Mevlana Land

Konya, the land of Mevlana (also known as Rumi), the land of a thousand mosques (ok so no one actually calls it that, but there are a lot of old famous mosques), Konya, the Citadel of Islam, the land of myth...and the land of legend. Konya is generally considered famous for two things: being the home of Mevlana, and a little something they like to call etli ekmek (literally, “bread with meat”). Anyone is welcome to continue to try and convince me that "etli ekmek" is not the same thing as lahmacun. In any case, I spent a little time in Konya a few weekends ago, along with a brief but comprehensive visit to the nearby Karaman (where two other Fulbright teachers hosted me).

Mevlana is known as "the Persian mystical poet" (pretty great epithet, right?). It was under his tutelage that the Sufi Order of Whirling Dervishes began, with their iconic ritual spinning dance. He is also incredibly well-known, as almost any Turk will point out to you, for having uttered the following regarding his order and by extension Konya:

Come, come, whoever you are,
Wanderer, idolater, worshiper of fire,
Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times,
Come, and come yet again.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.

So, I did has Mevlana commanded and visited the museum and his tomb (under the green dome you can see in the photo below) in Konya. (Aside: dervishes still perform in Konya, and the dance ceremony is called a sama, but they only do it there once a year, in December. There are a few dervish lodges elsewhere in Turkey where they perform more regularly. All dervish lodges are state funded and controlled.) As I was wandering around the museum, taking in various signs that made vaguely informative insinuations about what I was seeing, a Turkish man approached me and asked “English?” My subsequent nod led to two hours of him showing me the highlights of the museum and of Konya, a discussion of President Obama's potential reelection, and, of course, a new Facebook friendship. To top it all off he actually thanked me for the privilege of my English-speaking company. All I had to do to find a friend in Konya was to stand around and be American.

Kahve Falı

I had my coffee-ground fortune (faal, or maybe just fal; it's unclear) read for the first time a few nights ago at a friend's house. It was vague and amazing. The woman who performed this feat cracked me up but I had to be really grave and serious the whole time to avoid offending anyone.

Example:

"There is a man...with....a short neck.... and combed hair....DO YOU KNOW SUCH A MAN?"
"Um...yes, that one guy...."
"He will tell you...NEWS. It will be ok, do not worry about the news."
"Uh...ok."

I don't think there was too much lost in translation...because I don't think too much of note was actually said. She said I had a "bright star" though, which sounds pretty neat, and also that I looked very "natural" (literally- doğal).

Hey DigiTurk Hey DigiTurk

Please let me offer you a quick apology: apparently due to some inappropriate video postings constituting potential copyright infringement, Blogger has been temporarily blocked in Turkey pending litigation with the Turkish company DigiTurk. Thus it is easier for me to post at the university, where websites are not blocked, and where I have access to a Turkish keyboard, but typically when I am at work people are always calling on me to "teach English" (the NERVE). In any case I promise to add some updates this week because I went to the East for the first time and it was absolutely gorgeous.

Berlin ftw*

FUN FACT: That tower is 30,666 Rittersports high.

Recently I had the privilege of visiting Berlin for a Fulbright conference. How can I even begin to describe Berlin to you, dear readers? Let's try a visualization exercise.

First, imagine a sprawling city where none of the buildings are too high and every so often you encounter a narrow river. Then imagine some medieval architecture and some heavily graffiti-ed Soviet-style concrete blocks. Then, add the look, taste and texture of a beautifully frothy beer. Add a lot of hearty meat dishes but also some crazy-good pastries, some ice cream and edible imports like noodles and döner. Now top that all off with a black bear on its hind legs. That's kind of like Berlin in a nutshell.

As I was taking my leave of that fine city, I figured out what so captivated me about Berlin. First, I find the German language adorable (that's right, adorable. As in cute. Seriously listen to someone say “flughafen” and try not to think “awww”). Second, I like Germans. They're known for being shy and punctual and they love a good beer (and I can relate to at least the first and third parts). Third, Berlin has little pieces of other cultures I enjoy (there is a not insignificant amount of Turks there) added to its own vibrancy. Actually, maybe it could just be that I have a thing for geographical places that are notorious for their past or present east-west divisions. Who knows.

Here is a picture of two German dudes enjoying a sunny Sunday in front of a wall covered with graffiti. I don't think there's a beer in this picture (you can drink it wherever you want! and there's sauce on the döner! Is Berlin just bizzaro-Turkey?!) but otherwise it would really encapsulate a lot of the city.

This was a really cool (and famous?) Sunday flea market in the north-ish part of the city. I had my first currywurst at that flea market (basically a brat in special curry-y sauce, pretty good but I think I prefer regular bratwurst).

At the flea market, there was a throng of Japanese people selling rice balls for earthquake relief, calling themselves "Operation Onigiri". I was delighted to give them some of my euros.

