Kahve, my dark master?

In my 20s I spent a few years living and traveling the world with a guy who was a half-Greek, half-Scottish-American coffee addict/connoisseur (so, super calm), and we enjoyed the coffee traditions in many different countries. One of his favorite activities included berating me in public about how good coffee was wasted on someone like me, who doesn’t appreciate the true flavor, since I ruin it with milk and (at the time) sugar. He would openly tell barristas-or the national equivalent-to use their crappiest coffee on me because I’d never know the difference. It’s a good thing he was hot.

At home, on the weekends he would make our coffee, and even though it insulted him to the very core, he learned how to make my coffee exactly how I liked it, full of blasphemy and heresy in his own personal caffeinated religion. Monday through Friday, however, the coffee-making role fell to me, and he wouldn’t stir from the bed until I wafted his coffee cup underneath his nose, at which point he would groan, stretch and reach out like a blind man while lovingly begging for his ‘dark master.’ Some mornings it was cute, others annoying, but as part of my pre-work morning ritual, I didn’t mind it. Besides, as far as I was concerned, I was getting the better deal. I had to get up 5 minutes earlier on the days we had to get up early anyway, whereas he got up earlier than necessary on weekends, while I was able to luxuriate under the covers for another few minutes. He also cooked really well, so I also got a lovely Saturday breakfast most of the time. Baked goods fell to me to create, because he abhorred and railed against any activity in which anyone told him what to do, and that included cookbooks. If he could make delicious food by experimenting, he was all for it, but the second he had to follow instructions-and baking is a delicate chemical balance that you can’t mess with much without turning chocolate chip cookies into chocolate chip soup-that kind of food was stupid and not worth making or consuming. Except coffee. He would listen to people tell him how to make coffee in their own culture’s style with a dreamy smile on his face, unless of course that person dared to tell him there was anything but perfection in his way of making Greek coffee.

So as long as you didn’t criticize the Great Love of My 20s, he was enthralled with all things coffee, and loved to learn about it from others. In Taiwan, though he loved talking (mostly miming, as we ran through our combined Mandarin-English repertoire in about 45 seconds) to the coffee roaster whose little shop had just enough room for his wife to run a wee jewelry business on the side as we sat at the wooden makeshift ‘bar’ in front of the roaster and his beans as he poured us different shots of coffee to taste, and he really loved Vietnamese coffee in Hanoi and the highlands of northern Vietnam, when push came to shove, deep down he believed that Greek coffee was the best in the world.

He carried around his briki, or Greek coffee pot, to every country where we lived, and his father or aunt in London, living in the Greek neighborhoods (Cypriot Greek to be precise) would periodically supply us with the fine-ground coffee that it required.

The first time I saw his briki (which sounds kinda pervy when taken out of context), I was a little confused. It was almost identical to something my mother had had when I was little, only hers was blue (she says it was green but she’s old and addled and her memory is color blind). I have no idea where she got it-whether it was a gift she didn’t know how to use and so gave a purpose to or whether she found it at a garage sale and thought “Great Scott, this would make the most perfect butter melter EVER! I must have it and pay no more than 50 cents for it.” We were kind of poor when I was little. Mom used to place the briki-butter melter beside the hot burner of her electric stove as she made popcorn, with a slab of butter inside. The butter would melt slowly, never scorching because it wasn’t on the burner itself, and then she would pour it elegantly over her bowl of popcorn, distributing it so well that my budding OCD was delighted by the entire ritual. You may be guessing my age right now, based on the fact that my mother popped popcorn in a pot, therefore before microwaves or air poppers, but alas, mom STILL makes popcorn in the pot, and so do I. She always starts with just three kernels in the oil, and when the first one pops she pours in the rest. As do I now. The first time my stepsister saw this, she was full of dismay, thinking mom was making three pieces of popcorn at a time and we’d be there all night waiting for a handful. But we just believe in our traditions, and maybe our family traditions aren’t as cool as some, but we cling to them furiously.

So, upon first glance at a briki I thought to myself, “Damn, this guy is REALLY serious about his butter on his popcorn. That’s kind of insane to travel with, but at the same time, this may be my soul mate.” In the same way that he had a coffee addiction, I have a bit of a problem with popcorn: if it’s in the house, I’ll make it. In France, when the Great Love of My 20s (hereafter referred to as GLM2) had to work late, I usually didn’t have the energy to make a nice dinner, so would make popcorn. He didn’t approve, as there isn’t a whole lot of nutrition in it and to be fair, the gastrointestinal system probably doesn’t want popcorn kernels to process 4 days per week, but I couldn’t resist. Once, when we were out of butter and olive oil, I reached into a can of duck fat left over from some duck thighs that had been canned in their fat, and popped the corn using that. It was honestly finger-licking good. Sadly the aroma of popped corn-even in the drippings of waterfowl- sticks in the nooks and crannies of an apartment, so he’d come home from the restaurant where he worked at 1am, and scream “GodDAMMit did you make popcorn for dinner again?” You might think that this was insensitive of him, to wake me up when I’d been in bed for hours. You might be right. Man was he hot. And generally I didn’t really fall asleep until he got home anyway, as he rode a bike down poorly-lit streets to get home and I was worried, but on the rare occasion that he did wake me up, I could greet him kindly, once the disorientation wore off, with “Well, as soon as you want to get a real job instead of waiting tables at Le Jungle Café where they only hired you because they say you look and sound like Indiana Jones with long hair, then we can make dinner together again and I’ll get enough nutrition that you can stop worrying about my teeth falling out and you being saddled with an old hag until you die.” As a half-Greek, he liked to yell, but he liked to laugh just as much, so depending on his mood that would either turn into a no-holds-barred war of insults, or he’d chuckle, tell me I’d be cute even toothless, and fall into bed with me. The GLM2 was an international man of mystery. Except where coffee was concerned.

Clearly, the Greek way-the best way-to make coffee is a many-splendored thing. There is an entire ritual around it, not unlike the way mom and I make popcorn, only totally different because popcorn and coffee are consumed in polar opposite ways. But the fact that there is a specific order and placement and way of doing the whole thing, and that we feel strongly that it must be done in precisely that way in order to be done right-that is similar.

It turns out that, like so many other things, Greek coffee and Turkish coffee are basically the same. But one should never tell either ethnic group that because, even though Greece was under Ottoman Turkish rule from 1453 until 1821 and then when Atatürk took power of Turkey in 1923 and the two nations did their population exchange so that all Greeks lived in Greece and all Turks in Turkey (way to celebrate diversity, Kemal), they hate each other. Sometimes. Turks also hate being confused with Arabs. I get it. When someone thinks I’m a short German-and every time I go to Germany, other Germans ask me for directions, “Excuse me, dwarf fraulein, but where is the banhoff, bitte?”-I get really pissed off. Oh wait, no, I think that’s hysterical. Germans think I’m the Mini-Me of the Rhine. Because the Ottoman Empire ruled so many Arab nations for so long (and traded with them for even longer), the languages have a ton of vocabulary overlap, but the grammar of the two languages is totally different. Greeks also borrowed a few Turkish phrases, though they only admit it grudgingly. Imam bayildi, an eggplant dish considered both Greek and Turkish, literally means “the imam passed out [presumably because it was so delicious]” and there’s no way a Greek will convince me that they didn’t get that name from their erstwhile sisters in Asia Minor. The population exchange makes me so sad, to think that there might be less conflict and better cooperation between certain groups if they hadn’t decided that the best way to run country was to homogenize as much as possible. But they certainly weren’t alone in that at the time, and Turks now get to claim to be European when it suits them, Asian when they want, and sometimes they claim to be nothing but Turkish, unique in the whole world. And clearly they invented Turkish coffee. and everyone knows this. Except the Greeks.

The briki, as I knew it from my half-Greek GLM2, is just as important in Turkish coffee, but they call it Cezve. Apparently they also have the word ibrik, but I never heard anyone use it. The root is from the Arabic word ibriq, though a Greek might be more likely to tell you that the Arabs borrowed it from them. “Give me a word, any word, I tell you how is Greek in origin…”

With the GLM2, I learned how to make Turkish coffee, but the briki is a temperamental thing, and if you take your eyes off of it for that crucial .5-second window when it goes from ‘not at all ready and if you serve me at this point you’re a fool and a greenhorn’ to ‘I’m boiling over and burnt and ruined and you have to start over and may God have mercy on your soul, but if the Almighty drinks coffee and sees how you have abused me you’ll spend all eternity in perdition.’ And my attention span is such that watching a pot almost boil is not high on my list of priorities. Eventually the GLM2 stopped letting me make his Turkish–oops, I mean Greek–coffee for him in the morning and we’d only have it on the weekend. This was fine with me, as the grounds are so fine that you have to wait for them to settle at the bottom of the cup before you can drink the coffee itself. When you like your coffee with milk and/or sugar, the inability to stir it without dredging up the swamp tends to make it a lot less palatable, so Greek coffee was never my thing.

In Turkey, however, the ritual really is quite fun, even if I don’t enjoy the straight coffee flavor that much, because you get some little sweets on the side, like Turkish delight if you’re lucky, and a glass of water-I surmise to help rinse the sludge out of your mouth when you drink the coffee too soon or fail to leave the 8% at the bottom that is primarily composed of the grounds. The best part comes after you finish your coffee, when, invariably, one of the Turks in the group of people with you will offer to read your fortune in the grounds. Being Turkish and having had a grandmother seem to be the only qualifications you need.

So, as far as I can tell, you finish your coffee to the best of your ability, wishing you were a baleen whale with filters in your mouth that wouldn’t lets the dregs pass into your throat, then sluice the remains around in the cup a few times, and then turn it over onto the saucer. If you want to ask a question about love, you place a ring on top of the cup as the dregs slump down toward the saucer; if you’re interested in your financial fortunes, you do the same but with a coin.

Leave the cup and saucer a few minutes so that the fortune can solidify. At this point, if you were actually telling a fortune, you’d have a conversation full of leading questions so that by the time you flipped the cup back over you’d already have figured out what the other person wanted to hear. Then, good and marinated, it’s time to flip. You can read both the cup and the saucer, but I prefer the cup because it makes me feel like I’m in Harry Potter’s Divination class.

“Very unfortunate things happening, oh dear, call your mother, and WHA….it’s a grim.”

I don’t just make popcorn and melt the butter in a Turkish coffee pot, I then eat it while watching fantasy movies. Turkish/Greek coffee, however interesting though they may be, just don’t make it into my fantasy. Not this one, at any rate. I will always love coffee, but since I take it with milk, it’s not all that dark of a master. And I can resist coffee if it’s in the house, but not popcorn, which I must make 1-2x per day until it is all gone or my intestines blow a hole in them from too many stuck kernel. So perhaps I have a pale master. Alabaster master. Maize master. Perhaps. For certain, I should not quit my day job.

Call THIS to Prayer!

Before moving to Turkey, the only Muslim country I had ever been to was Indonesia, and I don’t think I should really count that because I only flew in and out of Bali, which –thanks to crazy reefs and poor sailing skills during the Muslim conquest of Indonesia–managed to stay Hindu, even after the Dutch showed up to colonize them and caused ritual mass suicides (to which the Dutch soldiers’ responses were presumably something along the lines of, “Oh, hey, that was easy, and cool, they threw their jewelry at us before they offed themselves, mijn God I wish it were this easy with those other pesky Indonesians.”). Since my only exposure to Muslim culture in Bali was what little interaction I had with Javanese people living and working there, and I never saw a mosque on the entire island, I’m going to say it doesn’t count.

Therefore, upon arrival in Turkey, my understanding of the Muslim call to prayer was limited to what I’d seen in films… in my case that means sappy historical fiction epics like Robin Hood:Prince of Thieves (before Kevin Costner tried to direct) and Kingdom of Heaven aka “That hot elf guy goes to Jerusalem.” I know I’ve seen some hard-hitting political dramas and documentaries that center on Muslim countries and the Muslim diaspora, some of which definitely involved a muezzin call or two, but the actual calls to prayer I recall are from movie scenes that open with an atmospherically meaningful and orientalized wide shot of an ancient city with a beautiful mosque dominating the skyline and it’s probably sunrise or sunset, then the camera pans across the city, finally focusing in on something else beautiful and nostalgic, like carpet shops and cafés where you can get picturesque tea or Turkish coffee and Turkish delight.

