Yabancı Takes A Break

Kurban Bayramı, the Feast of the Sacrifice, starts Friday. It's a four-day national holiday in Turkey and everyone is going to be travelling. Lucky me, with my days off on Wednesday and Thursday, I have a six-day break. But, due to the desire of everyone in Turkey to get with their family, domestic ticket prices have skyrocketed. When I debated the merits of paying 500 lira for a flight to Trabzon, Turkey, or 230 lira for a return flight to Munich, Germany, the choice was clear. Get another stamp in the passport and indulge in pork and beer and first-world organization.

I'm staying with a family friend for a couple days in Grafing, then meeting up with some fellow American English teachers from Izmir (who, independent of me, also discovered that the cheapest flight out of Izmir at Bayram lands in Munich). We'll meet up for some of the time, but I'll likely spend a chunk of time on my own. There are Bavarian towns to discover, Christmas markets to plunder, Neuschwanstein to explore.

I leave tomorrow morning. My backpack is packed. My camera is charged. My earplugs are ready for use in a hostel. All that's left to do is change some lira into euros (watch that stack of money disappear into a much smaller one...), grab my toothbrush and head out the door at 4 a.m. tomorrow.

There will be adventures.

You're the yabancı, not me

(Continued from the previous post, Soy Sauce, below)

He came bearing fresh ginger and cashews. As he washed the carrots and green onions he told me about how he had watched some video on Facebook about Chinese food. Gotten himself all scared about the experience. What, did they kill a dog on camera?! *sigh* He prepped the ingredients and I put it all together. I told him about my quest for the soy sauce and he was appropriately sympathetic. Maybe it added to his appreciation. That and he was already starving.

As the soy sauce/orange juice/ginger/garlic/red chili pepper concoction bubbled amidst chicken and cashews, he hovered with his cell phone camera, making a video. Yes, cultural experiences in a kitchen near you brought to you by Tür J.

"Have you eaten this before?" he asked me.

"Yes," I fibbed. I'd never eaten cashew chicken, but how could it be bad?!

"Have you made it before?" he asked.

"Yeah, lots." Another lie. It was a stirfry coming together easily enough. How many times did I make those in college? There was enough ginger in the pot to make anyone happy.

He kept sniffing the pan as it bubbled so I gave him a little of the sauce juice as a preview. His eyes got big: "Mmm delicious!" It did smell good, and I was pleased with it, but was he putting me on?! Ok, I reminded myself. He's never had this before and he's been thinking about it all day, and watching that damn video. When it was finished, I dished up a portion over rice and handed him a spoon and fork. When I came out to the table to eat, he had his camera out again, taking photo after photo until our cashew chicken looked mildly appetizing in the horrible incandescent light trapped by his 1.3 megapixel phone camera. You know, a trophy to show his friends.

I could imagine him later, replaying it again and again, me looking horrible in my weekend sweatpants, boasting how we had made Chinese food. Having witnessed its creation, he could attest that there were no insects, no dogs, nothing strange whatsoever.

All in all, it was a successful day. Yabancıs were lost and found, soy sauce and ginger were consumed, horizons were expanded.

Not only does this Turkish male's palate seem trainable, but so do his kitchen skills: we washed the dishes together.

If you'd like to try the cashew chicken recipe, click here. As you're gathering ingredients for your stir fry, take a moment to appreciate your centralized, simplified, North-American shopping experience. *wink*

Afiyet olsun (Bon appetit, basically).

Soy Sauce

Any Turk who wants to try food from different cuisines should be whole-heartedly encouraged. That was why, when my friend suggested Chinese food for dinner (adding with a smile: "Just no dogs or insects, ok?"), I immediately whipped out my laptop to search for a recipe he would find appealing (cashew chicken, but with no garlic--ok, I'm going to sneak a little in anyway-- and no sherry--he's Muslim), and then spent the new few hours wandering around gathering ingredients.

It is possible to find the ingredients for cashew chicken, they're just not all in the same place. Although I got almost everything else, soy sauce could not be found in my neighborhood shops, so I decided to go to the giant Kipa (which I previously complained about if you read my rant). I found myself in the metro station parking lot at exactly 12:04, looking for the free service bus to Forum Bornova, the giant, big-box, nauseatingly-American-look-alike mall a few kilometers from my house.

