Goodbye Turkey

The last three days in Istanbul have been a blur...spice markets, glittering mosques and palaces, harems, hand-painted tiles in 99 shades of blue, crazy hagglers in the Grand Bazaar, old wooden Ottoman houses on the Bosphorous, new wooden houses piled seemingly on top of one another, street musicıans and candy makers. It's been particularly active ın the neıghboorhood where my hotel is, near the Blue Mosque; crowds of people gather there every day to pray during Ramazan, and stick around to picnic ın the park and enjoy the carnival atmosphere after sunset. I have to say, this cıty is as beguiling as everyone says it is.

Sadly, though, my time here has come to an end; this morning I get on a Chicago-bound plane, so it's goodbye for now to Turkey...Hosça kalın, Türkiye, I'll miss you!

Hmm...I might do one more post tomorrow (wıth photos!) just so I can remember everything (EVERYTHİNG) I've done over the past few days. İ have to admit, I'm a bıt hampered at the moment by a Turkish keyboard that wants all my i's to be ı's and all my commas to be ç's...

Goodbye Goreme!

I finished up at the restaurant last Friday, and for the past week or so I’ve been doing a little farewell tour of Turkey, traveling around for a bit before heading home in a few days. Four of the past seven days were spent on a sailboat cruising the Mediterranean from Olympos to Fethiye, which I’m using to account for my total lack of communications for the past while.

Hm…thanks to the hard work of Ali at heritage travel (the agency owned by Mehmet…the same guy who owns the hotel, and the restaurant, and a carpet shop, and apparently half of Goreme) my tour has been pretty bam bam bam, full of overnight buses and scheduled itineraries, so I’m afraid my blog is going to devolve at this point into a sort of list of the various cities I’ve been to and tourists attractions I’ve visited. Just fair warning…

The first item on my itinerary was the Blue Cruise. There were ten of us on the boat, and though my fellow travelers came in four separate groups, TO A ONE they were Australians currently living in London, which is apparently a very popular thing to do if you want to spend a year or five making massive amounts of money in a corporate job (Aussie’s are apparently known for their work ethic and can get hired anywhere) and traveling around Europe. They kept having conversations like, “Oh, you did Croatia, too? Yeah, I went last year…it was great, though I preferred Slovenia and Albania. If you’ve already done Sicily and Malta, I would definitely go there next.” Adding to the confusion was the fact that six of the eight were freckled, energetic blond girls, all of whom changed bathing suits EVERY DAY of the cruise. You’ll excuse me for not keeping their names straight. The cruise was four days, during which we stopped at a couple sleepy, colorful beach towns and anchored in various scenic spots for a chance to swim in water literally the color of blue salt water taffy. We dropped anchor at night in secluded bays, usually hidden from any city lights, and slept on the deck under the stars.

(The town of Kas, one of the stops on the cruise)

(Walking around, I ran into these ladies in their garden. Can you tell that those are grape vines their sitting under? They're busy making stuffed vine leaves. The woman on the left gave me one to try, and while the rice inside was still raw, I have to say it rivaled the version we served at the restaurant.)

(We docked for a while next to Gemiler Island, a tiny little speck in the sea that's home to a bunch of Greek ruins from the days when the sea level was much lower--many of the old buildings are now underwater, but the water is clear enough that you can still make them out. I swam over and climbed among all the ruins to the church at the top...slow going in my bare feet and bathing suit, but definitely worth it.)

(Everyone slept out on the deck.)


The boat landed in Fethiye, where I spent one additional life. Fethiye is your pretty standard adorable small town, though I think I had my best dinner in Turkey so far there. The boat’s crewmembers were in town until the next morning before setting sail to do the whole cruise in reverse; for dinner, I went with a couple of them to the fish market in the old city, where we hand chose an entire kilo of red snapper and a few small octopuses for dinner. We then brought our selection to a restaurant also in the market, which for 5 lira fried them up and served them to us along with salad, yogurt sauce, and lavas (this great bread that comes to the table hot and filled with steam like a giant bread balloon). Delicious! Actually, I think the captain must go to this place a lot, since everyone there seemed to know him. The three musician’s wandering from table to table were especially attentive. It seems that there is a strong tradition of musical appreciation in Turkey; everyone at the table sang lustily along, and clapped with even greater enthusiasm when the deckhand’s girlfriend (a resident of Fethiye) got up to do a little impromptu belly dancing.