Finally, I had a ton of chocolate in my last few days in Berlin. I met up with a U of C alum and we went to the Rittersport "museum" and a famous Berlin chocolatier, Fassbender & Rausch. We did a comparison study of their hot chocolates (the latter shop's offering pictured above), and while Fassbender and Rausch certainly wins for fanciness and did not lack for taste, the Rittersport hot chocolate was not only spot-on, but also had the cutest lil' Rittersport gracing the saucer. It won by a small margin overall. Also you can make your own Rittersport bar at the shop, which is fun and delicious.

Just your neighborhood palace...

In conclusion, Berlin is awesome. Sure, it was a bit of a downer that Knut died basically the day I got there, but as one of our Fulbright panelists, Ingeborg Junge-Reyer (Berlin's "mayor and senator" for urban development and one of my new favorite people) said in response to a question from the audience which I would basically paraphrase as "KNUT IS DEAD WHY WHY WHY?", "We must remember, he was [only] a bear." I look forward to the day when I can go back to Germany and look more Germans in the eye and say "Prost!" over another brew. Happily I will definitely be back in that fine country in May...for Eurovision!


*I'll save you the trouble: I know I'm a bit of a nerd. (And ftw = for the win, so non-nerds don't have to google it.)

Şirince Fruit Flavor Palooza

Last week I went on a day trip to Şirince, a little tourist town near Selcuk and Izmir. Şirince is famous for şarap, or wine, made of almost every kind of fruit you might want. My two traveling companions and I tasted a dizzying array of fruit wines, listed more or less in order of agreed-upon deliciousness, from most to least:

black mulberry (karadut),
melon (kavun),
cherry (vişne),
quince (ayva),
strawberry (çilek),
peach (şeftali),
raspberry (ahududu),
blackberry (böğürtlen),
apple (elma),
pomegranate (nar),
blueberry (yabanmersini).

We really wanted to like blueberry, but it was just sour and strange. A word to the wise- trying the same wines in different places is a good idea, because we hated the first strawberry wine we tasted but the second one was amazing. We tried a little regular wine of the grape (uzum) variety as well but after the myriad sweet fruit flavors our palates could not really taste "real" wine properly. Fruit wine, at 12TL, or 6Euro, or 8-ish dollars a bottle, is the most economical non-Efes (most "popular" Turkish beer) way to get your drank on in Turkey. (Aside: Turkish beer is pretty terrible. Ask any Fulbrighter.)

Being three Fulbrighters, my traveling companions and I have all been in Turkey almost six months to date. This clearly gives us the know-how to gauge the authenticity of Turkish towns, and we decided that Şirince is one of the most genuinely Turkish-feeling towns we visited. Later we learned it is currently populated mostly by immigrants and that a lot of the village's quaint buildings are leftovers from Greek times. Sounds pretty Turkish to me, actually.


Thanks to my Fulbright companion for these pictures, because goodness knows that as per my normal habits I did not even remember to bring my camera.

Makin' Mantı

This weekend I learned how to make one of my favorite Turkish foods, mantı. (OK, technically it's my favorite "Central Asian" food, but I'll just adopt the Turkish norm of referring to its Turkish origins.) The name is often translated as "Turkish ravioli" in English menus, a name which gives a sense of the dish but does not do justice to the particular deliciousness of these tiny meat-filled dumplings.

So that you may learn, and I may not forget, here is the nub and gist of mantı preparation. First off, the dough consists of flour, eggs, and salt water. How much? Oh, enough. Of course these things are only "measured" by the watchful eye of the senior Turkish housewife present, in this case, my coworker's mother. The dough is kneaded and kneaded and kneaded by rolling your fists on it, kind of like slow-motion punches. Then it is separated into smaller chunks, in our case, four. Then more kneading and more flour to keep it from sticking. There is a special low, round, wooden table and long, thin rolling pin used for mantı, gözleme, börek; basically anything that involves rolling out dough. I would give the Turkish names for the table and rolling pin here but a) I forgot them and b) they differ by region.

The smaller hunks of dough are rolled first in the normal fashion of stroking the pin across the dough's surface. After an appropriately thin dough is achieved the whole thing is rolled around the thin rolling pin and pulled outwards by the motion of your hands from the middle to the outside. (That sounds a lot more complicated then it is, and if I had a picture of myself engaged in this pursuit, it would be much clearer.) In any case you stretch and stretch the dough until it is almost as big as the table, and then you do it a few more times, just in case. Then the dough is cut into the tiny squares you see below and filled with a finely chopped mixture of ground beef, onion, parsley, salt, and "spices", which I believe referred to red pepper in this case. You poke a little morsel of the meat mixture onto each square, and then fold the corners together and then press them into the middle to form a little pocket*. This part takes the longest- filling and folding each of the tiny squares took about 3 hours, with four tireless women working together.