(Incidentally, if you haven’t been to Turkey and you do someday, even if you don’t want to buy a rug, go to a rug shop-it’s a fantastic experience where they flip the carpets like pizza dough and serve you apple tea.)

My image of the call to prayer, or the ezan in Turkish (in Arabic it’s called the salat, but the Turks have to do it their own way, you know…ever since the Ottomans started taking over everything…) was pathetically romanticized, if a good Presbyterian girl even can have romantic images of such a thing. Then again, I’m sure there are those out there who hear/read the words “good Presbyterian girl” and get all kinds of ‘romantic’ images of their own, so I’m not going to feel too guilty for my ethnocentrism this time, and by the way, it’s the Catholic girls who wear those plaid skirts, and get your head out of the gutter.

I thought I’d hear the ezan right as the morning sun began shining in my window in the morning and I would stretch languorously and enjoy the ability to wake up to lovely devotional sounds in an exotic language sung by a man full of love for his deity at the top of a tower, well-placed so that the sounds roll across the hills and gently caress the ears of all who fall under its acoustic range.

If you have spent much time in Turkey, you are laughing at me. And I deserve it.

For one thing, as Turkey is a relatively recently developed country, it has gone completely ga-ga over all things technology. Even if the machine in question is unnecessary or even a hindrance, many Turks will deem it essential-but I feel that in a lot of cases it is little more than a display of technology for technology’s sake-such as doing a huge construction project shoddily, but including the bells and whistles. In my Turkish life, this was best exhibited by air conditioning and heating, depending on the time of year; since they have the means to heat or cool any room or transpiration vehicle, it is as though there is an unspoken rule: between April 1 and September 30, regardless of the temperature outside, thou shalt blast the AC until people have icicles hanging off of their eyebrows, and the rest of the year thou shalt turn the heat on so high that people on long-distance bus trips nearly pass out. Even in my classroom I had to keep the windows open all winter -much to the chagrin of my students, who were certain that I was trying to kill them with the cold- because with the windows closed it was 95 degrees in the room, and I personally have always had something of a reluctance to teaching with giant pit stains on my shirt.

In the case of the ezan and my utter naiveté and romanticization of it, how technology has ruined everything beautiful in the world = the tinny sound as it comes through the loudspeakers that nearly all mosques, certainly urban ones, have installed. So while the tune is still the same as in days of yore, it sounds mechanized and impersonal, and my personal favorite touch is that for many mosques you can hear the buttons pushed at the end of the recording that signal the sound system being turned off. So much for romantic Orientalism. The Post-Industrial Revolution has allowed for Turkey to dispense with the need for skilled muezzin, who knew how to sing the ezan beautifully, but who might come down with laryngitis or something inconvenient at any time, and replace them with anyone off the street (though I’m guessing not a woman) who knows how to push a ‘play’ button.

The above issues notwithstanding, the first few days in Turkey were kind of lovely. I only really noticed the ezan first thing in the morning, but was so jet lagged after changing 13 time zones that it sounded lovely and exotic to me as I tossed and turned and tried to convince my body to get on a normal sleep schedule. It was an obvious marker that I was in a new place and had a million things to learn and places to explore. But once my body clock adjusted, the honeymoon ended, and I began to notice just how damn early the first call to prayer takes place. In Turkey, the first daily ezan is called Güneş, and it theoretically takes place at dawn, before the sun appears. I always assumed the first one would happen WHEN the sun appears, so that you wake up with the sun. No no, that would be silly-you need to be awakened before then so that you are already up and ready to go to work by the time the sun shows up. Come to find out, their definition of dawn is ‘the true dawn,’ meaning the moment the sun starts to lighten the sky, like the opposite of that Lifesavers commercial from the ’80s only SO much less charming at 4 in the morning.

The website for the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey has up-to-date information about at what time each call to prayer will take place -literally down to the second for each day. It’s also just a really weird website for Westerners who have not been exposed to much Muslim culture to see the parallels and differences compared to evangelical Christianity-for instance, they announce how summer Koran study classes are starting soon, and the accompanying photograph shows two of each gender, smiling and psyched to go study scripture, but the pre-pubescent girls are veiled. I thought girls didn’t have to veil until menarche, but then that also bothered me too, because how embarrassing must THAT be- you go to school all year with no veil, then suddenly one day you’re veiled and it’s like a giant announcement to all and sundry: hey, look everyone, I have clumps of blood seeping out of my vagina now woo-hoo just wanted you ALL to know. I’m guessing that I am missing the point of veiling…but it bothers me equally to think that the veil is also an announcement to the world that you’re ready to be married because that is already just appalling, in that it turns girls into chattel, but also because in Turkey the average age of menarche is 12.74 years -incidentally that’s about half a year older than the average in the USA (oh how great would it be if the median age were 17 like in the ’50s?)-and no one should ever be looking at a ‘tween’ and thinking about her as marriage material.

I still have a feeling I’m missing the point of this veiling thing.

After a month in Turkey, I was totally over the invented nostalgia I had in my mind about the ezan, until I took a trip to Safranbolu with some friends in the early spring. We stayed at an incredible guest house, converted from an Ottoman mansion, that I cannot recommend enough if you find your way there. The family running the place, the rooms, the food, everything about  it was stunning. However, there was a little country mosque NEXT DOOR, and while the lady of the house did warn us about it, the morning after our arrival I was woken up before dawn by a booming voice that sounded like it was right in my ear, as though I were still a child and my big sister had learned to be a muezzin overnight, just to scare the hell out of me (or perhaps to put the fear of Allah in me) in the morning. But I will say this for the Safranbolu muezzin-he sounded REAL. For the first and only time, I actually believed there was a live singer performing the ezan, though it is just as likely that this small town was the only place that happened to employ a good sound engineer, who just didn’t have the money to move to Istanbul and try to have a career there in the music industry.

As much as I may criticize the ezan in Turkey, in no way do I want to imply that these are my only issues with prayer. Let’s take a look at the prayer I said with one of my parents every night as a child:

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

How is that not meant to traumatize a child? How often do children die in their sleep? If you’re able to memorize and speak this prayer, you’re probably out of the woods as far as SIDS is concerned. Is this just a prayer from a time when life was much more precarious and apparently healthy children actually did die in their sleep? And on the other side, do we assume that when I’m awake I’ll have time to pray for the Lord to take my soul in the moments before dying? What if I screw that up? I’m crossing the street and a bus comes careening around the corner to hit me and in the .03 seconds of cognitive activity I have remaining on this earth I’m expected to pray “Lord, please take my soul right damn now!” but c’mon, that’s a high-pressure situation, and there’s a good chance that my mind would malfunction and instead of praying for my soul to be taken I’d think something far less useful, like ‘oh fuck’ and then end up in Purgatory forever. So unfair.

As a child, I had issues with children’s prayers aplenty, but also with some prayers that appear in the Bible, such as Psalm 23.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures

…well what if I don’t WANT to lie down in a green pasture? What if I felt like going for a walk instead and lying down is of no interest to me at the moment that the Lord maketh me do so? I’m lightly allergic to grass, so if I don’t have long pants on when He maketh me lie down, my legs are going to be all itchy when I get up. And what if there are cows in that pasture? And I end up lying down in a hurry, since He is maketh-ing me, like the freshman girls ‘Air Raid‘ in the film “Dazed & Confused” (though if Parker Posey is God we’re all in a spot of trouble), and I end up lying down on a cow pattie? This just doesn’t sound like a good deal to me. I thought God gave us free will…

Say what you will about the ezan, at least it’s in a language I cannot understand and overanalyze.

Turkish recipe names=cultural insights or cooks on crack?

No two ways around it: Turkish food is wonderful. Plenty of flavors, sauces, spices, some of the best tomatoes and eggplants I’ve eaten in the world…and this is quite possible even more impressive because, like many quickly developing countries, Turkey’s pollution levels are often through the roof and their rapid modernization of sectors like agriculture have left their crops more toxic than most. A recent study of the pesticide levels in 23 European countries found that the top 2 crops with the highest pesticide levels were from Turkey (http://www.greenprophet.com/2012/03/beware-peppers-pears-and-grapes-from-turkey-are-most-toxic-produce-in-europe-study-finds/). I was gladdened to find that the Turkish tomato was neither of those, and while the #2 offender, Turkish pears, don’t tempt me anyway, I had to take a moment to sit and think about my Turkish pepper consumption, as they were #1 with a bullet-the MOST toxic crop in all of Europe. I love peppers. I love Turkish peppers. Above all, I love what you can do with Turkish peppers. So if you’re going to eat these in Turkey, try to get them from an organic market, or failing that, drink a crap-ton of rakı in the hopes that the anise-infested (or is that -infused?) liquor will line your stomach and kill anything unnatural that makes its way down. In fact, since Turkish grapes are also on the highly toxic list-and let’s be honest and admit that for the most part, Turkish wine is vile because they are rakı drinkers so never really got very good at any other fermented beverage-it’s really better for everyone involved if you develop a taste for rakı early on. Some of the wines have amusing names (if you have the sense of humor of a 12-year-old boy), but that’s generally their only merit…

Rakı is one of those beverages supposedly invented throughout the Mediterranean, and unless I’m talking to a Greek (who would probably slap me for saying this, or worse), it’s exactly the same as ouzo. Both are anise-based drinks that are clear in the bottle and which are meant to be mixed with water/ice, which turn the drink translucent and milky. Even if I had ever liked licorice, I’d have a problem drinking something that looks like glaucoma, but since I already have an aversion to anise flavors, rakı and I were sadly never destined to be friends. For that I am truly sorry, because one VERY Turkish way of whiling away the hours is to sit at a café drinking rakı  and eating meze (which are also the same as in Greece…to the point that it’s the same word, but again, beware of saying this in front of any unrestrained Greeks). I would have loved to get my Turkish groove on my playing backgammon with the old guys while having this kind of snacking-meal, and I thought it would improve my Turkish language skills so much that I attempted it once, only the be doubly rejected because 1. I am not a man and 2. the cigarette smoke around the café was so thick that it looked as though I’d be trying to breathe inside a glass of watered-down rakı.

As much as I don’t appreciate the finer points of rakı, and the snob in me is even offended that the most popular brand of it is called Yeni Rakı, which translates to ‘new rakı,’ and I generally only value old booze. No self-respecting semi-French person would ever drink Beaujolais Nouveau, and I like my scotch to be at least old enough that it could vote and buy cigarettes, were it a human—but in spite of all this I LOVE the existence of rakı, that it is a time-honored tradition in a culture that has been Muslim for centuries, and generally in Islam one does not drink alcohol. For me, rakı seems like it must pre-date Islam in Turkey, and be so well embedded in the culture that it has survived this long, in the face of –depending on who was in power– opposition. Rakı is just part of what it means to be Turkish (but please, for the love of God/Allah, do NOT taste it and then comment something like, “Oh hey this is just like that ouzo stuff we drank in Greece,” at least, not if you want the famed Turkish hospitality to remain in place.).

And even though there are some non-Muslim elements present in the Turkish palate, one of my favorite Turkish foods is named for a Muslim holy man, so there has obviously been a considerable amount of influence from the religion.

imam bayıldı

 

Literally ‘the imam fainted’ and the implication is that he fainted from pleasure. Eggplant boats with tomato, garlic and onions, sautéed in olive oil, allowed to cool and then topped with some yoghurt and maybe some fresh cilantro if you’re lucky, imam bayıldı is also in Greek cookbooks…I’m not sure how the Greeks reconcile themselves to making a recipe that clearly comes from the Turkish, but it’s so good that they must just turn their denial off for the time it takes to consume. Apparently the imam ate this and fainted because it was so good, or else he fainted when he found out how much olive oil his wife used to cook it, or he might have fainted when his wife stopped serving it to him. In any case, as fantastic as this dish is, the imam clearly had some issues, and possibly a light case of narcolepsy.

