Ankara & Istanbul

Pomegranate vinegar. Take an already delicious fruit, turn it into thick and syrupy vinegar, then whisk it with olive oil to dress a salad of arugula, beets, purple basil, mint, dill and pickles. Serve up some chewy bread, a yogurt + chickpea + bulgur concoction, and maybe add another little dish filled with finely chopped tomatoes, herbs and lots of chili flakes. Once you have laid these out on your table, you have a good sense of how my daily lunch in Ankara begins.

We found a little restaurant set on an artificial pond about a ten-minute walk from our place the morning after we arrived. Thankfully, unlike Italians (there it is – I said it), Turks know a thing or two about breakfast – so we quickly read up on kahvaltı, selected some traditional elements from the menu, and enjoyed omelettes with strong white cheese, the above-described salad, and white foccacia-like bread with lots of butter and sour cherry jam. Though my books claim that rose petal jelly (gül reçeli) is a popular favourite, I have yet to find it outside a grocery store…maybe I’ll just bite the bullet and buy a small jar to take back to Rome with me, taste untasted.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This country is obsessed with Atatürk, it's actually illegal to say mean things about him, so Filippo and I hightailed it to Atatürk's mausoleum as the first order of business once breakfast was taken care of. We got shafted on Turkish SIM cards and bought "genuine copies" of six DVDs along the way, to ensure that we were really experiencing Sunday morning as a local would.

Sunshiney and 40 degrees at the Atatürk mausoleum – guarding soldiers were all marching around in full regalia, and 60% of the women wore headscarves, long pants and long-sleeved shirts with jackets over top, so I couldn't really complain in my breezy tank top and mini-shorts. It was a combination museum-mausoleum, so we read lots of persuasive propaganda on the chain of victories that brought Atatürk his fame and this country its independence, then fell asleep while watching a 15min documentary so decided to call it a day.

Monday saw us both settled in offices near each other, a two-minute walk from the apartment where we're staying.  Our workday is typically 9 to 6, with a 1.5 hour lunch break in between. Though there are lots of good-looking restaurants in the neighbourhood where we're based, we usually return to the pond one and another that a driver recommended around the corner (Kebap 44) as we've gotten to know the menus and the staff are tolerant of our terrible Turkish.  One exception was the evening we went downtown to finalise bus tickets to Istanbul and Cappadocia: LeMan Kültür came highly recommended by our well-worn guidebook, but Filippo got frustrated that there were no pictures or English translations on the menu, so we will not be going back. ;-)

Actually, I shouldn't be so hard on poor Filippo - we fine-tuned our Istanbul trip the night before our departure at a delicious seafood restaurant where we both ate our weight in tasty appetisers.  The broccoli-and-three-seaweed salad was my favourite, and contained coin-sized slices of raw garlic that I'm sure are responsible for destroying the cold that I'd struggled with all week.

We arrived in Istanbul excited and ready to take on the city.  Turns out it is the country's hotspot for Ramazan celebrations, so we found it buzzing and festive: giant white tents set up to accommodate families breaking the fast together every evening, impressive firework displays afterward.   We ventured out to Taksim on Saturday morning, had lunch in an awesome vegetarian restaurant with a leafy courtyard garden, then headed to the Grand Bazaar area for a guided walking tour and some shopping.  Our hotel was conveniently located across the square from Aya Sofia, the Blue Mosque and Topkapı Palace, so we were up by 8am on Sunday to see those three sights, then hopped on a bus back to Ankara by 5pm.

Somehow it's already Tuesday and we'll be on another bus to Cappadocia this Friday afternoon.  I'm currently revising my vacation itinerary and may end up taking a little less time off than originally planned...it turns out that single female travelers may not have it particularly easy in Turkey, and I may have been too ambitious.  Well, if that means an extra week in Ankara, I'm going to see about enrolling in a pottery class and possibly a cooking class as well, so I can raid Filippo's mom's garden and make my own gül reçeli and pomegranate vinegar this fall.

NOTE: see that rectangular box on the left side of the page with photos shifting around in it?  It's a direct link to my web-based photo collection on Flickr.  I'll always include a few recent pictures in each post, but if you want to see all of them, click on the box.