After this, the many many finished products are at long last boiled for about 10 minutes, their size making it extremely easy to cook them quickly. Traditionally there are several sauces for them, and sometimes they are also used as dumplings in soup. In our case we put some lightly spiced tomato paste (salça) in butter and added a small amount of this to salted and slightly watered-down yogurt (ayran) by way of sauce. I have also eaten them with nothing but an entirely ill-advised amount of butter and walnuts on top.

(Aside: this picture was taken from Turkish wikipedia, credited to OsManduRdu, but it is almost identical to the scene in my Turkish coworker's kitchen. The spice in the jar is sumac, to be spooned on later if desired.)

A total of about 5 hours of work makes them taste at LEAST five times as good as in any restaurant. When I first began eating I inhaled those little yogurt-covered meat-packets as though I hadn't eaten for days (and by virtue of my being in Turkey we all know that is utterly impossible), and when I finished my last bite it slowly dawned on me that in polite circles the rapidity of my consumption might have been considered a bit rude. But as I looked up from my plate for the first time since the first taste hit my eager taste buds, I saw that I was behind in finishing by two other girls, and they immediately begged me to let them fill my plate anew, a request which I quickly and grateful obliged.

Afiyet olsun!



*In other words, you reunite the meat, which I'll call Numa, with the mantı's core. Sorry, that joke is for the benefit of only one reader of this blog.

Salt versus Skulls

For a trip that lasted two weeks, it sure was a whirlwind. There were two utterly indescribable highlights from both cities I visited...which I will, of course, endeavor to describe below. I couldn't resist trying to compare them, but in the end both teams played hard, and in a battle no one should win, who can win? I should also mention that both of the highlights were not in their respective cities proper, but short trips outside the environs. Without further ado:

PRAGUE HIGHLIGHT: THE SEDLEC OSSUARY
The Sedlec Ossuary is actually in the former second-largest town in Czech[Republic]oslovakia, Kutna Hora. Kutna Hora is beautiful in its own Bohemian way...but I didn't go there to enjoy the town. Make no bones about it, I was headed to the hippest joint in the place: a chapel decorated with the remains of an estimated 40,000 plague victims. Needless to say, my jaw dropped as I toured the inner radius of the chapel, and I got a bit of playful ribbing from my friend about how many pictures I took. The story of the place is that "Henry", the abbot of the Cistercian Monastery in Sedlec, went to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage and brought back some official Holy Land soil, and so the chapel cemetery became quite the desirable place to send the dead. However, when the plague struck the sheer number of bodies got a bit overwhelming, and in 1870 to "get the bones in order" an intrepid carpenter , František Rint, decided, in keeping with the chapel's “Baroque” fashion, to decorate the church with the bones of the dead. I don't think I can do this place much more justice in words, so please just admire these photos. The whole place is morbidly breathtaking and totally enthralling, and the beauty of something like a garland of human skulls makes it very difficult to wrap one's mind around the fact that they are actual human remains, which has the surprising effect of making the chapel more of an aesthetic experience than a spiritual one. At least, that's how it was for me. I also could hear John Cleese yelling “LOOK AT THE BONES!” in my head for much of the time, which was rather irreverent, but seriously--just look at them.






KRAKOW HIGHLIGHT: WIELICZKA SALT MINE
Why was the salt mine so awesome? Well, for one thing, it was the first (and likely the only) tour I've ever been on where I've been invited to lick the walls (whether this was facetious or not is unclear due to my guide's completely emotionless delivery of his well-rehearsed English patter about the mine that did not change in tone for the two hour duration of the tour). Secondly, while the mine itself is an unbelievable testament to the human addiction to salt, and is an unfathomable labyrinth of complex tunnels, carvings, chapels, salty lakes, and the like, it also boasts not one, but TWO ridiculous music-and-light shows on the tourist route. You know, to make it interesting. Out of the many tours you could get carted around on in Krakow, it's hard to dwarf how much this one rocks. The mine is definitely a good pick and I'd recommend you ax questions of your guide in order to get all the information, lest you be shafted. You'll learn that the mine also has a bit of meta-tourism going for it, because inside it has carved tributes to the famous tourists that have visited (Copernicus, Goethe, Chopin, Pope John Paul II, and more!) in addition to antiquated and currently unused tourist attractions like a subterranean ferry across one of the salty lakes. Sodium, baby! (Unfortunately due to being underground I have few to no good pictures. The final picture, of the salt-crystal chandelier, is from Wikipedia, taken by Andrzej Barabasz.)



In retrospect, the obvious answer to the question of which is better is simply...both. Who will carve a bone chapel inside the salt mine, though?