Ali nazik

One of my favorite meze to order, ali nazik means “Ali the gentleman”: You grill eggplant then mix is with yoghurt and top it off with lamb meat.  Evidently the creator of this dish was a super nice guy named Ali. I like to think there is more to the story. So in my world, when I order ali nazik, I’m thinking of a poor one-armed man named Ali who had an old lady for a neighbor, and she was even poorer, but her three favorite things in life to eat were lamb, eggplant and yoghurt. One day she fell ill, and so he created this dish so that he could carry it over to her with his one good arm. Chances are, however, that the real story behind ‘Kind Ali’ it closer to that of Italian pasta puttanesca, “whore’s pasta,” which is so named because it was all the prostitutes could afford to cook…so it was probably created in exchange for sexual favors.

Kadin budu köfte

 

Speaking of sexuality and food, this sumptuous dish translates as “woman’s thigh meatballs.”  The köfte are made of minced meat, rice and spices, mixed up and formed into supposedly female-thigh-shaped oblongs. They are then rolled in egg and flour (as one does with a woman’s thighs on occasion) and fried. I am not usually one to judge (yes, yes I am), but these don’t look as muscular as I like my thighs, personally. I’m thinking the aesthetic on female thighs was different back in the day. And oh, since you couldn’t see thighs on the street very often, getting them served on a plate was probably very nearly an aphrodisiac. I wonder how many Ottoman men went out to eat, developed a ‘taste’ for women’s thighs, then upon marriage were sorely disappointed in the look of real female thighs. Ah well, you can’t win ’em all.

Anali kizli 

“Mothers with Daughters”-how cute it that? the ‘daughters’ are little meatballs of bulgur and the ‘mothers’ are stuffed bulgur köfte. I don’t actually care for the oily sauce they swim in, but the name is just so enchanting.

Hanım gobeği 

SONY DSC

Leaving behind the sweet name of the prior dish, and returning to the slightly pervy-sounding names that indicate a certain obsession with ‘the consumption’ of women and their bodies as objects, hanım gobeği means “the lady’s navel.” It is composed of fried dough and a syrup that is usually simple syrup, though a Greek version would likely use honey, as is also the main difference between Turkish and Greek baklava. At least whoever invented this dessert, along with the creator of the savory “woman’s thighs,” had a healthy appreciation for curvy women. My question is: does the hazelnut represent that this sexy voluptuous lady had an outie? Or is it belly button lint?

Dilber dudaği

I’m going to have to argue with the aesthetics of whoever named this dessert, because its name literally means “attractive woman’s lips.” Phyllo, sugar syrup, walnuts, ground pistachios to top-but I would be more inclined to call them “scary botched botox lips of a woman with a horrible dentist an a moderate case of gangrene.” I admit, however, that such a name does not roll off the tongue.

Vezir parmaği 

I have to admit, vizier’s had it bad in the Ottoman Empire. More often than not, the sultan chopped off their heads whenever things weren’t going well in the empire, which I learned from history books on the subject, but apparently enough of them lost fingers as well-to such an extent that yet another fried dough confection was named after them. Now, I firmly believe that the above picture is closer to the original, which was hopefully based on some bad joke and not created in celebration of a vizier having his fingers cut off, but people have also taken the joke to Hallowe’en-esque lengths and added almonds to act as fingernails…

 

 

Poor viziers.

So what I have learned from Turkish food is that imams pass out easily, women have delicious bellies and thighs but drag-queen-creepy mouths, guys named Ali might cook for you, and never, ever accept the position of vizier, should it be offered to you. I think I understand Turkish culture now. OR, all chefs in Turkish history had several rounds of  rakı before getting creative in their kitchens.

 

 

 

 

It’s kismet…

What a difference champagne makes

To celebrate the end of the school year, it only seemed right to open a bottle of champagne.  I opened a bottle of sparkling wine I had purchased in Cappadocia a few months prior and had been saving for a special occasion. Turkey has quite a few wineries, and while they are of questionable quality, it’s always fun to visit a winery while taking a break from Byzantine rock-churches and fairy chimneys.

While Cappadocia is breathtaking in many ways, the only way their wine takes your breath away is by its complete lack of resemblance to any actual wine produced anywhere else in the world, from a grape at least. But I had gone to the winery and they’d let us taste several wines, so I thought I’d buy a bottle of the sparkling wine they had for sale-not available for tasting, but I figured that if it was terrible I could always use it for mimosas at brunch sometime.

Sadly, I never got around to pouring orange juice into this ‘champagne.’ Whenever I held a brunch, which I did at irregular intervals this past year, dependent on whether or not I had someone who could gain access to the US base hook me up with a pound of bacon (Tip: if you live in a Muslim country and want expats to come over, get your hands on some bacon and make it known that you will be serving it on this occasion. You will never feel more popular), someone I had invited showed up with a bottle of champagne that they could vouch for as being not entirely terrible, so I’d use that first, as my champagne was firmly in the ‘wild card’ category. I was pretty certain it would be bad. I just had no idea how bad. Plus, I was banking on the fact that I hadn’t tasted real champagne in so long that perhaps I wouldn’t remember what it ought to taste like, and as a result, might not know.

The end of a school year already merits such libations, but the end of a first year in a place I have decided to affectionately call a clusterfuck of idiots (as opposed to A Confederacy of Dunces, which involved characters equally as foolish and inept as some I have dealt with in this past ten months) truly called for something special. The problem is, the average Turkish person does not understand what wine is supposed to taste line, much less sparkling wine. I know that coming from an American this may sound like the pot calling the kettle black, given that most of my countryfolk think champagne is the actual name for sparkling wine rather than just that of a region in France- about which the French are fiercely protective, for if they had their way we’d all be fined for using the term incorrectly. But bear with me, as I am not being ethnocentric here, well, no more so than usual. The Turks have not historically placed much value on the production of wine. Their alcohol of choice is raki, which is like ouzo in Greece (though if you say this to a Greek or a Turk, prepare to have all of your future generations of offspring cursed. Why did Ataturk have to insist on that population exchange in 1923?). I cannot drink raki any more than I could drink ouzo or any other anise-flavored beverage. It is the kind of alcohol my stepfather would cheerily claim could ‘put hair on your chest’ and as a hairy chest is unlikely to be an asset for me, I think that’s just best avoided. If you can tolerate or even enjoy such a drink, however, my understanding is that there are few things more pleasurable in Turkey than to go to the kind of establishment that serves only raki and meze, Turkish for tapas. You toss an ice cube into a glass, pour the raki over it, and cut it with some water, which magically turns the liquid milky-opaque instead of clear. That’s the only part of raki drinking I enjoy. Clearly I was the kind of child who thought Ziploc bags were brilliant, happy to watch yellow and blue make green over and over again. Men (mostly, if not exclusively) in Turkey will contentedly change the color of raki while eating some of the best tapas the world has to offer, and they will do so for hours. But they do not do this with wine.

The Turks feel far more strongly about tea than they do about wine. Turkey is part of the Biblical world (according to the tour guides who make their living in Ephesus showing tourists the house that John took Mary to after Jesus was crucified and before he got sent to Patmos where he ate hallucinogenic mushrooms, I mean, where he was inspired by heavenly visions to write the Book of Revelations), and Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana, which isn’t so far away, so it is reasonable to assume that wine-drinking could be in Turkish traditions. Whereas tea enjoys relatively new popularity in Turkey-since coffee became more expensive during WWI and as the Ottomans lost their coffee-producing colonies/provinces- and yet it has run rampant thanks to Ataturk’s espousal of it in the 1920s, so much so that I recently saw a security video from an earthquake in May where two men in a shop wouldn’t run out without taking their tea with them-better to risk being crushed by a falling building than to be safe but thirsty.

So I do not wish in any way to indicate that the Turks do not have a sophisticated palette for beverages. Turkish coffee (also just like Greek but I won’t tell them that), Turkish tea and raki, in addition to some of the disarmingly tasty juices, like pomegranate and sour cherry, price to me beyond the shadow of any doubt that they know their liquids.

Just not wine. And I really don’t think I’m being unfair here. I know that I’m a snob, and pseudo-French, but I did my time in the Gallic hexagon and I have decided this gives me the right to bitch about bad wine. Do not mistake me: I have also lived in Taiwan, where the wine is utterly putrid. But their wine COMES from France, and they really like it. For the Taiwanese, and I am guessing the Chinese in general, since their food is so wonderfully strong-flavored, if their wine isn’t equally so, the flavors wouldn’t work and would offend their culinary traditions and sensibilities. For my delicate Frenchified taste buds, however, this meant ha all white wine in Taiwan tasted like Karo corn syrup, and all red wine tasted lie vinegar. And honestly, if you DID serve delicately-balanced, multiple-grape variety wines with lots of subtle flavors at a Chinese banquet, it would just taste like water, because it wouldn’t match the food. Likewise, if you were to serve 150-proof Gaoliang (supposedly fermented sorghum wine but in reality battery acid) from Taiwan with French onion soup, there would not be a happy customer around for miles. I have to hold a certain grudging respect for the ethnic Chinese decision to like wine the French hate, and in the end, everyone feels like they win, for the frogs unload their freakish wine experiments gone awry and the Taiwanese get wine they appreciate at bargain-basement prices.

Now the Turks make their own wine, rather than buying it from the French, like the Taiwanese do. And perhaps Turkey is going to be like California, where 40 years ago the wines were terrible-not fit even for a box-o-wine, but over time the vines matured and so did their winemakers, and now there are quite a few lovely Californian wines. Regarding the Turks, since wine is a priority more for tourists than for residents, I remain unconvinced that the subtlety of interacting wine favors is really going to be their strong suit anytime soon. However, with climate change, who knows? I read recently that in another generation or so of global warming, Britain will have a better climate than France for viticulture. And you can bet that such information makes any French person dearly, dearly hope the American Republicans are right and that global warming IS a hoax, because the idea of ‘les rosbifs’ making superior wine has got to rip their little froggy hearts.

In any case, I have been thoroughly unimpressed with Turkish wine. But it was the end of the school year, I was too lazy to go out, and I was getting on a plane soon to spend the summer in America, where the wine would at least be mediocre, so I figured it was time to pop open that bottle of Anatolian sparkling wine and see how it measured up.

It was appalling. So appalling that we had to laugh about it. It tasted flat and metallic, and yet too bubbly at the same time. My friend said that if you closed your eyes and pretended you were drinking Spanish hard apple cider, this would taste a little like that, if it had been marinated in dirt and had all the sugar taken out of it. I agreed. But we opened it, so we finished it, then chased it with a nice glass of scotch, pilfered from another recent trip to Europe. I love you, duty-free.

A day or so after the curious incident of the (not-remotely) champagne in the night, I got on a Lufthansa flight to Munich, then another to NY. International airlines still serve alcohol free on international flights, which I have heretofore eschewed because I am a giant nerd who worries about things like getting dehydrated while 30,000 feet in the air, and so I see no point in drinking alcohol, which would further dehydrate me. But on my long flight to Newark -and going to New Jersey is often reason enough to have a drink-I saw a flight attendant uncork a bottle of REAL champagne and serve a glass to a man in front of me. I took that as a sign from the universe that I should also have a glass.

God Bless Lufthansa. It was like effervescent semi-sweet joy on my tongue, that champagne in a plastic glass in economy class. I felt like having another. 3 glasses later, I felt certain that The Grand Budapest Hotel was the best movie I’d ever seen, and had completely lost the ability to call up the flavor of that sparkling wine from Turkey. Time heals all wounds. Then, of course, gripped by paranoia that I’d get severely dehydrated, I annoyed the hell out of the flight attendants by asking for a glass of water every 8 minutes for the remainder of the flight.

I heart New York (now really for the first time, thanks to Ankara)

The first time I came to New York I was 10, on a ‘motor coach’ trip with my mother and sister. If you called it a bus at any moment, the tour director made you put a quarter in a jar, which I won at the end of the trip and promptly spent the entirety on rock candy in New Hampshire while the motor coach drove back up to Maine, where we lived at the time. My memories of New York in 1988: Macy’s was huge and I was afraid to touch anything, the musical Cats had a character in it who looked like what Jon Bon Jovi would’ve looked like if he were a cat, and when my mother and sister went to a musical without me one night because we could only get two tickets, I waited for them patiently in the hotel room-lying on the floor in between the two beds, just in case someone fired bullets into the window of our 8th-floor room.

So it wasn’t really a love affair from the start.