(Walking around Fethiye. Yup, just your typical Turkish street...some cars, some flowers, and 5th century B.C. Lycian tombs carved into the hillside.)

(At the fish restaurant, one of the musicians was singing and fiddling at the SAME TIME...he's a talented man)

(Esge gets up to do a little dancing)

After Fethiye, it was on to Selcuk, a city about 3km from the Aegean and VERY historical. I spent all day on a tour of the Roman ruins at Ephesus. Actually, the tour ended a little early, so instead of going straight back to my hotel I asked the driver to drop me off near the 14th century mosque that just happens to be on the edge of town, and did a little afternoon wandering. Now I’m on the rooftaop terrace of the hotel, waiting for 9:00 to roll around, when I’ll take the overnight bus to Istanbul. Onward, onward!

(That's me! I'm sitting among the Roman ruins at Ephesus, so I'm not sure what's with the scowl.)

(Looking straight up from the steps of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus)

(In the courtyard of the Isa Bey Mosque in Selcuk.)

I feel as though I have undergone a sacred rite of passage, a true threat to my life. Last night, the unthinkable happened: I was stung by a scorpion. Twice, in the dark, while sound asleep. Aaaaah! The first sting was on my face, which is particularly creepy because it means that he was crawling all over my neck and shoulders before I rustled or did whatever it was that scared him into stinging me. Then, as I was wondering what kind of crazy bee had gotten into my room and decided to attack me, he got me again on my hand. Man it hurt! I jumped out of bed and managed to plug in the light and then did that crazy, omigod-another-living-creature-is-touching-me full body dance and hair shake, still wondering what on earth had bitten me. I was pretty absorbed in that, but not so much that I didn’t hear the faint scrabbling sound this guy made when he jumped off my bed and onto the wall…all pale and spiny with his stinger in the air, running to hide under the carpets. I was too quick for him, though, and, grabbing the first thing at hand (which happened to be a lumpy aluminum package of antiobiotics that I’m taking for a raging ear infection…not the most convenient killing instrument, but good enough), managed to smash him to death in only two tries.

So then what? What do you do when you’re alone in your cave room past midnight in the middle of Turkey and you’ve just been stung by a scorpion? You FREAK THE HELL OUT. I threw on a dress, my glasses and a pair of sandals and ran next door to where Pinar lives with her mother and proceeded to pound on their door like Armageddon was upon us. Fortunately, Pinar’s mother is one of those unflappable types that answers the door at 1am with as much equanimity and good cheer as she does at noon. She brought me inside, and after I’d shown her my evidence (the scorpion’s crushed carcass now wrapped in an empty box of gum) proceeded to laugh and tell me that everything was “tamam, tamam” (meaning “no problem”). I was still FREAKING THE HELL OUT, though, not sure whether or not she realized that the scorpion had STUNG ME TWICE or that, before I scraped him along the floor, he had been about four times the size as the admittedly puny looking thing I was now holding. (She kept telling me it was OK, because it was just a baby, but what if it wasn’t actually a baby???) And where was Pinar during all this uproar? My dear, calming, English-speaking friend Pinar? She was asleep in the next room…but she’d been so exhausted that night that she told her mom not even to wake her up at three for the standard pre-dawn Ramadan meal; I think my case did not merit overriding her request. Anyway, noting that my panic wasn’t abating in the least, and probably just to make me feel better, Pinar’s mother agreed to call Apo, one of the night guys at the hotel, to take me to the hospital in Nevsehir, the big town nearby. (There is one small clinic in Goreme, but it’s the kind of place that isn’t open on weekends and is closed from 11am-2pm for lunch. Inside the décor is sort of sweaty and tropical, with yellow and peach colored walls, wet tile floors and a great profusion of spider plants and bougainvillea trees. When I went to have my ear examined, there was a group of about twelve old women in scarves and old men in woolen vests just sort of clustered around the one doctor’s office, the door to which remained wide open even as she was examining patients…whenever someone came out, a new person would go in, but if there was any order to who went next I certainly couldn’t discern it. When I did finally manage to get in, she took about 15 seconds before declaring my ear to be “dirty,” writing me a prescription, and sending me on my way.)

