Turkish Wine

Today Chris' friend came into town so we went out to a wine bar to celebrate. The wine bar is called Sensus, and it only serves Turkish wine. It's right next to Galata Tower inside the basement of a hotel, and it has a real cellar-y feel to it. The floors and walls are all stone, and there is bright but localized light. Lots of bright and dark spaces with everything in between very soft. 

The people working there help you make selections on what kind of wine to try, and you can buy it by the bottle or the glass. Tonight we were all drinking the same Cab. I don't know a lot about wine so I can't tell you about the fruity flavors and woody aftertaste or whatever it is that wine people say about wine. I thought it was good. 

Back in August, Chris had this idea that we should try a new Turkish wine every week and rate them. He really wanted to know more about Turkish wine and wine in general. It worked for a couple weeks - he would carefully record our impressions of the wine and we would all give it a grade based on taste and price. After tonight, I think it would be fun to get back into that. 

Coincidentally my mother and my friend went to a Turkish restaurant in New York City last night and drank a bit of Turkish wine. I asked my mom if she remembered what it was called. She told me all she remembered was that it was the third one down on the list. It seems we could all learn a little something about Turkish wine.

Another Failure

Abby bought Christmas lights for the house! I got home and saw them sitting on my bed and got really excited! I decided to make tonight's blog post about putting up our Christmas lights. Look how cute they are with their small European plug!

We picked out where we wanted them to go; we have this part of the living area that doesn't have an overhead light. We thought the colorful lights would brighten up the room. Christmas spirit! The strand was about ten feet long, and we quickly untangled them to their full length. We plugged that cute little plug into the wall...and nothing. We tried another outlet. And another. We got zip. Actually we got this:

Lights that won't fit back into the box and the prospect of trying to return them like this! 'Tis the season. The next best thing is to make paper snowflakes from recycled Turkish homework and English grammar worksheets. Seems appropriate. 

Ludwig's Limits

This is a sign that I see almost every day at the place where I work. And it's meant for kids learning English but it also resonates with me as I am learning Turkish in Turkey. 

Often, I actively change my course of action because I don't know how to say what I really want in Turkish. This is especially true when it comes to approaching guys. In America, my wit and charm are enough win the boys over but it turns out my humor doesn't quite translate into Turkish yet. So when I see a cute guy, I don't say anything because I figure they either won't understand me at all or they will think I'm a hooker. 

So tonight at dinner, I saw a cute guy across the restaurant. I pointed him out to Abby and Niko, and they agreed that he was cute. That was going to be the end of the story - I couldn't express myself properly so there was no point in trying. And then I heard him speaking English! Back in the game!

And then he left. So I spent the next ten minutes working up the nerve to go talk to his friends. Okay, there was no real plan but I was going to see if I could get some info on this dude. Well, that was awkward. The table had a pretty awkward vibe when I sat down anyway - there were two guys and two girls plus one of the guy's parents. Anyway, there was no real way to segue from "Can I sit?" to "So does your friend have a girlfriend?" plus the guy with the parents had lost his wallet and that was a whole thing, so I extracted myself and fled back to my table.

As we left, I regretted chickening out so I made Chris go in there and explain that I am a wuss and could I have the number of the guy who left? It was totally Junior High-ish but hey, we all had boyfriends in Junior High because this kind of thing works! Chris goes back in and explains that I was interested in the guy who left. Well, it turns out the guy with the parents had also left at some point to look for his wallet. So Chris was asking about the wrong guy...in front of his parents.

Chris came back with a name which I quickly realized was the wrong name. Game over. I'll go back to studying Turkish now. Or maybe the language barrier isn't really the problem here. 

Awwwwkwwaarrrdddd.

How The Nights End

Last night I went out with some friends in Taksim, and as we were leaving, I stopped to take a picture of the clothes store Mango and its marquee. It lists every city that has a Mango, including Dallas, my hometown! Waiting to spot it has become one of my late night traditions. But they are in alphabetical order, and we showed up a little late. So we stood there watching the names of cities around the world go by, Abby and I made a game out of it by pointing out all the ones we've been to. The last time I stood outside to watch for it, my friend and I pointed out cities that we had never heard of. A very different game but just as entertaining. After about 5 minutes, we spotted Dallas!

I get really excited when I see Dallas, and it has nothing to do with the fact that it's usually very late on a Friday night. Ok, that factors in a little bit. Nonetheless, it's awesome to see this small connection from two important places in my life. Maybe people from Rome and Damascus feel the same way?

