Christmas Cheer

The parental deTars have arrived, and with them they brought lots of Christmas cheer. Like these ice skate stockings and Christmas tree quilt (with ornaments!).

And this Pickle ornament below from my parents. LOVE it (obviously).

And this miniature nativity scene in a matchbook. Perfect for meeting all your nativity scene needs in a very small space.

Capped off with this $3 plastic tree we bought at the "new years" market, we're set to go for xmas09. BRING IT, holidays.

Fake (and Real) Mustaches get their Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Remember when Matt did that post telling you all about how we saw the Ottoman Military Band? Well, we are totally trend setters because the New York Times went to go see them after us and wrote a whole article about it.

Apparently they are part of "Ottomania." (Do you not know what that is? It's "a form of Islamic empowerment for a new Muslim religious bourgeoisie who are reacting against Ataturk’s attempt to relegate religion and Islam to the sidelines." Duh).

If you don't want to read the whole article, the gist is that Matt and I obviously need to find some of those "Empire Strikes Back" T-Shirts ASAP.

(Photo and Article found HERE.)

Fat Cat

I know that some people think cats get to much play on this blog that is purportedly about Turkey, but it's hard to restrain because a) I was already kind of a crazy cat person before I got here and b) they are everywhere here and just asking to be photographed.
Like this obese cat.

Tell me that this obese cat shouldn't be shared with the world (or, at least with the 5-8 people that read this blog).

Would you prefer your large amount of carved butter...

in chicken form?

or in cat form?

Definitely a tough call.

Kittens and Piles of Used Books

I definitely see a best selling successory stemming from this dynamic pairing.

How to Eat a Baked Potato in Istanbul

First, you go to the place called "Kumpir Sokak" (Baked Potato Street) in Ortakoy. This street has a bunch of identical stands (15?) that all have identical baked potato ingredients.

You approach the stand of your choosing and ask for a baked potato (in bad Turkish) and point to ingredients. I picked yogurt, cabbage, green olives, corn, cheese, pickles, couscous, and hot sauce.

Then you enjoy your baked potato while watching the president drive by in a motorcade.

And then (if you are Matt) you finish your whole potato. Success!*

*I made a valiant effort but had to throw in the towel near the end. Those things were HUGE.

Home Sweet Home

The mosque next to our house leaves out cardboard boxes for the cats to sleep in. They don't even discriminate against the cross eyed ones.

Italian for Dinner

OMG! You caught me in the middle of my delicous pasta dinner!

Bulk Section

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. That's what happens when I forget to bring my camera places. No one likes a blogpost with no pictures. But I'm back! With good news: they sell pickles in bulk here!

Mmmmm.....

Nothing like a kilo of pickles...

Thanksgiving

We did eat things besides Inflatable Turkey, though. Evidence of this:

Herbed Buttermilk Biscuits, Squash, Mashed Potatoes, Stuffing (no recipe- just kind of followed what my mom does), Mushroom Gravy (adding wine, duh), Cranberry Sauce and a salad with goat cheese and pomegranate dressing.

Most ingredients for our feast of thanks were pretty easy to find in Turkey, except Cranberries. Cranberries don't even exist here in canned form, and certainly not in the fresh/frozen form. We did find dried cranberries though, and a recipe on the internet swore that we could rehydrate them with orange juice and then make traditional cranberry sauce.

Consistency was right, but the internet lied- it tasted like jam/preserves, not like delicious tart cranberry sauce. Definitely not worth the effort of going all the way to the spice market and spending $5 on dried cranberries.

We also had to make some veggie broth for the stuffing and gravy, as we have looked high and low at various grocery stores for any form of meatless broth and it is impossible to find, even in bouillon form. But making the veggie broth was easy and painless and we probably should be doing this anyways because it is healthier.

You can get squash here, but it's not like at home where you go buy a squash and take it home and butcher it yourself. Here, you go to your corner vegetable dude and ask him to cut you off a piece of his enormous squash with his enormous machete. Obviously.

A couple years ago I spent Thanksgiving in France w/ some of my college friends, and were were able to make a quite successful meal thanks to the restaurant in Paris entitled "Thanksgiving" where you can buy every American thing you might want for Thanksgiving. We're thinking of opening one up in Istanbul, because it is obviously a tragedy for one more person to go without real cranberry sauce.

oh and p.s. we missed our families a lot especially after I heard that my mom was making a squash spice cake.

What's Thanksgiving Without...

An Inflatable Turkey??

Thanks to our friends Ryan and Kyle's awesome wedding gift, we are the proud owners of an Inflatable Turkey. Which we obviously had to bring to Turkey.

Some Final Pics from Cairo

The number of interesting pictures left to share from our Egyptian honeymoon is drawing low. (Well, I think all 400 pictures we took were interesting. But something tells me I'm alone in that.) Here are some final pictures that give you the flavor of Cairo...

We were quite impressed with this dude's ability to bike-with-a-huge bread basket on his head. (Also- kind of changes that question about whether something is bigger than a bread basket, right? Right? Ba dum dum...)

Crazy market/alley that we got lost in. This was a way cooler market than Khan-al-Khalali (the main bazaar in Cairo) because we were the only tourists so we weren't getting hassled to buy things. Mostly just stared at. A lot.