The drive to Nevsehir is about 20 minutes, and Apo doesn’t really speak any English, which gave me free reign to indulge in my panic. Does scorpion venom cause you to go into cardiac arrest? I could suddenly feel a certain tightness in my chest. Or wait, why was the back of my head beginning to tingle? Can poison penetrate the blood-brain barrier? Was I going to go crazy? Maybe blind! Or maybe my face and right hand would become permanently paralyzed, and I’d only ever be able to communicate again using shaky, left-handed script.

Well, it turns out that while the pain was real the threat was not. (Are you shocked? Everything really was “tamam.”) Remember what I said about the threat to my life? Absolutely not. Apparently stings from the species of scorpion that live in Goreme are really quite harmless; they basically just really, really hurt for about a day and not much else. When I got the hospital the nurse sort of unceremoniously gave me two analgesic injections, one on either side of my rear, so that instead of hurting in two places I hurt in four. I say “unceremoniously” only because she didn’t bother with any of the niceties that usually accompany injections, like disinfectant, or any sort warning that I was about to get an injection at all. Just bam! needle in, needle out. Then, as I was recovering from the surprise, bam again! Actually, it was a kind of busy night at the hospital—apparently in addition to more road rage and traffic accidents than at any other time of year, Ramadan is also the occasion for a huge spike in hospital admittance. There were all these sort of dazed-looking men wandering the halls, holding aloft with their right hands the rehydrating IV drips attached to their left.

OK, I know that 90% of my blog posts have to do with food—cooking it, serving it, eating it—but isn’t cuisine a major part of any culture? So I’m completely justified in writing all about my newest favorite thing about Turkey: the midnight barbeque. I don’t know if it’s because of the late hours that anyone who works in a restaurant has to keep (THANK YOU, Italian tourists who show up at 10:58, two minutes before closing, and linger for HOURS over wine), but so far none of the BBQs I’ve been to have started before 12:30am. And forget potato salad, or baked beans, or plastic cups of lemonade. Turkish BBQs have only two ingredients: meat and bread. But lots of meat. And tons of bread. At my first BBQ, we started off with a first course of beef, then moved on to spicy meatballs (apparently of a variety that can only be bought in Yasin’s hometown, Adana), then non-spicy meatballs, and finally lamb kebabs. Actually, that first BBQ was pretty great; we all scootered up to one of Goreme’s many “panorama points,” and it just so happened that directly below us there was a huge Turkish wedding party in process. Which leads me to….

The Turkish Wedding. Turkish weddings are EPIC. They last for days and days. Remember how on the day I arrived in Goreme there was music being piped through the town loudspeakers, the celebration of a local couple’s wedding broadcast for the entire town to enjoy? Well, it turns out that this kind of village-wide celebration is not only common, it’s basically an everyday occurrence. Most afternoons, the loudspeakers mounted on one of Goreme’s several minarets click on and the town crier (what else can she be called?) announces that so-and-so are getting married and that everyone (everyone!!!) is invited to the party. In traditional Turkish parlance, this is the “village wedding,” and it is only one part of the multi-stage, week-long process of getting married in Turkey. Other traditions, of which I have only heard and not seen, include a day-long music festival at the groom’s place, in which all of his buddies are encouraged to stop by and dance (a part of the wedding that the bride feels absolutely no obligation to attend); a formal visit to the groom’s home by the bride and her “entourage” (for this event I was told that the women don’t wear traditional dress, but rather the kinds of outfits you might wear to an office party—fun); and Henna Night, in which the bride covers her head in a sheer red veil decorated with sparkles while attendants wave 12 candles above her head, sing traditional Turkish songs, press gold coins into her palm, and wrap her hands in little red mittens. (All of this, of course, varies from region to region and town to town…Turkish wedding traditions are like an endless buffet of song, dance and ritual. I like the one that includes sprinkling coins around the house and then running around to collect them, “like beggars.”) Anyway, while for the most part Turkish weddings seem very much shrouded in mystery (the veils! the candles!), the village wedding is big and brassy enough to make up for it. From our viewpoint at the top of Goreme, we could see the giant bonfire in the middle of the crowd, hear the twisting melodies of Turkish folk songs being played by the five-man band, and even see the men, young and old, snapping their fingers and wildly, drunkenly swinging their hips in time to the music. What a party!