Two additional thoughts. First, Crete is an island not a city, and Deira is a part of Dubai. Why would they abandon the city theme? Crete has individual cities, I'm sure the Mango is in one of them and there is more than one Mango in Istanbul but the individual neighborhoods don't come up on this marquee so why are Crete and Deira so special, huh? Second, I had no idea where Rotterdam was. I had to Google it. 

So yes. I'm a nerd who thinks it's fun to play geography games at 1am on a Friday night in the bar district of Istanbul. Sorry I'm not sorry. 

Weird Leafy Vegetables

I'm bad at grocery shopping, especially shopping for produce. There are several factors that result in purchasing disasters such as this:

The lighting is bad because it's my kitchen but that's a huge pile of white-ish, yellow-ish pieces of a leafy vegetable. I wanted to buy lettuce but I ended up with this.

Now, I am not totally incompetent. I know what lettuce looks like...in America, the land where food is grown to look pretty. So when faced with a wall of leafy vegetable heads that look nothing like the perfectly round, green lettuce that I'm used to, I get confused. At the same time, I haven't learned all of my vegetable vocabulary, so I don't know what to ask for. I usually say I'm making a salad and ask if whatever I'm looking at is good for salad.

In this case, I bought a head of something that was big. Like almost a foot in diameter. But I thought, "Hey, who knows? The outside is green, and it's clearly a leafy vegetable. Let's try it out!" The inside was all yellow/white, like the core of iceberg lettuce. After cracking it open, all I had was a pound of that weird core stuff that no one eats. Niko tasted it and said it was probably some type of cabbage, which I'm not going to eat either. I'll keep experimenting...

Kati - 0, Weird Leafy Vegetables - 1

The Lokma King

What happens when you fry dough and then soak it in honey and then sprinkle it with cinnamon?

Lokma happens. Yummy. This is a picture of some lokma I had a couple weeks ago - coincidentally, the day we signed up for internet, which we finally have (almost two weeks later, as predicted)! These were okay. It's actually hard to find lokma in the city so I was kind of just taking what I could get. 

My first encounter with lokma was in the beach town of Bodrum, when I went traveling around with my friend Stephen for my first week in Turkey. We found the mother-lokma. Watch this guy in action:

I call this guy the "lokma king." Pretty awesome, huh? Last week, Chris tried to make lokma and failed really hard. He's been inspired by this video and is going to try again. Who knows? With internet and a lokma prince in the house, I just might never go outside again.

Visual Balderdash Gibi

Every Thursday, Abby goes to the Kuka Kafe in Beşiktaş for game night. Usually I don't go but tonight I was in the neighborhood and decided to show up. Abby loves games. Loves. Them. She even brought games from America to Turkey. This is a picture of one of her games that we played tonight, Dixit.

Basically there are a bunch of cards with these beautiful abstract images on them. Whosever turn it is says a phrase to describe an image in their hand. Then every player plays a card from their hand that they think best fits the description. The goal is to have people pick your card from the set of played cards. But you don't get any points if a) everyone picks your card or b) no one picks your card. So your description has to be both vague and specific.

We play this game at home a lot in both English and Turkish. It's fun, and it lets me practice my Turkish! What more could a girl in Istanbul want?

1.75 tl tour

So I was going to write a blog post about how you can just take public transportation around the city and it's the same as a cheap tour. But here are the best pictures I was able to capture from the moving tram. 

This is a picture of The Old City. That's the Hagia Sofia there in the background. The second picture is also of the Hagia Sofia but it's pretty terrible (Update: So terrible that I mislabeled it as the Hagia Sophia. It's actually the Blue Mosque). The tram goes a lot closer to it but I couldn't get a picture.

The point is, I suppose, that you can take the tram to the tourist spots but you will have to get off the tram to fully enjoy the sights. The cheap tour only allows you to see new things, not really experience them. My favorite 1.75 tl tour is riding in the front row of the second level of a double decker bus. The whole front is a window and you feel like you're flying. You can bring a fake steering wheel and pretend like you're driving the bus but people might think you're weird. But I think it would still be fun. 

Abby and I made a plan today to take a 1.75 tl tour every weekend. We will find a bus going to a place that we've never heard of/never been to and ride it until the end of the line. Then explore slash eat lunch. Sounds like a great plan. I believe in the 1.75 tl tour. 

American Goodies

My mom sent me a bag of stuff from America. This picture represents my favorite things.