Spice market. Smelled delicious. It's funny, there is a big spice market here in Istanbul that we bought some spices at, and it's called the "Mısır Çarşısı"- Egyptian Bazaar. So apparently spice markets are an Egyptian thing.

Cool bookstore/jewelry store.

Cool gold things store. (Sorry, we didn't buy any Aladdin lamps for anyone. Next time.)

Egyptian Supreme Court!

This picture demonstrates how terrifying it is to cross the street in a city with no cross walks where drivers are insane. These cars were all going 30+ miles an hour, and the people just dodge between them.

Cotton. Or wool.

The Nile at night.

Us in front of Nile. (I call this one "grainy self portrait taken with timer.")

That's probably it for Egypt pictures. Unless you guys are like "OMG! I so didn't get enough pictures of you guys in those Melon Pods!" In which case we can reopen the picture file and see what we can find.

Things We Learned in Turkey This Week (3d Ed.)

We've almost been here a month... which means we've obviously pretty much stopped learned new things about this country (ha!). Here's some of the highlights of the week.

1. So, there are cables running down the sides of apartment buildings. A guy comes with a truck or cart, yelling that he has a specific type of product (olive oil! melons! bread!), and if you want it, you send a basket with payment down the cable and then the dude puts his wares in your basket and you pull it back up. We deduced early on that this was its purpose, but this week was the first time we caught it in action.

2. We (finally) made it to the Asian side of Istanbul this week. It's pretty much the same as the European side, but with the added bonus of having one of the most delicious restaurants I've ever been to. Plus, epic sunset views from the 10 minute ferry ride.

3. Sometimes, in Asia, your beer comes in a cool metal tea cup.

4. We went to our first show here in Istanbul (to see the black lips) and learned that going to a show in IST is pretty much the exact same as going to a show in the states. Except that more american college students studying abroad attend the show in IST, which in turn makes you feel very old when you realize you are 10 years older than them. And that you are married now, which makes you REALLY old.

5. There's all this drama going on right now in Turkey because the government wants to expand some rights that the Kurdish people have (in eastern Turkey), but Turkish people think that is negotiating with terrorists because the PKK blows stuff up. After trying traditional Kurdish breakfast this weekend, obviously this whole matter could be solved if everyone would just eat Kurdish breakfast. You could not deny these people rights after eating this breakfast. We are taking anyone and everyone who visits to our new favorite brunch place.

6. Turkish cat(s) of the week.

Fake Mustache Capital of Istanbul

A couple of days ago we stumbled across the Turkish Military Museum while we were out, and since the military band was about to play their daily concert in full Ottoman costumes, we decided to check it out. Now, just because I've dressed up in a stupid costume and marched around while playing patriotic songs on a clarinet before, it doesn't mean I don't recognize a boring concert when I see it. This was one of them. But it certainly wasn't lacking in the mustache department.

It seems like everyone has to have one. Which is funny for the guys that don't have one but still have to wear enormous fake ones.

Also, it's funny that that guy just had to stand like that through the whole concert. Snooze.

The entire school sitting next to us seemed to enjoy it too. They may look bored now, but if you look closely, you can tell who the trouble makers will be.

After the band played, we checked out the rest of the museum. The coolest thing in the museum is this enormous chain that was stretched across the Golden Horn in 1453 in order to prevent Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror from moving his ships close enough to attack Constantinople.

The awesomeness of that was tempered a little by the really disturbing room devoted to "The Armenian Question." It was basically a lot of upsetting pictures of war crimes committed against Turks by Armenians during WWI, and a lot of documents describing the need to "relocate" Armenians to preserve the safety of Turks, all implying a justification for anything you might have heard about in re the systematic killing of Armenians but which is not directly addressed in that room.

Man, this blog post was way more fun when it was about fake mustaches.

Why People From Corvallis are Cool

Because sometimes we get out of the blue wedding presents consisting of fancy global salts from someone we haven't seen in many, many, many moons.

How cool is that?

Egypt Honeymoon: Islamic Cairo

The old part of Cairo is known as "Islamic Cairo" (which is kind of a misnomer, because obviously all of Cairo is Islamic). It is definitely a change from the more modern center of town, near where our hotel was. Islamic Cairo is filled with lots of cool old mosques, bazaars, food stands, and... goats!

The next four pictures are from al-Azhar Mosque. al-Azhar is home to the second oldest university in the world, a Sunni university that still acts as the chief Sunni learning center in the world. Note how even though I had a scarf (to cover my head) and my shoulders and legs were covered I was still asked to dress like a hobbit while inside the mosque.

We visited a couple other mosques and walked through the markets, then made our way to Bab Zuweila, the old city wall "fortress." We walked all the way up to the top and view was pretty amazing.

When we got to the top we discovered that on many cairo roofs there are goats that eat the trash that is brought up by the families that live there.

We made it to the top right when the Friday noon prayers were starting. It was pretty amazing because we could hear the call from probably 20 different mosques within a mile. Below is a video showing just that- tons of different calls to prayer at the SAME TIME. Watch it, and it'll be like you guys were totally there. You never have to go to Egypt now.