My aunt moved to NYC a few years later, and while on my college interview driving tour of the Northeast with my mother, we stopped in Manhattan for Thanksgiving, and my aunt took us to a Cathedral near Columbia University called St John the Divine. This gorgeous cathedral had been built by the Catholic Church, but when they ran out of money they sold it to the Epsicopalians, who made it the New-York-est of cathedrals by having rain dances and animal blessing ceremonies, but most of all by training and hiring new stonemasons, chosen from among the local homeless men. The old stonemasons needed to retire, according to my aunt, and so they offered to train and give a vocation to several men living on the streets. Quite a number of them took the cathedral up on the offer, and for years you could watch the new guys carving saints and using each other’s faces as models. The consequences of this development are that when you go there now, you see the ‘old’ statues of white, long-nosed, straight-haired saints, then the next columns over you find frizzy-haired, bendy, flat-nosed saints. It’s pretty beautiful. T

There was a terrible fire at the cathedral several years ago, so the ‘newest’ statues are still being cleaned, from what I can tell, but it’s still great to see the progression.

Over the years, because of my aunt, and because my college was in close proximity to NYC, I came to appreciate it much more than I had at age 10, cowering between hotel room beds (as though my mother and big sister would have stopped the rogue bullets if there had been a shooting from across the way and they’d been there, but don’t mess with the logic of a pre-teen). But I never felt like it was a place I’d want to live. Too big. Too busy. I’m not really a city girl-I like to stop at about 2 million.

And I always felt that NYC was only for sophisticated people. Everyone here was well-dressed, knew everything about everything, and was some kind of rock star, movie star, artistic genius, etc…and I’m not a sophisticated type. I’ve lived in Paris and San Francisco and been to 36 countries and have two Master’s Degrees that will never, ever give me anything but social capital (I mean, come on, Anthropology and Theatre?), but I’m not cosmopolitan enough for New York.

Or am I?

I arrived last night on a flight from Ankara, a city I still don’t know very well after a year because, quite frankly, it is underwhelming in every way except affordability, air pollution and men who think you’re going to sleep with them as soon as they hear you’re American. Perhaps, just perhaps, now that I have that experience under my belt, the next few weeks in NYC will cause me to appreciate it in all the ways I never could before.

For instance: you can drink the tap water. Wow. In Ankara you CAN drink the tap water, and it’s a great way to lose weight. Mmmm, dysentery at the turn of a faucet. In addition: New York has sidewalks. Big, sprawling, clean, smooth sidewalks. Ankara has some sidewalks, to be sure, but they are generally so pock-marked that I cannot fathom wearing anything but tennis shoes while out, in the hopes of thereby avoiding breaking an ankle. And no one cares what I look like. I am not sure if New York has become less swanky over the years or if I just don’t care anymore, or if perhaps I was dazzled by the reputation when I was at a young and impressionable age. But today I went out walking in my jet-lagged state wearing a strappy loose dress I’ve had since 1999 and flip-flops, and not giving a damn. And no one looked at me. No one. Not like at home in Ankara, where, if I am wearing yoga clothes in the grocery store, veiled women and mustachioed men stare at me as though the Whore of Babylon is putting tomatoes in a bag.

And breakfast. Oh breakfast. The thing is, I’m not giving Turkey enough credit. There are amazing places for Turkish brunch, and nearly ever hotel in the country where I have stayed has included breakfast, and it is always filling and nutritious-several kinds of cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, plenty of bread with butter and fascinating jams, ranging from sour cherry (which is amazing and found nowhere else, as far as I know) to fig or quince. There is always an abundance of tea, served in the ingenious manner where the tea tank has one spigot for super-strong tea that is rather opaque and another spigot for hot water so that you can dilute it according to your taste.

But the coffee is usually Nescafe, affectionately known as powdered shit in a cup. Sadly, I cannot drink Turkish coffee because, like Greek coffee (and everyone who isn’t Greek or Turkish will readily admit that they are one and the same), it is thick and include the grinds, so you have to let them settle at the bottom, which is not conducive to my latte-with-a-touch-of-sugar preferences. I dated a Greek guy who told me I shouldn’t be allowed to call what I drank coffee, because I had bastardized it beyond the point of recognition. We had a healthy relationship based on mutual respect for our differences.

Other problems with Turkish breakfasts include the lack of bacon and the lack of bagels. Sure, they have simit, which are bagel-like and covered in poppy seeds (as with the reluctance to admit the cultural and culinary overlap in Turkish and Greek culture, apparently Jews and Muslims have no overlap either), So this morning, as I walked around my new temporary neighborhood, I stopped in at a place called Nussbaum & Wu. for coffee and a bagel. I’m thinking that’s a German Jew and a Chinese person getting together to make deliciousness, and it’s oh-so New York. Ten bucks says they’re open on Christmas Day. May all the gods that are worshipped at the cathedral of St. John the Divine bless that establishment. I got an everything bagel toasted with egg and cheese (no bacon…something about the Jewishness of the place. Damn) and a latte. And the latte wasn’t burned. It had enough flavor that I wasn’t required to douse it in sugar, like I am at Starbucks, which is the only place I can drink coffee in Ankara, alas. I nearly jumped over the counter to plant a kiss on the barista. But he was a hipster, so would probably have been freaked out.

On my way back from breakfast-happy-coma, I stopped in to D’Agostino’s grocery store, and just drooled at the dozens of packages of bacon. I realize full well that bacon has a bunch of toxic additives in it, and it’s not exactly the most nutritious cut of meat, but I have never really favored pork until this year, living in a place where I can’t have it. Forbidden fruit, or perhaps forbidden flesh.

I also walked by a sushi place, a Korean place, and a handful of Mexican joints. I am going to have to do about 7 hours of yoga per day this next month in order not to gain weight beyond recognition this summer.

Enh, first-world problems. For now, I am just grateful that finally, after 25 years of visiting New York, finally I get it.

I heart NY.

Party on American Soil

Expat social life in Ankara is primarily defined by finding other expats, regardless of country, with whom you have something in common, and drinking mediocre, over-priced alcohol. It’s kind of like college. Without the frat boys and the keg stands. And perhaps I just don’t get invited to the right expat parties. But the jewel in the crown of expat living here in Ankara is hands-down the embassy parties. In Paris, the expat community is too big for just any random Westerner to have an ‘in’ at embassy functions, and in Taiwan, well, since they’re not legally recognized as a country by anyone except Panama (and formerly Costa Rica, who, oh yeah, has no standing army), there aren’t a whole lot of diplomatic parties being thrown there. So the whole diplomatic corps expat world is new to me.

And now that I mention it, a lot of guys who become diplomats have an air of aging frat boy about them, come to think of it-I mean, it’s a job where you get taken care of, and where women wherever you’re posted tend to fawn all over you because they want your big…hard…passport. Though I imagine it must really suck to get posted in Scandinavia: “Hi, I’m whiter and richer than you are, why would I want to drop everything and follow you around for the next 30 years?” Almost as difficult as being a Mormon missionary in France: “So you’re saying I convert to your religion and I stop drinking wine and can only have sex with my spouse? Are you insane?” But most of the time, and certainly here, being an expat/diplomat is a lot like being a straight man in San Francisco; you are such a rare commodity that there are tons of people around who want a piece, whether you be male of female. I do think there is a certain allure to the passport, but for the women it helps that Americans are all giant sluts. Or so every high-school-cheerleading film that somehow gets exported always teaches the natives of any other land. We’re so easy, in fact, that a lot of local men don’t even bother trying to woo/seduce/charm/talk to us, which is highly entertaining as they stumble through a conversation and then after 3 minutes ask you to go home with them, secure in the knowledge that you are going to say yes, because that’s what all the girls in “American Pie” would do. It’s not their fault-they are laboring under a  giant misunderstanding. It’s the Australian girls who are truly trampy. Or so I’ve heard.

Alas, I am not in the Australian embassy loop, if there is one in Ankara, so I have no way of testing my theory, which is just as well, because I’m a sucker for that accent. In fact, it seems, from what I have heard, that there has been much less embassy activity this year than in prior years, particularly regarding the US Embassy. You’d think I’d have been to my own embassy before going to any others, but no, I got into the French, German and Canadian embassies before I even heard of a US embassy function, much less got on the list. To be fair, there was a bombing at the US embassy a little over a year ago, and they have been on the down-low for the most part ever since.

So when some friends asked if I wanted to go with them to the Saint Patrick’s Day party on March 28, I jumped at the chance. Yes, that’s considerably late for a Saint Patrick’s Day party, but we are dealing with the US Marine Corps here, and those boys are badasses, but they’re also about 20 years old and probably don’t care all that much about when Padraig the Roman slave-priest expelled snakes from Eire and saved the should of the people. They do, however, care about putting up green leprechauns on the walls and serving beer, which is more useful in the long run. Another organizational snafu-nobody was quite sure when it would start, so I missed a few people who decided to treat it as a happy hour, because my friends and I figured it made more sense to go when things were already rolling. And we were not wrong, though the security there was a bit rougher than usual. A woman in front of us who held a US diplomatic passport wasn’t on the list and had a hell of a time getting in. I saw her walk into the bar about 30 minutes later.

What did it feel like to be on American soil for the first time in months? Kind of rad, but also kind of like walking into a compound. And the first thing I saw was a branch of the bank of jackasses I belong to here, so at least it wasn’t too depaysant. The place was huge, and we had to follow a trail of security guards to get to where the party was held, my favorite part being the moment we walked by outdoor showers that made me think of a 1970s summer camp for derelicts. By that point we just had to follow the music, and walk into a wall of people smoking outside. Oh right, we were still in Turkey. God, I miss living in a country where you can sneer at a smoker with half-contempt, half-pity, and not feel like a bad person for it.

While holding my breath and pressing through the cigarette-lovers, I ran into a friend who was speaking with 2 guys and informed me that they were French. She and I both lived in France a while ago, and we like the variety. Regardless, I don’t care what language you speak or how cute you might be, I said why great, would love to talk to y’all but I’m allergic to smoke, then proceeded into the coat room  where I stumbled upon…hot dogs…hamburgers…it was like a summer bbq in there and it was gorgeous. I haven’t eaten a hot dog in about 15 years, and I only want a hamburger made with hippie grass-fed beef on an organic cracked-wheat bun that was kissed by babies who volunteered for the job (did I mention I lived in San Francisco?), but I almost dove head-first into those trays of GMO death-meat. Almost. First I got distracted.

By beer. Really gorgeous beer, made by monks in Germany of Belgium, with photographs of cathedrals on the labels. The Turks can make raki like nobody else on earth, but beer is not their forte. And importing anything here costs an automatic extra 20% for customs or something like that, so it’s not worth it for the business owners to stock them. Never have I felt more like saying “God bless the marines” than when looking at that beer.

Speaking of seeing phenomena I’m not used to here anymore, there were more Black people at that party than I have seen since leaving the US. And I apologize if I offend, but all of my Black friends in the US think I sound stupid if I say African-American, so I go with what they want. We have a few people of African descent where I work, but some are married to real African diplomats, one is Afro-Caribbean, and one of my favorite people here was British, of Ghanaian descent, and she quit in January because she couldn’t handle the way people treated her here, and she lived in Japan for several years, so it’s not like she’s not used to dealing with being different. And this party had every color of the rainbow, and it felt like home. As did the beer. And the music. And the dancing.

When you put on dance music in a party full of people from many countries, you find out pretty quickly who is American and who isn’t. We got DOWN. I’m not saying we’re good dancers, per se, and if you put on salsa music, most of us are screwed. But loud, probably bad, dance music, now that we can do. When Americans go out to dance, we plan everything accordingly: don’t wear too much make-up or it’s just gonna run, make sure you can bend your knees and hips in those jeans, because if not you’ll look stupid, and don’t wear anything that’ll get precarious if you wanna shake it. The non-American women did not seem to know this, nor that dancing causes people to sweat. Then again, most of them weren’t really dancing. The other Anglo-Saxons were right there with us, and the Turks kind of gave it the old college try, but my favorites are the Northern Europeans. Take that-you may have health care and a reasonable retirement age for all, but your rhythm sucks. Most of them don’t even try. I was in Norway years ago with a bunch of Spaniards and Venezuelans, and we went into a club where everyone was pale and fair and a foot taller than most of us, but holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and swaying to the music with no notion of what a beat is. And they stared at us small dark people (and only in Norway do you count as dark with chestnut-honey-colored hair, but it was kind of amazing being exotic for once) as though we must have been surgically enhanced with extra joints.