Starting at the top we have my new class ring! I'm allergic to the nickel in white gold so I had to get it redone in silver. It came back a few weeks after I left (my right ring finger has been sad since I got here). Below that we have the most perfect gray nail polish - my mom found it. Next to that is the moisturizer that I cannot make it through a winter without. It's really expensive in Turkey so I had to have it imported (that sounds so serious). There's also my favorite chapstick. Above that we have awesome office supplies: index cards, post-it notes (expensive unless you buy off-brands), and my favorite pens and mechanical pencils. New shoes (and old shoes not pictured), two novels (English books are really expensive here), makeup and razor blades that can't be found here. And finally, the hottest commodity of them all: tampons.

Yes, my friends, the ones with plastic applicators are impossible to find here. For me, this is not okay. I think that an import business based on these puppies alone would allow me to retire by 30. If I put them on the black market, maybe 25. Any friend who visits me is required to bring at least one box. That's my price, and I'm not ashamed to say it. 

Good News!

Oh happy day! Do you see this? This is the best thing that has happened to me this week, grilled chicken aside.

This is a picture of Niko signing for our Internet. And thus bringing our two month quest for utilities to an end. Now, we don't actually have Internet in our house yet. We won't get that for another week (in Turkish time, it might be closer to two weeks).

Here's a example of the circles of insanity that are so easy to get caught in here. So when we rented our apartment at the beginning of September, we were told that we didn't need a residence permit to get utilities in our new apartment. This was great news because you need an address to sign up for an appointment to get a residence permit, and the appointments are so backlogged that it takes six weeks to get an appointment. So if we didn't need this permit for utilities, we could just sign up for them the next day instead of waiting the six weeks. We signed the contract.

But it turns out you DO need a residence permit to put utilities in your name. So we have had water, gas, electricity, and internet in our house over the last two months but their acquisition was not exactly kosher.

Last week, Niko got his residence permit (the first of us - I get mine next week) and spent the last hours of the last working day before a four-day holiday securing us water, gas, and electricity. So we went today to sign up for Internet. The last thing. So exciting. 

But it raises a frustrating problem - you can't get a residence permit without an address and you can't get utilities without a residence permit. It wouldn't be an issue if the appointment happened a couple days after signing a contract but SIX WEEKS?!?!? That's ridiculous. Most people have their utilities in their landlord's or company's name but neither of those things was an option for us. 

So yes, this blog post is coming from sketchy Internet sources but hopefully, this time next week our apartment will be fully operational. And I'll consider myself fully settled in my new home. 

A Big and A Little Thing

Today was the 73rd anniversary of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's death. Atatürk is a big deal here. He's the founder of the Turkish Republic. Take your feelings of pride towards George Washington and multiply it by a lot.

Here's a brief article from Today's Zaman about the importance of the day.

"There will also be a ceremony at Dolmabahçe Palace, where Ataturk died at 9:05 a.m. Regardless of where they are, people are supposed to observe a moment of silence at 9:05 a.m. on this day every year. Flags across the country will be flown at half-staff." 

It's a big moment, and people/cars/everything stops. I wish I had taken a picture of it but I wasn't outside and forgot until it was too late. I'll try next year.

***

In unrelated news, for those of you who read about my Cooking Fail, you might be interested in seeing this picture of the beautiful chicken that I grilled tonight.

Oh yeah. It's juicy, not pink, spiced to perfection, and tender enough to shred. The outside wasn't overcooked either. This was the first piece of chicken I have ever grilled in my entire life. And I did it all by myself and without a recipe. I am honestly really proud of myself. It's the little things, you know?

Henna

Henna isn't exactly a Turkish thing but the house had some left over from a hair dyeing adventure (not mine, promise. although i've been told i need to dye my eyebrows so if anyone has any thoughts on that, let me know). So Niko took to drawing on all of us. I picked the soft swirls that seem to grow out of each other and the dots were Niko's idea. What do you think?

That picture was taken during, and after a couple of hours wrapped in saran wrap, it looked like this. 

It looks pretty orangey. Really, I look orangey too. It's the lighting in my house. I don't look jaundiced in real life. But it darkens up over time. This is today. 

Can you see a difference or does the orangey light mitigate any possible change? Here's a look from our entryway.

Ta-da! I'm a big fan of the viney swirls and dots. Even though it's chilly and I've been wearing long-sleeves so no one else can see it, I know that it's there. It makes me happy to think about the happy pattern that's secretly on my arm. Thanks, Niko!