I found a white service bus, next to which a couple women patiently waited, and checked the sign over their head: "From metro to Park Bornova." The bus was scheduled to leave 10 minutes later. Not bad, I thought, for getting a free ride on no planning. The driver and his friend came over a few minutes later; everyone (me, four other folks, and the two drivers) piled onto the bus. At 12:13 the engine started. At 12:15 we left the metro parking lot, circled around the round about, and were on our way.

After we didn't turn right where I thought we would, the older woman next to me turned and started yammering: "blah blah blah by Aegean University blah blah turn blah blah Forum Bornova blah blah?"

"It goes back to the metro," I offered lamely.

"Blah blah blah blah blah," she continued, since I clearly hadn't answered her question. So much for trying to fake it, J...

"I'm sorry I don't know," I conceeded.

So the woman tapped the driver's friend on the shoulder and asked him the same question.

"No," the drivers said. "Blah blah blah doesn't go."

"My friends and I blah blah blah," went the woman.

She had gotten on the wrong bus and the driver politely pulled over and advised her to take a taxi. Where could she possibly want to go?! I wondered. We're going to the mall. It's obvious. It's written on the sign. When she got off the bus, the other three people got off the bus, too, leaving me with the drivers.

We all had a good chuckle about Turks not knowing where to go in Turkey. Boy did I feel smart. The drivers continued to lament Turks stupidity at having got on the wrong bus, when, after all, it's written on the sign that we're going to Park Bornova. Not Forum Bornova. It dawned on me slowly, through the lightning storm Turkish, as they continued to rake the previous riders over the coals for being daft, that I, also, was not going where I thought I was going.

Big. Internal. Sigh.

What is this Park Bornova, I wondered. As we wound through neighborhoods new to me, the unpleasant but familiar sensation of mild panic and stress pulsed somewhere by my esophogus. We passed a break in the buildings, I could see Kipa's mega sign in the distance--a taunting beacon of my own stupidity. I forced myself to relax and enjoy a free ride through a neighborhood but I kept wondering, "Will there be soy sauce?!"

We rounded a corner and I spied a rundown playground. Peeling paint on teetertotters, a sad swing set, something like crabgrass sprouting defiantly in the dirt. I took a breath, steeling myself for the possibility that this was Park Bornova. But the bus rolled on. Exhale.

By this point, I was way too embarrassed to admit to the drivers that I too wanted to go to Forum Bornova, not Park Bornova. I thought to myself, "But I'm the foreigner..." No, they would laugh at me, too. Nope, I was sitting on that damn bus to discover where it went.

Finally, at a stoplight, I spied the Park Bornova sign peeking above a car dealership. The answer was close. As we rounded the street, I saw written under it, "Outlet Center" (in English--strange). And a Max Tansas--a biggish supermarket. Score! We finally dinked over the parking lot speed bumps; I got off the service bus like any professional Park Bornova-goer, thanking the driver. I had exactly 12 minutes to find the fabled soy sauce and get back to the parking lot for the same service bus to go back to the metro.

Once through the metal detector (standard in all Turkish shopping malls), I raced to the Tansaş. I asked the bored-looking guy at the customer service counter if there was soy sauce.

"Let's have a look," he sighed and moseyed down an aisle, looking lamely between bottles of red pepper paste and olive oil. "Hmmm... There isn't any."

"Maybe it's in another place?" I suggested, hoping, hoping.

"No... It would be here."

I huffed a thank you, cursing the Maxi Tansas gods for their lack of product, and skulked down an aisle when, lo and behold, I spied the soy sauce. Little bottles were only 2 TL. I grabbed two. I didn't want to come back. Then I saw a big bottle on the top shelf--hmm--maybe it would be cheaper. I grabbed that too and wondered if they would have my toilet bowl cleaner of choice. They did.

Life was suddenly looking up for this dumb yabancı who was ready to take a taxi from a neglected playground back to civilization.

On my way to the checkout I saw the unhelpful clerk and held up my treasure: "I found it!" I told him with a smile.

"Oh," he looked totally unsurprised and apathetic. Or maybe he was masking intense curiosity as to what the fuck I could possibly need three bottles of soy sauce for. In Turkey.

Finally I made it home with all the ingredients. But it was worth it because, like I said, Turks need to be encouraged to eat non-Turkish food. Anything to broaden some horizons.