So, by and large, the dance floor was cleared for us. For US. And then I realized: I hadn’t heard a single song I recognized. But my 23-year-old friend knew them all. I allowed myself to feel old for a minute before remembering that I had the moves like Jagger, and so I threw myself into learning new lines dances, like the Shuffle and the Wobble. When I was truly young, we had the Superbowl Shuffle…not the same. And I always thought wobbling was a bad thing, but evidently I’m totally outdated, so I attempted to turn off my brain and just let my feet do the work. I don’t even like line dances. And perhaps these dances were legitimately better than the Macarena or the Boot-Scootin’ Boogie or the Electric Slide, but I think a huge part of why I enjoyed them was just because it was all so very American. There is something about being with people from ‘home’-even if the US has over 300 million people, and a lot of those of us at this party would have been highly unlikely to socialize together at any other time, something about being in this foreign place bonds us together- we understand the same bad jokes,  we make the same innuendos, I mean GOD  I was so HAPPY just to see a hot dog, imagine how I felt being able to dance, even if I was one of the oldest people there.

And then something truly magical happened. I walked by a trash can and saw a flash of a bottle label that looked familiar. It was blue. My heart skipped a beat, and I am not ashamed to say I stopped at that trash can and looked long and hard into it until yes, I saw a Blue Moon. If you don’t know Blue Moon, it’s an American Belgian-style white beer, and probably my favorite beer NOT made my monks. I firmly believe that people who are not having sex make the best beer, but Blue Moon isn’t bad, and in this country it’s frickin’ ambrosia. I am not entirely sure what happened next, but I think it was sort of like the moment in “The Fellowship of the Ring” When Pippin realizes, in the tavern in the village of Bree (like you didn’t know I was a giant nerd), that you can order a beer in the form of a PINT and the little hobbit scampers over and under people until he reaches the bar. I don’t have hairy feet, but otherwise that was pretty much me.

And I got my Blue Moon. From a barely-legal marine. And I turned with utter glee and my face ran smack into a man’s…solar plexus. I looked up and made eye contact through the clouds and asked, “What the hell are you, like 7 feet tall?”

-“No, just 6’9” and 3/4.

Oh that’s all. So that happened. But I don’t care if you are a totem pole of hotness, if you’re not a Blue Moon and you’re not on the dance floor, you are of little interest to me. Then again, if you’re going to dance all night, eventually  you need a guy to dance with. A guy with rhythm. If you’re going to pick a man at this party who could dance hot (in all likelihood Black-yeah how ‘s THAT for stereotypes, but I swear there was a dearth of white men dancing) man (aside from the Saudi uni student who THINKS he’s Black, but hey, he taught me the Wobble.) to dance with when you haven’t danced in a long time, you may as well go for one who stands out. So when he came to the dance floor, I went for the tallest. In all honesty, it’s not that easy to dance with someone whose hips, if they moved too quickly, could hit you in the ribs and knock the wind out of you…but it was worth it.

I didn’t want to seem like a total stereotyping cretin, so I did not ask him if he played basketball. I had a boyfriend in college who was 6’4″ and he couldn’t catch a cold, much less a basketball, and he mildly resented people who just assumed he played. So I innocently asked what this guy did here in Ankara. He said he built tree houses. I looked at him quizzically and asked him how he built tree houses in a place where there are no trees. He enjoyed that. I guess he gets tired of people assuming he plays basketball too. And though I had imbibed enough of my beloved Blue Moon to actually believe the tree-house thing for a split second, I wasn’t too far gone to appreciate the sense of humor. But as far as conversation goes, the hell with it, I was there to dance.

I never liked talking while dancing at a loud ‘dance party’ kind of function-you end up having to shout and going hoarse and it’s not like you’re having a quality conversation anyway, so just shut up and dance. But when you get a crick in your neck just trying to say ANYTHING to the tallest person you’ve ever seen, yeah, then you REALLY don’t so much want to dance. I did make a comment, while he was singing along to one of the songs, that I still hadn’t heard a single song I knew, so then he asked me who I listened to for music, and I replied, well you know, people like Ani Difranco and Tom Petty, and the Steve Miller Band and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He informed me that I was the whitest woman he’d ever met. But he was just happy I was American and willing to let him knee me in the stomach on the dance floor while cradling my Amer-Belgian beer as the beautifully-dressed and well-made-up Turks watched us like we were aliens. If there’s no way you’re going to really belong in a culture, you may as well just embrace your differences and get on with it.

I’m just mad about Saffron…Safranbolu’s mad about me

If I haven’t made it clear by now that Ankara is not the most exciting place to live…it’s not. I honestly think there was more to do on any given week-end in the little town in Wales where I went to grad school than there is here, although it’s entirely possible that most people don’t find actually counting sheep (or dodging sheep, or hitting sheep accidentally with golf balls) as entertaining as I do. I am sure that most, if not all, of my problem locating fun things to do in this city of 4-5 million is that I just don’t know my way around well enough. That, coupled with the fact that I’ve known dogs who understood more words in English than I do in Turkish (sit, stay, park, vet, bunny…there are some dogs with considerable vocab), is just not conducive to having much skill in finding fun things to do. The city is not built on a grid, and the sidewalks are more deeply pitted than the face of that guy who played Magwa in “Last of the Mohicans,” so not all that fun to walk around if you have Gumby ankles like mine that love to just fold in random directions given half a chance.

So it stands to reason that people who live here enjoy getting out of town when the chance presents itself. From Istanbul airports you can fly directly to almost any destinations in the world, but from the Ankara airport you can go directly to…Istanbul. Munich. Doha. And Tehran. Nevertheless, there is so much to see in this country-this crossroads of civilizations-that a well-planned road trip now and again is far superior to taking a 5th trip to Bavaria in one year. I never would have thought it, but the sight of lederhosen can get old.

When a friend proposed I join a group of women to go to Safranbolu for the week-end, I jumped at the chance, knowing nothing about the town except that they evidently had a lot of Saffron.

I knew 3 things about Saffron before going to Safranbolu for the week-end with a bunch of strong, interesting, kick-ass women:

1. It’s expensive

2. It turns stuff yellow, like the rice in paella

3. It’s mentioned in the song “Mellow Yellow” (quite rightly)

And I can’t even really be sure #2 is accurate. I have since learned that the flowers are purple, the high-quality saffron only has two little stamens or pistols or whatever the hell get turned into saffron eventually, as opposed to the lower-quality saffron flowers, which have 6 of them (tramps), and I still have absolutely no idea what one does with it in cooking. Everyone else on the trip bought some saffron. I bought a magnet.

I’d love to say it was an educational week-end, but that is pretty much the extent of my learning. Unless you count my learning this uncanny phenomenon whereby, during a Turkish road trip, every gas station is always on the opposite side of the road when you need it. But I wasn’t driving. I wasn’t navigating. I didn’t have to do anything, except be the token American, and I’m pretty used to that no matter the circumstances, so I was up for it.

Road trips were different when I was younger: playing loud music, preferably 80s or Red Hot Chili Peppers, buying obscene amounts of junk food at convenience stores, swapping dirty jokes…I refuse to believe that I have matured, but for some reason, this time I just looked at the scenery and debated whether drinking coffee would mean I’d have to use a rest stop squat-in-a-hole toilet. I have officially gotten old. On the up-side, the scenery was lovely once we left the city–plenty of mountains and plateaus reminiscent of a calmed-down Arizona, and even a few remnants of snow here and there.

I most definitely cannot recall the last time I spent a week-end with 7 women. Even my mother, her sisters, my sister and my grandmother only come to a total of 6, the 7 of us haven’t willingly been together since 1994, and I’m pretty sure whoever planned that Christmas was smoking crack when they thought it would be a good idea. That is about the same time I quit cheerleading, wherein I was indeed on a squad with 9 other girls, but since I didn’t actually LIKE any of them, and their conversation extended only as far as how much they could shorten their skirts before our coach would notice, how long they could do the splits in the air while lying down without their feet going to sleep, and whether or not they had mastered the moves from the latest Janet Jackson video, I wasn’t sure what 2 days with 7 women, most of whom I barely knew, would yield.

I needn’t have worried.  One of the best thing about women is we tend to chill as we get older-with each other at least-as we realize that we don’t need to fight over male attention because they’re not actually the rare commodities that our culture cunningly teaches us to believe. There are no more rumors, no backstabbing, and at my age, if another woman were to call me a slut, I think I’d guffaw, whereas at age 15 I’d probably have cried in the bathroom for all of 4th period and then told everyone that she masturbated (which was shockingly GROSS and VULGAR in the 90s in Colorado Springs, CO, where everyone was a Christian and if you did that you’d totally go to Hell).

I love all smart people, women or men, who take an interest in others and their ideas. I love when people with strong personalities inevitably clash and then find a way to get over it. But I love nothing so much as the bed & breakfast where we stayed in Safranbolu. When we got there, our hosts were waiting to show us a video of the town, another video of all of Turkey, and mama brought us all food. Why would you ever stay in a hotel, when someone brings you food and is excited to talk to you and tell you about their hometown in their halting language skills, AND they pretend that your halting language skills are impressive? And this house, it was this great old house from 300 years ago (Safranbolu has tons of old Ottoman houses), with gorgeous wooden panels and ceilings, and on the ground floor: two walls of plants and a third taken up almost exclusively by a fireplace larger than my last apartment in Paris had been. I always wondered in the Bible story about the 3 boys, how they had comfortably squeezed into a fireplace, like Santa (who incidentally, is from Turkey), but this thing could have fit Shadrach, Meshach AND Abednego standing with their arms out and still not touching. Side note: do not name your son any of these names if you don’t want him pummeled in the playground. When our hosts lit the fire, the kindling crackled so loudly that we couldn’t hear anything else. Guest house mama’s father had apparently been the mayor of the town, and this gorgeous grande dame of a house had been in her family for generations, while guest house papa had been a colonel in the air force until he retired. I can just imagine my stepfather, a retired Naval Aviator, making the poor man sit and listen to his pilot stories for hours on end-thankfully his English wouldn’t have been good enough to let on that he was bored. Guest house kids (grown up though) were living in the US and Germany, and the parents had just gone to visit the EU for several days. Mama busted out some Turkish cheese and even sliced up some Dutch cheese they had brought back from their trip. Knowing how precious this cheese was, that it was irreplaceable for them, that they’d not taste it again until they saw their daughter again, made my tiny black heart grow a few sizes, but I was also entirely flummoxed, because if someone comes to my home and wants to even taste one of the things I can only get in Duty-Free shops in the Munich airport (and I go there at least every other month), it is all I can do not to take my fork and stab them in the throat. I should probably work on the whole “God loves a cheerful giver” thing.

Safranbolu has a lovely Old Town, great marketplace, copper vendors, and  dozens of old Ottoman houses (Ankara is a little skimpy on actual houses). It does not, however, have a thriving night life, unless you think it’d be a fun night out to break into Turkish Delight shops and roll around in it until the police come and throw you in a Turkish prison, where ‘Turkish Delight’ would take on an entirely different meaning. Add to this the fact that Safranbolu is a dry town, which we thankfully knew and so brought a few bottles of wine with us, and it pretty much makes the wildest night possible consist of sitting with your week-end roommate in her incredibly rad adult-sized onesie jammies, drinking red wine out of bedside glasses. We were 8 serious badasses.

You might be acquainted with those towns in the Bible Belt in America that have a church every 50 ft…if so you can paint a picture in your mind of Safranbolu with mosques. The best part of this is that, no matter where you are, you can be woken up at 5.30 in the morning to sonorous caterwauling that sounds like it’s right on top of you. Extra points if you’re staying at a guest house with a dog who thinks he is the back-up singer for the 5.30am call to prayer. I miss church bells. I just don’t see Ernest Hemingway penning “For Whom the Muezzin Calls.”

