First Turkish Friend!

I've made my first Turkish friend! A Venezuelan friend from Chicago knew her when they studied together, so she put us in touch and from our first meeting it was clear we are kindred spirits. The first night we went to a restaurant right at the edge of the Bosphorus overlooking Anatolia (Istanbullus don't really call that side Asia--they call it Anatolia).  We had a great time talking and the waiter recommended that I get a steak with a mushroom sauce and it was honestly as good or better than the steak we get in Latin America.

I'll say this over and over, but it's so nice to live in a place again where food tastes like food! Root veggies at the supermarket are still attached to their roots AND have a little dirt on them...when I cook chicken the kitchen smells like chicken!...The tomatoes and cucumbers are so delicious that you can eat them with just a little bit of olive oil, salt, and lemon. And don't get me started on the olive oil...delicious. I need to take a picture of this in the supermarket but they seriously have an entire aisle for olive oil--they are not joking around when it comes to thier olives.  My first few days here I only shopped at the smaller local stores, so I had to make do with what they had...and this picture is the result! Tomatoes and cucumbers in the glass bowls, curried potatoes, and beef cooked with red peppers, tomatoes, onions and garlic. Despite not having any culantro, it turned out pretty good.

But back to my new friend--she's really great, and I appreciate having one person that can help me with my pronunciation and also act as a cultural broker.  It was funny, that first night at the restaurant--they brought us blankets when the sun went down, and the waiter was very attentive, he even came over at the end and gave us those little airplane towlettes for our hands. And she cracked up, she said she'd been going to this place for ten years and had never had them act that way, so that it was because of me, hahaha....I guess to some extent I understand, I think sometimes people are nicer to foreigners because they want that person to have good things to say about their country. But of course, had she not been there, I would have thought that they do this for everyone. :-) I don't have a picture of the Bosphorus, so instead I'm including a picture of the sunset from our apartment. And did I mention that it's been 80 degrees and sunny for the last 10 days?

Yesterday we met up again and she took me to her favorite place to have manti off of Istiklal Street. Manti is the Turkish version of ravioli--they are little pockets of flour dough with meat inside. They serve it with a slightly sour yoghurt sauce, and she asked them to put tomato sauce on it too. I didn't expect to like it, since it really didn't look appetizing, but it was delicious. I wanted to lick the plate! We also had another typical Turkish dish, gözleme, which they translate on menus as 'pancake' but that's really far from accurate. It's more of a flour tortilla folded in half and filled with whatever you want--we had potato and cheese and it was also finger-lickin' good. The place was also very charming--one thing about Turkish restaurants and cafés is their element of surprise. What looks like a little hole in the wall usually has a garden or a second (and third and fourth) floor, and locals tend to gravitate towards the top floors because they are less crowded.  But what made me laugh was that this restaurant had a store window, but instead of displaying goods there was an old lady sitting there hand-making the manti and gözleme to order. I took a picture for you!