Ah, so this week I took my first days off from the restaurant for a 3-day trip to Mt. Nemrut, in eastern Turkey. Completely amazing! On the second morning of the tour (“morning” being a generous designation), we woke up at 2:30am to drive to the mountain, do a little pre-dawn hiking, and be at the Eastern Terrace near the top of the mountain in time to see the sun rising over the surrounding peaks:


Do you see that river, off to the right? That is the EUPHRATES RIVER. For whatever reason (I dunno, maybe because it was the water source for the first flowering of human civilization…), I was completely bowled over to see this river. Okay, and not only did we get to see it from afar, but the next day actually stopped of on the side of the road and went WADING IN THE EUPHRATES. I tasted it! This is one half of an Italian couple also on the tour, knee deep in the freezing water:


Back to Mt. Nemrut, though. Some background (very short): in 62 BC, King Antiochus I Theos of Commagene (whose full name, somewhat grandly, means “Antiochus, a fair, eminent God, friend of Romans and friend of Greeks”) chose Mt. Nemrut as the sight for a giant tomb. (The bodies buried there have never been found, despite one archaeologist’s attempts to unearth them using dynamite, which, according to our tour guide, reduced the stature of Mt. Nemrut by a good 200 feet but otherwise had little effect.) The tomb was fronted by huge statues of lions, eagles, Greek gods (Zeus, Hercules, Apollo) and of course the king himself. The statues at this point have all been decapitated, but the giant heads are still intact, ranged in front of their seated bodies in a neat row. I don’t know if this picture quite captures it, but these heads are enormous—definitely taller than me, and very imposing. Well done Antiochus, I was very impressed.


After the brisk morning hike, we did a bit of touring around the area. It took all day, but I’ll sum it up with a picture:


And then it was off to Urfa, home of Abraham’s cave (birthplace of the prophet…though Iraqis disagree, Turkish people believe that Urfa is on the site of the ancient city of Ur), a spice market, a sprawling mosque, and many other things that passed in a haze because I had woken up at 2:30 that morning. The main thing I can tell you about Urfa is that it’s a very conservative city; unlike most cities in western Turkey, where you’ll see plenty of women in tank tops and with uncovered heads, pretty much every woman in Urfa wears at least a scarf over her hair, and many wear a çarşaf (the Turkish name for what I think of as a burka, and a word that also means “pillowcase”). Which meant that despite the 100-degree heat I had to wear long pants, and because I am a brilliant packer that meant jeans (why-oh-why don’t I own any breezy, hippie-traveler-style linen pantaloons?), all of which meant I nearly died of heatstroke. But it was OK! Because Urfa was lovely. Here are some men feeding the fish…there are a lot of (very well-fed) fish in Urfa, thanks to the legend in which Abraham, after smashing idols and declaring that King Nemrud was only human, was tossed into a fire to burn when, miraculously, the fire turned to water and all the embers to sacred carp.

Oh, the trials of vegetarians in foreign lands! I remember going out to eat with Jen in Korea; the word “vegetarian,” even in translation, was often completely useless—most waitresses used it to indicate that a dish contained both meat AND vegetables—and fish broth was ubiquitous, even in dishes that were otherwise 100% vegetable. I’m sad to report that vegetarians in Turkey are in for trouble as well, at least if they come to our restaurant. That yogurt soup you ordered, described in the menu as “prepared with rice and seasoned with dried mint”? Yup, it’s mostly chicken. And those “stuffed vine leaves dressed with olive oil”…filled to bursting with ground beef. I think the greatest travesty is probably the peravu, “Goreme-style cheese ravioli with tomato sauce.” This is just a straight-up lie. The peravu are in fact stuffed with onions and lamb, smothered in a chokingly thick garlic yogurt sauce and then doused with red pepper-infused oil. So watch out, all you parents of picky eaters who think you’ve finally found something simple that your kid will eat—they will not! They will balk! Then there was this…a week or so ago I was taking the order for a family that was very concerned that their meal not contain any lamb. The mother, who was doing all the talking, would say, “One order of the grilled chicken and rice—with no lamb, please. That has no lamb, right? And the okra with beef—but no lamb. Without the lamb!” I thought she was being a little unnecessarily cautious (or course the grilled chicken doesn’t have any lamb…), but the last thing she ordered was one of the woodstove roasted chicken kebabs. It was only at the last moment, as I was relaying her order to Ibrahim, that I remembered that at the top of each kebab, lamb and chicken alike, Ibrahim plops a giant, white cube of what was described to me as “lamb butter.” Over the course of the roasting process, the lamb butter melts down to cover all the meat and vegetables (presumably what makes these kebabs so incredibly delicious). So I found myself in the position of declaring, “One chicken kebab—with no lamb!” This caused a bit of an uproar; I had to be very insistent and Ibrahim was very reluctant. Anyway, anonymous non-lamb-eating mother, I take back all my exasperated thoughts—yours is clearly a paranoia born from experience.