So we got up. And while I will insist that we were 8 phenomenal women (à la Maya Angelou), in just a few ways we did fit the stereotype of things women do when we get together…being supportive, complaining about our own bodies, talking about men, and shopping. Several times during the week-end someone needed something and 5 of us jumped up to offer help. The 3 who were mothers definitely foremost among the volunteers. Not to be down on men, but it reminds me of an old joke about watching the Superbowl and running out of tortilla chips: in a room full of women they fall over each other while running to the kitchen to get more, while in a room full of men they look around and then call out ‘not it’ as quickly as possible. In addition, we all said ‘sorry’ for no apparent reason half the time, only with 7 Canadians it’s kind of charming, because they actually say ‘soary’. Aw.

Regarding the next stereotypical female topic of conversation, I ended up asking if we could STOP making little self-deprecating comments about our bodies at a certain point, because we all CAN find something about our bodies we can’t stand, and really, how does that help anyone? My ex used to say that my thighs could feed the world, and to a Mediterranean guy that’s evidently a high compliment, but, um, not every man feels that way about a woman with hamstrings thicker than his neck. I did take it as something of a compliment when one of the other women on the trip said, “I don’t know if I want to go to a hammam and get naked with all you skinny bitches” for a split second, the moment it took for me to forget that she called me skinny (aw!) and to realize that a perfect woman just insulted herself. And honestly, none of us are skinny, because we were all feminine with amazing curves, like real women should have.

I thoroughly enjoyed the only conversation about men I recall-we were standing outside a coppersmith’s waiting for him to finish an engraving that one of us had asked for on a dish set, and somehow we got on the topic of how many different nationalities we’d each slept with. Since most of us don’t keep diaries of that kind of information, those of us who hadn’t gotten married young took a while to come up with our lists. And, much to my chagrin, because I love a good competition, I forgot one, and didn’t realize it until days later. Sadly, as it’s probably a really bad idea to rush into the Canadian Embassy screaming, “Mexican! Mexican! I forgot the MEXICAN!” I guess that conversation will just have to fade into the ether.

But oh, did we shop. And I hate shopping. Well, I hate malls. But going to market vendors is different. There’s more adventure to it, more exoticism, or something. And you never know what kind of people you’ll run into. I was in Vietnam with an old boyfriend years ago, and he was so good at the bargaining thing that this Hmong vendor invited us to come back and have dinner with them. 10 days in north Vietnam, and by far my best memory is sitting in the dirt sharing rice with a family in the dark over a fire, after the market had closed for the day, holding hands and trading jewelry with their 13-year-old daughter. Slightly less adorable (but really only just slightly), was the metalworker guy who sucked us into his shop when he heard our English, crying out at the top of his lungs that he loves America and Canada, and proceeding to show us about 50 news articles in papers from as many different countries, featuring a younger version of himself beating away at hot metal. He was so cute about vaunting his fame to us that we found it oddly charming. He dragged us around to different shops, workshops, and showed us a gorge we’d have walked right by without him, then he insisted on taking a few very touchy and affectionate photos with us. I may have already forgotten his face (I think he had a mustache?), but his hands were unforgettable-deep crevices in the strong, thick fingers lined with black soot from the forge. They certainly gave the impression that he knew his craft, in the event that the newspaper articles hadn’t convinced us.

At the top of the hill overlooking the old town, we encountered, while looking for a view and a nice photo-op, fruit trees in delicious-smelling bloom (and no, please don’t ask me if they were cherry, almond or apricot…a plant’s a plant and it smelled sweet), a ludicrous garden exhibit of 7-foot-tall replicas of all the major clock towers in Turkey (hm, maybe the Bells DO Toll for someone here), and of course, a bunch of guys dressed as Roman soldiers, shooting a short film. I spoke with one of them while he was on a break, and he said it was just a little studio thing and that they were hoping it’d get picked up in Istanbul…then he let one of my friends take a picture with him wherein she was holding his sword at his neck. I kind of loved him.

It really started to feel like too normal and cute of a week-end to be worthy of much of a blog post (though I’m pretty long-winded and very good at diverging for several paragraphs), and then, on Sunday morning, we went to the hammam. I don’t want to sound puritanical, but evidently, mixing a bunch of naked women, heat and water is going to be a recipe for something memorable. Just ask Snoop Dogg. Though, given his favorite pastime other than Girls Gone Wild can severely impair memory, perhaps he’s not the most reliable source.

Every hamam in Turkey is different, sometimes little difference, sometimes big. But they mostly have the same basic elements: you get down to bikini bottoms, you pour hot water on yourself for a while sitting at a marble sink, after a while an imposing-looking matron grabs you and brings you to a hot slab roughly akin to the Stone Table in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” except no lions or wardrobes around, lays you down, scrubs a few layers of skin off of you, soaps you up, soaps you down, gives you a giant wedgie with your bikini bottom, then pulls it way down, puts it back, and re-delivers you to your seat by the marble basin where you recommence pouring hot water on yourself. All in all, a highly pleasant experience. Some variations to this hamam…my lady, in order to indicate that it was time for me to turn over, delivered a satisfactory-sounding slap to my left gluteals…I’m not sure if that was because she figured my Turkish wasn’t good enough to understand ‘hey foreigner, turn over’ or if it was just that kind of place and her kind of thing. To be fair, it’s been a long time since anyone spanked me (the Mexican I nearly forgot about might have been easier to remember if he had), and it got the job done, so whatever. When she was done manhandling-exfoliating-washing me, she sat me down and said “Shampoo”, then slopped a dollop of shampoo onto the crown of my head. Not knowing this ham am’s etiquette, and having never been shampoo-dolloped before, I thought she was going to wash my hair, and since that’s pretty much my favorite part of any haircut, I sat there and waited. She looked at me like I was mentally deficient, grabbed my right hand, and a-little-more-heavily-than-necessarily placed it on my head over the shampoo…kind of reminded me of my older sister doing something similar years before and then asking me why I was hitting myself. So yeah, I guess I was supposed to wash my own hair. Duh.

Clean and fresh and sparkly, I rejoined my friends. Soon after that 2 Turkish women came in with a little girl. At first this made me happy, because there was finally someone there with smaller breasts than mine, even if she was under age 12. And no, I wasn’t looking at everyone’s chests and measuring, but it comes to my attention when I feel like I’m the only one still in a training bra. However, this trio quickly became more awkward and mammary-centered than I could have imagined. The 2 adults were buxom, to say the least, and then some; they kind of looked like those old fertility statues you find in archaeological exhibits in museums of human prehistory. And the adults lay themselves out majestically on the Stone Table, which is incidentally in the center of the hammam, and as far as we could tell, they then put on a little lesbianic show for us. Yeah, more than my spanking woman. Much more. The first thing we noticed was one of them roll over and bite the other one. On her nipple. Oh, it gets better. Or worse. The bitEE yelped, then laughed, then they BOTH turned to look at US. The foreign women. Not the other Turkish women there. Us. Were they trying to gauge our reactions? We honestly didn’t really react, because we hadn’t believed our eyes. So that was unsatisfying to our exhibitionists, and they had to ramp it up a few notches. A few moments later, the bitER rolled to her side, threw her ample leg over that of her friend/lover/what-the-hell-ever, and therein began some fondling. We REALLY tried to look away, but it was the middle of the room and it was just not the kind of thing you see every day, and it was like watching a train wreck–you couldn’t look away. I was averting my eyes so hard, studying the centuries-old ceiling, that I didn’t notice our Sapphic stars rising and then going with the child over to an area with the marble basins where some of our group were seated. They motioned to one of our party and said “Chok guzel. Mashallah” (You’re so beautiful, May Allah Protect you) and tried to get her to join them. She declined, and the crestfallen Venuses had to make do with giving each other back rubs, with the added bonus that when I walked over to see how my girls were doing, I got the eyeful of the backrubbER reaching under the arms of the backrubbEE, grabbing her breasts and then jiggling them. Really? I was less offended that they were doing this in a public ‘safe’ space and more offended that a WOMAN was doing this: I honestly thought only men were stupid enough to think that we like being reminded that parts of our bodies jiggle. I joined a ridiculously-overpriced gym precisely because I’m doing my best to diminish my jiggling. Ugh. You’d think a woman would KNOW not to do that.

I know there was more to the Dykestravaganza performance (and I’m allowed to use that word because I don’t think ‘dyke’ is an insult, but rather a synonym, and because it goes best with the word), but I think I may have blocked out the rest. The part that really floors me is, not why they would pretend to be lovers just to try to goad us into some reaction, nor why, if they really were lovers, they would feel the need to try to have an international orgy in the local hamam, but what the hell must the little girl with them have been thinking? She was frolicking around here and there and seemed totally unfazed by this all, so I guess she was fine with it, or used to it. I’m hoping that they were a family with inappropriate boundaries and one of the moms had just been away for a while and they were so happy to see each other they couldn’t keep their hands off of each other…if for no other reason than because a lesbian family unit in Turkey is already rare, and even more so in a small conservative town. I’ll never know the truth, so I’m going to go with that.

As we emerged from the hamam into the dressing area, I was ecstatic that I now had something REALLY worth writing about…and then we saw the cat. It was cuddled up on the bed of the cabana next to mine. It had evidently attempted to get into my cabana, but the friend with whom I was sharing it got it out quickly, aware of my allergies. Let’s leave aside for a moment the question of hygiene and cats hanging out in hamam dressing areas. This cat was fat. Turns out, again according to the attendant, she was pregnant. My cabana-buddy reinforced this by saying that when she picked up Kitty to get her out of our place she felt the little ones inside. I did not grow up on a farm, and I think babies are terrifying as it is, plus my allergies, yeah, I was making one of my WASP-y sour faces at this point. But whatever, the pregnant pussycat was out of my way, so I could get dressed at my leisure. A few minutes later, Lola, which is what I will call the Canadian woman in the adjacent cabana, opened her door and announced that she was pretty sure the cat’s water had broken…on her bed. Awesome. Hamam attendant took this all in stride, handed Lola some towels, ostensibly to place under the birthing animal, and then went about her business. A few minutes later, and with a blessed minimum of miauling, the fecund feline (yes, I am really enjoying cheesy synonyms and adjectives with alliteration, and I’m aware that I’m beyond the limit) delivered and we witnessed the miracle of life. Actually we witnessed the miracle of stillbirth. The kitten wasn’t moving, and mama cat starting licking it to try to get it to move, to no avail, and after a few minutes, she curled up and fell asleep–I assume because she was regrouping for the rest (cats have litters, don’t they? maybe it’s ok to have 1 not make it when you’re having 4 more and they’re going to each eventually stake out a cabana at the hamam), but Lola was kind of bummed. I can sympathize, I mean if a cat’s going to take over your cabana, go into labor and deliver while you’re having a week-end away, at the very least it ought to be alive.

I don’t want to end the week-end on a sad note, and it was still a nice day-more shopping, rainy but walkable, lots of people with platters full of Turkish Delight samples for us, a heartfelt good-bye to our guest house hosts, and a nice hot lunch that involved a really incredible lentil soup and these meatballs that were the best thing I’ve ever tasted. And Lola got the soup, so that brightened her spirits. I think going to a hamam is kind of like going on a hike all day: whatever you eat afterward tastes like the best thing you’ve ever had. Sadly, the woman who’d been so politely hit on by the two not-sure-lesbians at the hamam, who had ordered a simple panini-type sandwich called ‘tost,’ opened it and saw, to her chagrin, that they had interpreted her order of a cheese and meat panini as ketchup and mayonnaise. And if I may say, cooking ketchup and mayonnaise does not make them more appetizing. So she sent it back, and the waiter was grumpy, and then she, ravenous as the rest of us, had to wait for her meal another 10 minutes, by which time my head had finally risen from the table, where I’d been licking my plate.

The entire week-end, for nearly every meal, one of our orders got royally screwed up. It made me think of how, traditionally, when weaving Turkish carpets, women would purposely make 3 mistakes, so that if someone came to their house and complimented the rug, they could point out the mistakes and thereby avoid the evil eye. Maybe if we were too happy with the food it’d have brought bad luck down upon the proprietors? Our first meal out in Safranbolu, we stopped at a pide place, kind of like Turkish pizza, and my friend ordered a plain cheese pide, which was not on the menu…it came last and it was full of egg. They couldn’t comprehend that she ONLY wanted cheese. And our big dinner out at one of the nicest restaurants in town, where we sucked down bread soaked in artisanal olive oil and black-fig and cabernet-sauvignon vinegar while awaiting our entrees (and that vinegar was as close as we got to alcohol at the restaurant), the two people who ordered the stuffed calamari waited half an hour for their meal. Admittedly, I don’t even like calamari outside of the Basque country because I’m a giant silly snob, but these things were gorgeous-as big as a lung. Ok, I realize that doesn’t sound all that good, but they were huge and stuffed with capers and other goodness and I thought about breaking my only-Basque-coast calamari rule and asking for a bite, but I was still licking black-fig vinegar off of my fingers.

