Busy mornings...

The flurry of adventure tours has come to an end (though I still have yet to go on that balloon ride), and my formerly empty, formless days are starting to take shape a bit. I basically have the mornings free, so I use them to do productive things like wander around the postage-size downtown area, surf the internet or lounge on the pillowed terrace with my book. (I’m halfway through Irfan Orga’s “Portrait of a Turkish Family,” a memoir that no one in either Turkey or the US has ever heard of and which is lauded on the back cover as being “good.”) Sometimes I hang out inside with the other hotel staff, who are a lot of fun; this morning Ünal and Pınar taught me how to make Turkish tea (sweet and delicious), Turkish coffee (shockingly strong), and the most abominable lattes known to man—the process involves microwaving the milk and then stirring it vigorously to get rid of the skin that forms over the top. The other day there was word (false, as it turned out) that the police were in the neighborhood looking for foreign workers, so I had to spend the morning “pretending” to be a guest, lying in the sun by the pool. It’s a tough life.

With Ünal and Pınar
















I’ve also been telling everyone that I’m interested in learning about Turkish cuisine, and for the past few mornings I’ve been admitted into the kitchen at the hotel (a smaller operation than the restaurant next door) and allowed to don a cap and apron to help out with the cooking. I’m not sure how much about Turkish food I’ve actually been learning, though. Yesterday I peeled and chopped potatoes for French fries, and helped make the daily special, which was sautéed onions, mushrooms and chicken thickened with flour and milk, spooned over puff pastry and baked with a slice of cheese. Apparently Mustafa, the chef, learned the recipe from a friend who lives in San Antonio.

I’ve had better luck learning about authentic Turkish food at the restaurant, which specializes in home-style, local food. Most of it is prepared in the morning by two women from the village, Razia and Zembra, who despite the new, gleaming kitchen at their disposal prefer to do their food preparation cross-legged on the ground in the dining room. Specialties include stuffed squash blossoms, stuffed grape leaves and several dishes cooked underground in a clay pot—okra stew, bulgur soup and “sulu köfte,” chickpea-sized lamb and beef meatballs in a spicy tomato broth. On Wednesday morning I was loitering around the restaurant with Ali (one of the “stewards,” who arrives at 7am to do the breakfast buffet at the hotel and doesn’t leave until the restaurant closes at 11pm…oy) when Razia and Zembra were rolling out the köfte.

Razia rolls two meatballs at a time...impressive.





















I helped out for a while--my hands smelled like meat and turmeric for hours, no matter how many times I washed them.












In the afternoons I’ve been manning the drinks bar by the pool, which basically just means more reading, and occasionally popping open a beer for a parched hotel guest. I really, really like being at the pool. All the kids flailing around in the water look like they’re drowning and all the adults splayed out in their deck chairs look like they’re already dead. After hours of relaxing in the sun, too, people are just so happy and relaxed, and a lot of them stop by my little bar just to chat. Yesterday I talked to a woman from Tehran about fraudulent elections and Iranian independent cinema, to an older couple from North Carolina who have been living in Cairo for the past year and to a couple of Belgian archaeologists who spent the last five weeks excavating an ancient city about 50km from Goreme and are very interested in the difference between “interior and exterior contexts.” I’m not really sure what that means. Plus, being next to the pool means it’s suuuper easy to just get IN the pool whenever I feel like it, which it turns out is often. On Thursday I was tempted in by Ozlem, the daughter of one of the housekeepers, who for the past couple of days had been trying to teach herself to swim. (The day before a kindly Dutch man tried to help her out; he extended his hand out to her and said, I thought, “Here, give me your hand.” It turned out, though, that he said, “Here, give me your HEAD,” cause he proceeded to drag her the length of the pool gripping only her chin.) Anyway, I’m pretty pleased, because yesterday morning Ozlem was only able navigate distances of about two feet without grabbing the side of the pool, and by the end of the day she was paddling across no problem. Our lesson was carried out using exclusively the words “yes,” “no,” and the numbers one to five, which basically exhausted her English and my Turkish vocabulary.

Yasin came down to visit me on his cigarette break, arranging himself on the pile of towels meant for guests at the pool. Very smooth.










After the pool bar closes (that is, once I decide the pool bar closes), I head over to the restaurant. Hmm…it’s actually getting to be about that time now. OK, I’ll write about the restaurant tomorrow—if I’m able to find the time.