Ramadan and Churches

Ramadan started yesterday, which means that for the next month between the hours of about 5am and about 8pm, when the muezzin sings the evening call to prayer, most of my fellow-employees will abstain from eating, drinking, engaging in or thinking about sex and basically everything else that defines humans’ base functioning. Oof. Apparently the first day is the worst, and the mood around the hotel yesterday could definitely be characterized as listless. A lot of uniformed employees slumped over tables or sitting limply on the stairs, staring balefully at passersby. This has got to be particularly punishing for anyone who spends all day mixing drinks and ferrying around platters of honeydew and watermelon. Ramadan is also particularly tough this year because it hits right in the middle of August, when the weather is hottest and the days are longest. Ahmet, the hotel owner’s young son, is fasting for the first time this year; all afternoon he lingered by the drinks counter, periodically pulling out a bottle of water and juggling it from hand to hand for a while before putting it back in the cooler. I got to the restaurant at 7:45, just minutes before the evening call to prayer. Ali and Ramazan had already set out their food—huge piles of sliced melon, chickpea soup, spinach pastries, and two giant bottles of water—and were circling the table like hungry wolves. Hakin, the chef, already had a cigarette between his lips, lighter at the ready. My coworkers are not terribly religious—as far as I know, none of them pray regularly or go to the mosque—which makes their efforts seem all the more impressive to me. To go through what is clearly a difficult trial (and for a whole month!), I think I would have to be motivated by some pretty heavy religious fervor. On the other hand, absent such fervor, why do it at all? Ali tells me it’s in order to empathize with those who have very little, and that the Koran instructs us that Ramadan should be welcomed as a time of joy and celebration. But if you’re not a devout Muslim? I think I’m just confused. Turkey is a country so devoted to secularism that headscarves are banned in all universities and government buildings, and yet even non-practicing Muslims do this very difficult fast for a month (and, so far as I can tell, not in a spirit of joy and celebration, and without all the additional prayers and traditions also associated with Ramadan—just the fast)…what am I missing?

I finally made it to the Goreme Open Air Museum, probably the biggest tourist draw in town—and the only part of Goreme to be an official, preserved UNESCO site. “Open Air” because even once you buy your ticket and pass through the turnstile, what you’re actually there to see are a string of cave churches dating back to the second half of the 11th century; to see them all is actually a bit of a hike, but definitely well worth it. (For a while I had an entire house to myself, but a few weeks ago a Dutch architect named Nico moved into one of the rooms next door. According to a somewhat garbled, rambling account he gave me over breakfast the morning he moved in, turning Goreme into a tourist destination—including creating the Open Air Museum—was his idea back in the ‘80s. Now, he wants to make another museum. When I asked where the second museum would be he replied, “The whole town.” “You want to make…the whole town…a museum?” I was trying to picture how you would go about charging admission. It turns out, though, that what he has in mind is more of a walking tour, with each of the stops preserved as it’s own cultural heritage site.) I have to say there is just something incredible and moving about a church that on the outside looks like this:

And on the inside looks like this:


And now a special segment…after hours at the restaurant:

On Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, we have live music at the restaurant. Unis plays the sas, a seven-stringed lute-like instrument, and Burak plays the frame drum. It turns out that our man Ibrahim is no mean sas player himself, though. After all the guests leave (or if no one has ordered one of his wood-fired kebabs) he often plays Turkish folk songs; sometimes Metin plays and sings along.


Erkan and Ali roast eggplants, hot green peppers, garlic and onions in the embers of the wood stove to make salad for a late-night dinner.


Ramazan is a ham.


So is Erkan.