Oh, and I’d totally go back. You just can’t have a week-end like that in Ankara.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jog

An old friend of mine from Istanbul told me something a split second after I told him I’d taken a job in Ankara.

“We have a saying in Istanbul about Ankara: The best part about visiting Ankara…is going back home to Istanbul.”

I may or may not have called him a jackass and hung up. Way to be supportive. I had assumed the rivalry between Istanbul and Ankara would be akin to that of New York and DC. But no, Ankara really is kind of boring comparatively. What do you expect when the city is really only 100 years old, forged out of an old town by the sheer will of Ataturk? Like any city, Ankara has its hidden gems, but you have to find them, and that takes a certain amount of work and time. In cities like Istanbul, or where I went last week-end, Budapest, you walk out the door and something beautiful just hits you in the face. In Ankara that beauty lies under a veil of mystique, construction work, and smog from the coal many less-well-off people burn for heat. It’s a hefty veil.

Budapest was amazing for so many reasons, not least of which being that you can get pork, a real caffe latte that isn’t burned, a good-tasting local beer for reasonable prices, nor due to the lovely architecture, nor even because I’d been wanting to go for the last 15 years and so had probably idealized it a bit anyway. It’s also walkable, there’s a big river, and you can eat pork. Like, on every street corner.

I know, though, that I appreciated it all the more because of living in the center of Turkey right now. Pig-related food obsessions aside, without living here I would not have understood or even paid attention to the Ottoman history of Budapest, which was under control of the Ottoman Empire for 150 years, and which has quite a few remnants of that legacy-architecturally and most visibly in their baths. Budapest is famous for its baths, and it was the Ottoman Turks who figured out that there was a veritable plethora of hot springs just underground in that area, which spurred on a flurry of hamam-building on their part. If they’d spent less time bathing and steaming, they might have held onto Hungary a bit longer, but they’d eventually have lost out to those dirty, vile Hapsburgs anyway…

But I digress (shocking). When you go to the city that is most famous for its baths in all of the EU, what is the first thing you pack? When you love to swim and be in the water, and your mother taught you to ALWAYS pack a bathing suit first, because even in the desert, you might come across a hot tub, what do you do? When you own TEN swim suits (let’s be fair, some are for hanging out on the beach, some for swimming, some for water sports like surfing…) and you brought FIVE to a landlocked city on the Anatolian plateau…what do you forget to pack? Yeah, I now own 11 swim suits. But I have a good junky one now I can wear to co-ed hamams and not worry about getting dirty.

Obligatory shopping requirement aside, I just had one of the most romantic week-ends of my life…with someone I will call Gina. Gina is a great friend, and allows me to be dorky when we walk through a major city square playing 80s music outside of a hot spiced wine kiosk, and laughs when I start dancing like a nerdy high school boy. She likes nice food, and music, and theatre, and we both make jokes about how the statue at the front of the cathedral looks like Gandalf and how going to Gellert baths makes us think of Grindelwald from Harry Potter, and she can sit in a hot tub for hours on end, just being blessed out. But she’s not a dude. I am starting to wonder if Romance is dead, or if it never was. It’s just a bunch of girls and gay boys sitting around dreaming up trips they should just take with each other, because straight men do not seem to think that listening to gypsy music all night while drinking wine and eating sponge cake soaked in chocolate after a day of looking at castles and an afternoon soaking in a giant baths complex with other people in their swimsuits…well, for some reason that’s not as appealing to very many straight men. They do it, because they assume it’ll get them sex. And I can’t fault anyone for that, but it might be time to stop hoping a guy will come along who WANTS that, and just to take romantic sexless trips with my girlfriends and gayfriends from now on.

Every time I take a trip outside of Ankara, I get a little grumpier when I come home. I like my little apartment and all that, but I’m just not doing as good of a job at ‘making my own fun,’ as a friend from grad school used to say about living in Indiana (and oh dear GOD she was right) as I should. The more I go out, to hamams, to the old town, to random embassy events, the more I like it. I need more Turkish friends, and I need more art in my life, and then the grump will probably recede, but for the time being, my first point of grumpiness usually hits around the Munich airport.

Munich is one of the few places that flies direct to Ankara. So if you’re going anywhere else in Euroland, chances are good that you’ll change in Munich, unless you go through Istanbul. I prefer Munich, because at Duty-Free you can buy your own weight in sausage. And between flights, the Munich airport is calm, you can get newspapers and free coffee/tea on the EU side, and it isn’t until 45 minutes before the flight to Ankara that the gate gets busy. February is low season in Budapest for tourism, and the place was blessedly semi-deserted. Ankara has people everywhere. Everywhere. So does Istanbul. Turks seem to…like each other. They’re very social, much more so than I am, and they will talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime, have a much smaller idea of the length of personal space than northern european folks do, and they make noise. It would be amusing to compare activity at a gate full of people waiting to fly to Turkey with a group waiting to fly to Oslo. Or Helsinki. Or even Boston (home of the Frozen Chosen!).

Gina and I had been happily dozing on and off during out layover in Munich, taking turns going for walks or looking at duty-free stuff, getting lots of reading done (which is another reason she and I travel well together-we’re both perfectly happy NOT talking for hours at a time, though she’s significantly better at it than I am), when the gate began to fill, and we started to feel like we were inside the noise equivalent of a bouncy house at a kid’s 8th birthday party when they all just ate cake made of sugar and crack. I got up to lustily ogle a few bottles of wine at the Duty-Free shop when I spotted another colleague who had taken the week-end off, a young blonde whom, for the sake of anonymity, I will call…Morgan. She joined us at our seats, and we had a jolly conversation about our whereabouts during the prior 3 days, when all of a sudden and completely unbidden, some random Turkish guy sidles up to Morgan’s seat and decides to ask us if we’re Erasmus students and where do we live and blah blah blah. My WASP spine stiffened ramrod straight at such an unceremonious introduction, and I suddenly realized I absolutely had to check the medal count for the Sochi Olympics (I really wanted the US to out-medal Canada). But Morgan, sweet Morgan, just smiled and listened to him go on and on.

The thing is, this guy, whom I will call Mehmet the Unwanted, made a beeline straight for her. And on some level, pheromonal or otherwise, it’s as though he knew that she was the only one of us who would have given him the time of day. Gina would have been polite but brushed him off within a matter of minutes, and I would have just openly told him I was uncomfortable talking to strange men. That is so unnerving to them that they are usually shocked away but not egregiously insulted. If that doesn’t work, I try to find something really vulgar and unsettling to say, and that finishes him off. I kept looking over to Morgan to see if she was giving me the eye, while Mehmet the Unwanted prattled on about how we should be ashamed because he has a friend from the Ukraine who moved here and was fluent in Turkish in 3 months, whereas we’re not, because I was waiting for my moment to say, ‘Sorry little annoying man, that we have JOBS and are not just studying the language here full-time, and oh by the way do you AT ALL realize that telling a women she’s effectively lazy and stupid is not a good way to make her like you, and hey Morgan, can we go back to talking about the chunks of blood seeping into our underwear right now and how we feel about organic versus industrially-produced tampons?’–but I never got to use my offensive albeit fair (minus any commentary regarding the reality of anyone’s menstrual cycles-I do not go around inquiring or offering information about bodily functions [WASP alert], but I find that menstruation is a good topic to get men from any culture to leave you alone, which is odd, because it’s a pretty natural, normal thing, and it’s not like it’s contagious and they’re going to catch their period, but whatever, men are weird) statement, because Morgan is just far, FAR too nice to even look away and roll her eyes at her friends.

I love my friends. I have some of the most wonderful friends I can imagine having. But I wouldn’t say we’re exactly the sweetest people. We’d bend over backwards for one another, sure, but when it comes to talking to strangers, most of us are lukewarm at best. This is the first time in my life I have had friends who were elementary school teachers, and yes that often goes hand-in-hand with a certain degree of sweetness. And men love it. And they can see it from across the room. These women are catnip for men. Man-nip. Ok, that doesn’t sound right. And while my current friends ARE all cute and lovely, the man-nipped girl in a group will not always necessarily be the prettiest, or the one with the biggest breasts, or even the one showing the most skin, but somehow she’s the one least likely to call the guy a d-bag and throw her drink in his face. I don’t know how men can tell this, just by looking at a group of women from across a room (maybe this is where their energy goes instead of into learning to be romantic…), but they can tell. My last roommate informed me that any man in the bar could tell I was an ice queen, purely by the way I sat on a bar stool. He also told me that I was the ‘fat friend’ who made sure none of her hot girlfriends went home drunk with a guy. I said screw you I’m not fat and even if I were how does that detract from my attractiveness and well you’re right, I’m not going to allow my friends with impaired judgement to make a stupid decision they’ll regret if I have any say in the matter. He told me that is precisely why I’m the fat friend. I do not think that living with him for a year and a half made me a better person, but it certainly was eye-opening. Most of the friends I go out with have close to an equal level of snark exuding from their pores to my own, so a guy wanting to approach us has to just take his chances, but the man-nippers are like ducks on a pond for certain guys…

Maybe they have a mommy complex and they sense that these sweet elementary teachers deal with bigger babies than they are every day. Maybe it’s because these women know that children feel soothed by higher-pitched, slower speech. Maybe it’s the way my friend Rhonda (yeah I made that one up too) will listen to a man, laugh and say “You’re so funny” in a way that actually sounds like she means it. Thing is, she actually does mean it, but then again, she spends all day with 5- or 6-year-olds, anything more sophisticated than a knock-knock joke is likely to make her laugh.

I, on the other hand, can only imagine saying “You’re so funny” in 2 possible contexts: 1) to be quickly followed by “but looks aren’t everything.” or 2) to be used as a reprimand and a warning that should such hilarity continue, I might be in danger of having a bodily function in the near future, which cannot happen because WASPs don’t have bodily functions. If you haven’t figured out what I mean by now, think “You’re so funny, stop making me laugh like that or I’m going to snort.” (NB-no other bodily function is allowable for WASPs). Maybe these men can’t smell my ice queen anti-pheromones after all. Maybe they can just see how uncomfortable this stick up my ass is.

Thankfully for the stick and the poor man hitting on Morgan, it was soon time to board the plane. All three of us girls were in separate rows, which would have made Turks woeful, then get over it by just yelling over other people all flight long. And I don’t mean this in a frat-boys-just-graduated-from-college-going-on-2-week-tour-of-Europe yelling over people in the plane way. I mean in a much more charming, convivial, getting-ready-for-the-wedding-in-My-Big-Fat-Greek-Wedding kind of way. Listening to people on the plane actually made me WISH I were more like them, but at the same time I was mildly annoyed because all I had thought about when I saw that my friends weren’t siting next to me was the blessed peace of 2.5 hours I would spend reading, nestled up against the window with my newest book. Then who should walk up and put his bag down at the aisle seat but Mehmet the Unwanted. I refused to make eye contact.

Luckily for both of us, a Turkish girl showed up to be the buffer between us in the middle seat. Poor Mehmet the Unwanted-he had to ask her in English if she spoke Turkish, because thanks to those pesky Ottomans wandering to far into the Balkans and Slav-land-ia back in the day, there is a huge variety of physiognomies in Turkey (no I’m not sure if I’m using that word correctly). You can be all dark and swarthy and your sister can be a blue-eyed redhead, and you’re both still just as Turkish. So you can’t always tell when someone sits next to you on a plane whether or not they are going to speak Turkish. Though if you pay attention and notice that someone is avoiding eye contact and burying their nose in a book and trying really hard to make sure your elbows never touch on the arm rest, there’s a good chance that person is NOT a Turk).

This woman was willing to speak to Mehmet during the entire flight. Or rather listen to. I am not sure how much he even breathed. She was high-maintenance, with lots of jewelry and lacquered nails and hair highlights, and when she put down her tray table for the meal, she did so with both hands, as though it might be too heavy for her poor little female self to do it on her own. Mehmet was in heaven. If she agrees to go on a date with him, I hope she orders the lobster.

