something in Turkish.

"Sorry," I said, "Amerikan...just a minute," and I tore out of the shop and down to the car. "Anne, I think he says I need more money. Or that I have a lobster on my head. I'm really not sure."

Anne counted out a few more coins, and I ran back into the shop. The shopkeeper accepted them, grinning, and handed me my pita. I grinned back, and hopped down the steps to the car, and off we went again. About a block later, we passed a McDonalds (yeah, I know). It looked like any other McDonalds, except for the row of red Vespa-style scooters parked outside. There were maybe a dozen of them and they all had red carry-cases emblazoned with golden arches strapped behind the seat.

"McDonalds delivers here?" I squeaked.

My host mom shrugged. "Of course."

Does a fast-food place that delivers (aside from, you know, Dominoes) sound like the height of decadence to anyone else? And bear in mind that I was quite literally running on fumes at this point. I thought of a Big Mac, and salivated like one of Pavlov's pooches. "Can we order sometime?" I asked.

Once home, I attempted to write up a quick post and discovered that my concentration was shot and curled up with a magazine instead (Working Mother, left to me by a vacationing American before she went back to the US, bless her).



We broke fast a little before eight p.m. with a meal called iftar. I sat down fully expecting to consume every scrap of food that was on the table, and possibly the table cloth as well - and then discovered that I didn't want to. I had a bowl of soup, some bread with honey, cheese, and a few olives, and pronounced myself full.



And no, the Author didn't fast again today, although she may again sporadically during the Ramazan period in order to more fully embrace the experience. She feels that although the experience was illuminating and potentially slimming, the food here is just to good to willingly miss it.

Of course, there was no sign of Jennifer Garner...

We stopped by a super-secret spy bakery today!

There’s a small bakery a few blocks from Anne’s office. It’s somewhere between a Starbucks and a chocolatier, and if you think that sounds like heaven, you’re right. It had a nice outdoor seating section, complete with a potted geranium or two. The usual feral cats were prowling around, alternating between mewling adorably and stealing bits of pastry when patrons weren’t looking. It was very nice, and I thought I’d get a picture or two to share with the folks from home.


I snapped exactly four photos, one of which didn’t turn out at all, before the clerk conveyed through gesture and barked Turkish that I was absolutely not supposed to be photographing his venue.

Now, I’m all for the privacy of this customers, but I wasn’t photographing them; I was photographing the delectable pastries in the display case. But this was, evidently, verboten.


If Alias’s SD-6 could be housed in a bank, there’s no reason to assume that a bakery couldn’t hide a secret agency or two…and at any rate, the pastries were tasty enough to seduce even the most dedicated foreign agent into giving up state secrets...

Fish Alley

I would like to begin by stating for the record that they told me we were going to a “fish restaurant.” Now, call me crazy, but I hear “fish restaurant” and I think of, oh, Red Lobster. It’s a restaurant. There are fish. It’s a pretty basic assumption.

I asked Anne if I needed to change before we left. She surveyed me, shrugged, and said “Trousers, maybe.” So I figured, hey, nothing too fancy, and put on a pair of jeans. She and Abi and I piled into the car and headed off across the bridge to pick up Baba from work. I’d been there once before, on the way from the airport on my first day in the city: we’d stopped to drop him off. It’s not part of the Istanbul that they put on postcards; it’s part of the Istanbul that makes you think “Oh, that’s how Triangle Shirtwaist happened.”

In the States, it would have been labeled a “historic industrial park” or some such, but as Istanbul has no discernable zoning system (at least, that I'm aware of), it’s more like a slum with some Byzantine architecture thrown in for good measure (“You know Harlem?” Abi asked. I nodded. “This is like Harlem. Very dangerous”). We picked up Baba, which necessitated driving in reverse for maybe a hundred yards at around twenty miles an hour, thanks to a coyly marked one-way street, and then headed off.