Am I just naïve, or are standards of food sanitation in restaurants pretty lax everywhere? I’ve already mentioned that Ibrahim, master of the woodfire stove, keeps a cigarette going throughout the food prep process (leading to what Bob has deemed “ the apparently endless danger of cigarette ashes in all fabrics and comestibles”), but that’s definitely not the only biohazard putting Turkey's restaurant patrons in danger. The other day while cutting up an apple in the hotel kitchen I accidentally sliced open my finger, one of those shallow cuts that immediately bloomed bright red. Fortunately, the apple absorbed most of the blood (yum!), and none of it got on the counter, but Mehmet, the kitchen assistant, who was watching, didn't even bat an eyelash. Blood in the kitchen, and no one cared. And not once when I've gone in there has anyone ever asked me to wash my hands or even tie back my hair. Though the chefs all do wear impeccably washed and pressed whites, to show off what clean, sanitary cooks they all are.

This is me cooking "Turkish" food in the hotel kitchen...adding flour to hot oil to make a thickener for the soup. (Isn't that a French thing? Roux?) Anyway, you'll not that the only thing holding my hair back is my sunglasses...I look like I just wandered in off the street.

Actually, the major hazard to food sanitation at the hotel is probably the horde of wild animals roaming around all the time. Goreme is home to I think hundreds of stray dogs and cats, which wander in and out of stores, restaurants and private residences with the entitlement of a very overindulged population. Unal says, “They belong to no one but are cared for by everyone.” There are a couple of regulars at the hotel, two cats who‘ve been stopping by for a morning snack for as long as any of the current employees have been working there. These cats are smart; they always show up before 11, when the breakfast buffet ends, and are treated to eggs, French toast, and thick grape syrup. It turns out, by the way, that feral Turkish cats love egg whites but spurn the yolks—no wonder they’ve been around for so long, they must have excellent heart health. Anyway, though, these cats pose a real problem later in the day when Mustafa puts out the daily special (usually something involving puff pastry and béchamel sauce, and always displayed on a low table near the entrance to the kitchen). Yesterday there was a candle burning next to the special, a trick that supposedly keeps the cats from nibbling on it, but by the end of the night there were still some suspicious, feline paw prints around the plate’s rim. Those darn cats!

This is Ozlem (who now comes to the pool every day and is basically part girl, part fish) and one of the many stray puppies that hang around the hotel. It's a pretty terrible picture of both of them--I swear they're both much cuter in real life.

Oh! I finally went on the sunrise hot-air balloon ride! Sooooo cool. At 5am 12 of us crammed into the Butterfly Balloons van, which took about eight minutes to maneuver itself out of the admittedly cramped and somewhat perilously positioned (as in, carved into a cliff) parking lot and then…drove us about 200 feet to the building just at the bottom of the hill. While we breakfasted on chocolate cookies and grapes, the Butterfly Balloon guys were out with their little black weather balloons, testing the wind currents in order to figure out the best take-off point for a scenic flight. (Balloon pilots can shift the balloon up and down, but they have no control over the direction it flies other than to position themselves in the varying air currents at different altitudes, which change from day to day and I imagine make the daily life of a balloon pilot a constantly exciting adventure. Actually, probably what makes the life of a balloon pilot an exciting adventure is things like flying over the North Pole, where it’s so cold that the gas turns to liquid and has to be stored in special, pressurized containers, or working for a year in Switzerland, where it turns out balloon pilots are in high demand and short supply.) The flight itself was nothing short of amazing. We spent a lot of time very high up (not sure how high…just “very”), able to see the entire expanse of Goreme, the surrounding villages and all of the valleys. At other points, though, we were literally feet off the ground in the valleys. Our pilot, Mike , was able to point out cave churches and Roman burial grounds at eye level. And…I have pictures!

They were still inflating the balloon when our van arrived. These balloons are HUGE--on the order of 315,000 cubic square feet.


Pilot Mike blasting the gas. I had a spot right next to him, so if you were worried about me getting chilly at the high altitudes, you can relax.


I've never seen Stonehenge, but does it kind of look like this?


In the lower corner you can see a few of the vineyards on the floor of Honey Valley.


Looking straight down at Honey Valley.


Sunrise over Red Valley. The holes in the rock on the far left lead to cave churches!


Champagne toast after a successful landing.