The flight from Munich to Ankara was a sort of organized chaos, but a sort of happy pandemonium. I found myself wondering how the German flight crew liked that route…one day I’ll ask. After a calm week-end in Hungary it was a jolt to come back to the reality of the noises and smells and sights of Ankara. Kids running down the aisles, some smells of body odor, some smells of very expensive perfume, sometimes both coming from the same person, people passing food to each other, at one point someone behind me ululated like Xena: Warrior Princess’ war cry and I was half-afraid a chakram was about to fly through the air…it’s not me, but it is my world now. And I do, I do wish I were more like this in a lot of ways. I wish I liked talking that much to strangers, I wish I didn’t think about what my neighbors in the plane are thinking and whether or not my actions inconvenience anyone-and I don’t think it’s even that…they just know that none of their actions DO bother anyone else with this cultural heritage. It’s just a normal way to interact with human beings when we’re put into a completely unnatural position: hundreds of us 30,000 ft in the air in a small metal cylinder. My way, the way of ‘my people’ is to take up as little space as possible and try to get through it quietly and quickly, but honestly, if you’re going to spend hours in the stratosphere, why not make it more fun to pass the time? I think it’s too late for me, because at that point all I wanted was some herbal tea on my couch at home. home. Home.

My grandmother used to always say the same thing whenever we pulled into our driveway (or hers, if we were visiting her and not the other way around): Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jog. She’s old; she’s said old stuff. But she never sounded all that excited about it-if you ask me, “Jiggety Jog” sounds like it ought to be pretty fun. But I think she liked the adventure of an outing with the family, and home was comfortable, but not particularly exciting. I get that. Jiggety Jog.

My first Turkish love…the cleaning lady.

NEVER in my life did I think I’d be sitting at home on a Monday evening, gleefully disregarding the mess in my kitchen, because hey, why bother cleaning it up, when my cleaning lady is coming in the morning? Leaving dishes in the sink overnight, not wiping down the counter after cooking, these are things that would have given hives to the good middle-class American girl I was raised to be. I have been known to get out of bed in the middle of the night on the few occasions that I did leave some dishes unwashed in order to go remedy that situation–because otherwise I can’t sleep. But now, I purposely cook big messy dishes and/or bake on Mondays, because I know that on Tuesday morning a small, veiled, age-not-easily-determined Turkish woman will appear and make it all go away.

This is new to me. And it’s fantastic. When I first arrived in Turkey and one of the other international teachers suggested that her cleaning lady was looking for more hours, I scoffed, because I grew up knowing how to clean everything: I know that nail polish remover gets out just about anything, I know to save old toothbrushes to use for cleaning the grouty-moldy stuff that likes to congregate between the tiles, in fact the only household thing I never quite mastered was mopping-I always somehow use too much soap and then end up walking on sticky floors for a week. But thanks to the wet Swiffer, I was able to give up mopping ages ago. I am, therefore, a domestic goddess in my own right.

There is just one problem-I hate cleaning. And I really hate cleaning using toxic chemicals. My lungs don’t like it, my skin doesn’t like it, and the part of me that lived in San Francisco for 3 years buying only organic, natural products absolutely abhors it. Alas, one would be hard-pressed to find Seventh Generation in Turkey. So the next time my colleague mentioned her cleaning lady, I asked about price…and determined that this woman was willing to work for about an hour of my paid time. This is absurd, but so is the idea of a living wage in this country-and she sets her own rates. And she gave me a list of products she likes, which I bought, and never have to smell. So I felt justified in taking her on.

This is meant to be one of the joys of expat living. You still earn a teacher’s salary, but it goes a lot farther in a lot of places, so you can enjoy more travel and other creature comforts. Only up until now, I’ve always moved to countries where the average salary was higher than that os the US (France, the UK), unless you count Taiwan, which I don’t, because I was there with a man who periodically went on a cleaning binge and made the entire house spotless (this is the major upside of falling for a mama’s boy-mama teaches them to cook and clean).

We kind of had a maid growing up. Kind of. I can’t recall very well, but when I was still Thumbelina-sized I remember a woman showing up about once per month, and my mother cleaning for hours the night before she came. I always thought that was odd, but then I also thought it was odd that my mother would have the maid come twice before my grandmother came for a visit, until I saw my grandmother put on a white glove and walk around the house checking for dust and either clucking or tsk-ing, as appropriate. I’m pretty sure that as the women in my direct line get older, we also get distinctly more Cruella DeVille-like. Last year we uncovered my grandmother’s collection of kid gloves (they actually exist-AND they’re called kid gloves because they’re made of baby goats, not because they’re for children-clearly my education is sparse and wanting in several areas but oh God those things are soft, even if they ARE the clothing equivalent of eating veal) and I now have a pair of white ones that go past my elbows. Putting them on the first time infused me with a desire to tell everyone around me what they were doing wrong and enjoy every minute of it…so perhaps it’s not genetic after all…But actually, I think having a cleaning lady is counteracting things, because I’m happier and nicer now that I don’t have to clean any toilets, middle-class pride be damned.

For the sake of ease of narrative, I am going to call my cleaning lady Zeynep. It’s not her name, but it’s a RAD Turkish woman’s name, so it should get more attention from the world. Zeynep does not speak English, so I had to ask my department secretary to call her for me, and it wasn’t until the first time she came that I realized how very particular I am about how things are done. One of the nice things about living alone is that everyone is always done your way; you never need to get mad about the toothpaste top not being screwed on, you never have to yell at someone for putting the milk carton back in the fridge empty, and you always know where everything is.

Until you hire someone to make your place nicer. Zeynep has her own ideas of where things go. Some of this makes sense to me, like the way she puts my sweaters on a lower shelf, with my tank tops, which I just assumed was because she couldn’t reach higher up (she is not the tallest woman), but then you have to wonder how the mug I bought for 3 Turkish Lira (which isn’t quite $1.50) which is amazingly adorned with a photograph of Ataturk in which he bears a striking resemblance to Grandpa from The Munsters, yeah, how does Zeynep manage to put THAT mug in a place of high-up prominence in my kitchen?

Having Zeynep in my house once a week is kind of like being in a relationship: she knows a lot of intimate things about me, and she quite possibly likes to do things that drive me nuts, like putting the iron in a different place every week. Granted, before she came into my life I didn’t even know I had an iron, but now I find it every week in a slightly different location. Correction: now my feet find the cord in a slightly different location every week. And I’m used to other people indicating that some of my domestic duties are lacking; in grad school I had a housemate who was so fed up with spots on the wine glasses that he forbade me from ever washing them again, even if he wasn’t involved in the wine-drinking on a given evening (to be fair, whenever I wash wine glasses rigorously, they break, so I figure some spots were a reasonable compromise), and an ex-boyfriend of mine who had worked at The Gap during high school and therefore learned to fold shirts “correctly” wouldn’t let me fold clothes because he said my way was appalling. So perhaps my perceived domestic goddess-hood is a bit skewed, but if a man you’re living with wants to do more chores, you don’t say no.

And now that I’m paying someone to do my chores, I won’t complain about a few eccentricities. I am particularly enamored of the way she organizes my shower stuff in a different pattern every week, but always one that shows the she has a kindred form of OCD to mine. Sometimes she organizes by size (it matters, after all), sometimes by brand, sometimes by function (shampoos to the right, conditioners to the left, etc…and yes I have at least 3 of each); every Tuesday afternoon when I come home, there is an adventure waiting for me in the shower…though perhaps not as exciting as I might wish…seeing how Zeynep organized things THIS time. She does the same thing with the throw pillows on the couch-always symmetrical but different every week. I am starting to think I need to get out more.

There are a few things about me that Zeynep just doesn’t get, like the semi-clean clothing chair. I know this is more guy-like than I probably ought to be, but I honestly believe that if you wear something for only a few hours and don’t sweat in it, it is perfectly acceptable to drape that item of clothing over a chair for a couple of days and then wear it again. Z has this strange belief that if it’s sitting out and not in the closet, it needs to be washed. I don’t want my clothes washed too much because I firmly believe that over-washing wears things out more quickly, and if there’s anything I despise more than cleaning, it’s shopping, so no, I do not want to wash my jeans every week, because I don’t want a hole in the crotch turning up any sooner than absolutely necessary. I have probably made this up, but I actually believe it. Like the people who never wash their hair because they say it is a self-perpetuating thing and that if we just left it alone our hair would de-grease itself. I don’t know if I have the patience to invest in months of oily hair to find out, but I DO know that buying jeans is far, far worse than buying any other item of clothing, so if I have to put mine in the freezer to kill bacteria and then take them out and iron them, instead of washing them, if it works, and I don’t have to go jean-shopping again for years, I’m game. But I think Zeynep might have a fit if she saw jeans in my freezer.

She’s a good lady though. I don’t think she’s the judging type. Given that she wears a headscarf, I’m going to assume that she is a practicing Muslim, but she hasn’t freaked out about any of my not-remotely-Muslim paraphernalia. At first I felt like perhaps I should wash my own underwear, because I didn’t know if my lacey thongs would make her think I was a heathen harlot, but then I went to a hamam where an elderly woman was selling lingerie that I wouldn’t even see in Victoria’s Secret–we’re talking Frederick’s of Hollywood for some of this stuff. I guess that behind closed doors, some of these conservative girls GET DOWN. Like pastor’s daughters in the US. Except that doors are closed. So Z doesn’t care about my underwear. She hasn’t smashed my alcohol collection, which mysteriously grows every time I go through Duty-Free on a trip. She also has yet to comment on the pole I put up in the middle of my guest bedroom after the Winter Holidays. I have decided that she thinks I am a paranoid American who thinks the building is not structurally sound and so put up a pole for support, and that she has no inkling that it is in fact for pole dancing. I’m not running a strip club out of my guest bedroom; it’s entirely for fitness. I challenge anyone in Ankara who doubts me to come over and try a few pole tricks to execute them perfectly and tell me it’s easy, and not have bruises or sore muscles the next day. I know Z doesn’t judge or doesn’t care, but I still felt bad the day she put away some satin nightie that she’d washed, and when I came home I realized she must have seen the condoms at the bottom of the drawer. It’s not like she’s my mother, but for some reason I want her to think I’m a good girl. Oops. Oh well, she hasn’t quit.

In December, I purposely had a hot mulled wine party right before Zeynep was to come, and again I felt like a giant sinner, because there were red wine stains all over the kitchen that I just LET SIT overnight. She annihilated them. We may not be able to communicate, but she manages to get everything just about spotless, and I have been trying to leave her notes in my wretched Turkish, but she seems to anticipate what I want anyway. Sometimes on Tuesdays, before I come home, I think of something I meant to ask her to do, and if I have any Turkish kid in detention at the end of the school day I’ll make them write Zeynep a note and teach me the Turkish in it, and 9 out of 10 times I come home and she’s already done the thing I forgot to ask her to do.

Z is like a cleaning rock star. I have heard that there is a ‘cleaning lady mafia’  in the university area where I live, and they fix their prices and complain about work and all kinds of other things. Z is evidently not part of a mafia-she charges less and does more than the others. She even started cooking for me on days that I haven’t left a giant mess anywhere and actually have food in the fridge. Apparently, and I heard this from another party, she left an abusive husband years ago and started doing this in order to make a living for herself and her young daughter. He daughter then married an equally abusive man, so Z took her back and now supports herself, the daughter and the baby. She’s a badass. And I’m worried about her seeing condoms?

I also worry that I won’t have enough for her to do. I only met her in person after she’d been cleaning for me for several weeks, and she laughed, telling me friend, who speaks Turkish, that cleaning my place is like taking candy from a baby. I simultaneously thought ‘Great, that means it’s easy.’ and ‘Oh God she’s going to get bored and leave me.’ On second thought, I doubt people get into the house-cleaning business because they are looking for constant mental challenge. But she really is like my first major Turkish relationship: I worried at first that she’d think I’m a hot mess, I worried that she’d think I was a stripper when she saw the pole, I worried for about half a second that she’d leave me if she got bored. But most importantly, she makes my home a nicer place, she cooks for me, and I’m madly in love with her.