I watched the building recede behind us. “There’s a dog on the roof,” I said, a touch disbelievingly.

Abi shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“And this is normal?”

He shrugged again. You can communicate a lot with a shrug. “Yes.”

“Oh. Okay.”

En route to the “fish restaurant,” Anne provided a running commentary of the sights. “That’s a…how do you say…military school? Yes. And a mosque. Very old. That is the shop where we bought Abi his first bicycle. And that building? Brick? It housed the water supply in the early Ottoman Empire. Do you see that wall?”

It was impossible not to see the wall. It was massive, rows of weather-beaten stone rising in rows of successively smaller arches perpendicular to the thoroughfare. It looked old. “Yes.”

“Is from Byzantine times.”

Old, indeed.

We drove passed a textile market, a fish market, several train stations, and a lot of mosques. People are everywhere in Istanbul. It’s the third-largest city in the world, and it never lets you forget it. In a traffic jam on the Asian side - Istanbul at rush hour is essentially one large gridlock - a street vendor standing on a median tried to sell us simit (a bit like a bagel) through the car window. On the Asian side, a family worked a roundabout, selling bottled water to temporarily stranded commuters. A one-legged woman on crutches hopped gaily through an interchange, causing a fully-loaded bus to come screeching to a halt.

I was shooting pictures from the car’s open windows the whole time. Very few were even close to sharp, but the defendant would like to remind the jury that she was shooting from a moving car in İstanbul’s rush hour traffic, and also that seat belts are not quite en vogue here, such that sudden stops can cause some significant jarring. And there were a lot of sudden stops. For clarification: cars do have seat belts, but they're more for decoration than anything else.

Eventually we parked next to what must have been the third fish market in ten minutes. Baba paid the otopark manager, and we wandered across six lanes of highway traffic towards a decidedly unpromising pedestrian underpass.

“This is very famous,” Abi told me. “Many tourists come here.”

I was somewhat perplexed – after all, the underpass looked more like a road works tunnel than a tourist attraction. But I followed them into the rabbit hole –

- and came out in New Orleans.

Or very nearly. The streets were narrow and wending, the buildings were tall, and it was as if you’d taken Diagon Alley, shaken out the wizardy stuff, and replaced all the storefronts with seafood restaurants. Blocks of them, and up to three stories above street level.

“Fish restaurant”? Try “the Las Vegas of all fish restaurants.”

And of course I hadn’t showered for a day. Of course we’d driven over with the windows down and thus my hair was less “attractively tousled” and more “feral child found in Wisconsin woods.” Of course we were meeting people there. Two families, in fact, and both were the sort of warm, hospitable people Türkiye is known for.

We were seated at a long table with me and the three boys at the end: Abi, my brother; Sam; and Eddie. (Names have been changed for privacy)

The first course was the usual salad stuff – vegetables, cheese, and the best melon I’ve ever had (ornately cut to resemble a boat). The second was some sort of rubbery shrimp (overcooked, sadly) and really excellent fried calamari.

Occasionally the boys and I would head off on a photo expedition, such as when the five year-old belly dancer started dancing on a table a block away. Roving maharishi-style bands serenaded the tables, and vendors wandered up and down the streets, hawking everything from cigars to Cabbage Patch dolls to model boats.

At the next table over, a trio of waiters brought out an enormous flaming platter. I scurried over with my camera and a waiter kindly offered to take my picture with the dish, which turned out to be some sort of fish in a thick clay shell.

Having taken the photo, the waiter handed me a mallet.

“Hit it,” he said.

I did so, and apparently with more force than intended. Once the dust cleared, the table’s patrons looked in horror at the flaming crater the size of Chesapeake Bay that I’d created in their meal. It turned out that I was only supposed to have cracked the shell, which could be removed piece by piece. The waiter, evidently realizing that I wasn’t to be trusted with a hammer, suggested by pantomime that perhaps I’d better sit down before I did any more damage.

I sat, cheeks aflame, and feeling rather mortified about the whole thing - after all, I'd just ruined someone's meal when all I'd wanted was a photo - and that was approximately when the maharishi band found our table.

“They are for you!” Anne announced. “Can you dance?”

What I said – as those of you who have seen me try to dance know – was that no, I really couldn’t.

What she evidently heard was “Why, yes! In fact, I have been mistaken many times for Anna Pavlova in my homeland!”

And that was how I wound up hoisted on a chair, dancing with the band leader.

This is perhaps the time to explain to the uninitiated that traditional Turkish dance is possibly the most hilariously suggestive dancing in the world. And then the entire table was dancing, although I was the only one on a chair – probably eight or ten people, the majority grown adults, bumping and grinding without actually touching (that would be inappropriate). Bear in mind that these are the people who gave the world belly dancing, and that will give you some idea of the sight.

Eventually the song ended and they got me off that chair and I discovered, to my everlasting horror, that Nur had appropriated my camera and captured the whole event on film. Or on memory card, as it were.

This happened twice more throughout the course of the evening; by the second time, the band leader – a large, mustachioed man with, for whatever reason, a tie wrapped around his head – had managed to identify me as an American. As the band plucked out the starting chords, he bellowed “BUSH” before beginning the song. And of course I had to dance again.

(Bear in mind that by “danced,” I don’t actually mean “danced”; I wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression. “Danced” is, in this instance, an inventive sort of euphemism for “twitched erratically and hoped this wouldn’t end up on YouTube,” just so we have our definitions straight.)

We were eating during this, too. So after the shrimp and calamari came some sort of steamed whitefish with tomato – very tasty – followed by assorted fruit in ice water And then in the middle of all this food, the guy with the tie on his head hauled me up on a chair and off we went again, while at the next table over, a herd of waiters armed with tongs and brushes attempted to salvage the clay-baked fish.

At some point after the third song, the boys suggested that we go wander the streets so I could take photos to send home. And Fish Alley, as I’m calling it, is an incredible spot for photography, which is why it’s a shame that I’m so very bad at it. Anyway, we traipsed the streets, dodging hookah vendors (hookah - water pipes for smoking mild tobacco; known here as narghilè, I believe) and crowds of Chinese tourists, before happening on an ice cream stand.

Turkish ice cream is a traditional treat, and in consistency bears a remarkable resemblance to saltwater taffy. We watched the vendor twirl it around and mug for the camera, and Sam bought me an ice cream cone. It was quite delicious.

We went back to the table to find the waiters (who were still giving me dirty looks, presumably because of the thing with the flaming fish) setting trays of baklava down on the table, along with thimbles of Turkish coffee and vials of transparent liquid. I politely declined the coffee, on the grounds (heh) that I wanted to sleep that night. Anne shrugged, and handed me one of the vials of liquid. It looked remarkably like a shot glass, I thought.

“Drink this, then,” she told me. “Is traditional.”

I raised the vial to my lips, and just as it hit my tongue, she laughed and said, “You will sleep well tonight!”

It looked like water, it tasted like banana, and it burned like whiskey. I placed the glass back on the table.

Anne raised an eyebrow. “You do not like it?”

There is an interesting phenomenon in the Turkish language wherein the words for “no” (hayır) and “slimy git” (hıyar) are remarkably similar, and it had been a long night, and I was still a bit jet-lagged…

…And, yes, in the process of trying to explain that I wasn’t a fan of the moonshine, I accidentally called my host mother something rather rude.

At least, as mistakes go, it was too funny to be offensive.

In Turkiye, the evening meal goes on for a long time. We were in Fish Alley until probably one in the morning, and we were by no means the last patrons to leave. And it was a good forty-five minute trek home to the other side of the city, and into the house. I brushed my teeth, put on my pajamas, collapsed into bed like I hadn’t slept in days, and dreamed of zzzzzzzzz...