Baby, I'm a Star!

Well, maybe not a star, but as close as I'm ever going to get: yesterday, I went to Istanbul to film an episode of a Turkish cooking show with a friend of mine! It was a riot.



The Show: The show is titled "Turk Lezzeti", which translates to something like "Turkish Flavor" or "Turkish Taste". It's a new show, so it'll start airing in April, and my episode should air in May. It's on TRT International, which is available in Europe and the US, as well as Turkey, so if you folks back home have incredible cable, you might be able to see me. The concept of the show is that every episode, they take 2 yabancis (foreigners) and teach them to make a Turkish dish, while chatting in Turkish about why, exactly, they are yabancis in Turkey.

How I got on a Turkish TV show: Internet-savvy yabanci that I am, I frequent several forums for expats living in Turkey. Usually it's really kind of boring/depressing, because everyone lives in Istanbul, so all the information and events are in Istanbul, so I end up skimming a lot. One of them had a post last week mentioning that a studio was looking for yabancis with free time during the week to film a show. Since I set my own schedule, and thus have all the time in the world during the week, I emailed the contact info given. They called back that night, asked if I had a friend that wanted to go on with me, and set up a date and time. I figured I could easily find another Fulbrighter for this chance of a lifetime (or at least, chance of a grant-time). I originally was going to go on the show with a friend from Ankara, but there was a scheduling conflict, so I ended up meeting up with my friend Emily in Istanbul to do the show (for those that read semiregularly, Emily was one of my partners-in-crime for my Bursa trip).

The Big Day: I boarded a bus to Istanbul bright and early Tuesday morning after a little-too-late night. I took Nilufer this time, which I'd never taken before; they were good, probably about Metro-level in quality. My one complaint was that even though it was the "Express" bus to Istanbul, we still stopped at a rest station for 30 minutes. Some things don't change... I got in to Istanbul by 2:30, and got downtown to Besiktas by 3:30. I'd wanted to stock up on some DVDs for awhile, so I headed to the Buyuk Carsiya to check out the DVD markets. One of my regular go-to places had remodeled since the last time I stopped by, and now has new releases prominently featured, a much shorter waiting time, and bulk-purchase discounts. Excellent. I picked up Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button, a season of The Wire, the Shawshank Redemption, and Run Lola Run, all for 30 lira (that's currently under $20, so that's pretty awesome, although apparently not as awesome as Ecuadorian DVD prices). While I was perusing DVDs, I noticed one's Turkish title, because it was so odd: literally, it translated to "Flaming chicken." Intrigued, I looked closer, and saw that it was "The Hot Chick." I think maybe that one should not have been literally translated...

I finished up my shopping and headed to the ferry docks to meet up with Emily, who was coming straight from her calligraphy lesson in Asia. We grabbed a cab, showed the cab driver the address to the studio, and off we went. Side story, the cab driver looked at the address, said "I don't know where that is, but we'll get there," and ended up one building over. Pretty good navigating. We had a bit of fun trying to get in to the studio, as the building had about 7 different entrances, not very helpfully labelled, but we finally got to the right place by about 4:45.

We were ushered in, past the set, and back to the dressing room, where the host was getting her makeup finished up. We said hi to a bunch of people before getting our hair done. The stylist put my hair in a style that I've never done myself, and don't know that I would do, but it looked ok. He finished it off with more hairspray than I thought the can could hold. Next Emily got her hair styled and sprayed, and then we got the makeup treatment. Turkish makeup is of a slightly different style compared to American makeup trends (which clearly I stay up to date on, ya?), and Turkish television makeup is just amazingly over the top. They do not hide from colors that I thought were awesome in middle school. Also, they're big fans of the sparkles. I was up first, and after a few layers of various foundation-type ephemera, the makeup lady got to work on my eyes. She started with some neutral tones that I actually rather enjoyed, before moving to a blue that I think is best described by the name "peacock," or perhaps "Mimi on the Drew Carey Show". That was my main eyeshadow color. It was finished off with some glittery product and ridiculous amounts of mascara, before she moved on to stark blush (the contrast was...almost tuberculosis-patient severe) and glittery lip gloss. I wasn't dressed for clubbing, but my face would have been perfect for hitting up even Reina (the best/most expensive club in Istanbul, where the real partiers go). It was absurd, but awesome. Emily was up next, and got a similar treatment, although as she's blonde, her main eyeshadow color was pink, instead of blue.


Artistry

Thus suitably television-ready, we headed out to the set, where we hung out and chatted with the crew as they prepped the ingredients and dishes for the filming to begin. We also chatted with the host, who asked us some questions to ascertain our Turkish levels and told us about the episode we'd be filming. We were making 2 dishes: muhallebi and güllaç. These are both milk-based puddings, so we got a dessert episode. We got miked up, did our sound checks, and got told by the cameramen where to stand for the best viewing angles.

Side note: any Scrubs fans out there might recognize muhallebi, from the episode where J.D. yells at Omar the Turk for stealing his pudding, "O benim muhallebim, Omar!" I used that line a few times on-set, dork that I am.

Finally, it was time to start the show! We counted down, listened to the theme song, and started in. The host introduced each of us and interviewed us briefly on our backgrounds before launching into a description of the dishes we were making. We got started on the güllaç, heating milk and sugar wıth some rosewater while I crushed some walnuts and mixed them with cinnamon. We chatted a bit about what Emily and I were doing in Turkey, and where we were from, and then the host decided I wasn't well-versed in walnut-crushing and took over while we waited for the milk to boil. We talked about when güllaç is traditionally consumed, which is during Ramazan, and I had to pretend to not know when Ramazan was so she (the host) could explain to me that it moved by 10 days each year. Once the walnuts were well and truly crushed, and the milk had boiled, Emily and I got started assembling the güllaç: We started with a layer of güllaç dough, which is like yufka or phyllo but specifically for this dish, and then added a ladleful of milk and a sprinkling of walnuts. We then added another layer of güllaç dough, and continued for maybe two dozen sets of dough, milk, and walnuts. At the end we poured all the leftover milk over the top, and let it sit while we watched the host work on the muhallebi.


Emily and our finished Güllaç

We made Sakizli Muhallebi, which is made with sakiz. In English, sakiz is 'mastic,' but neither Emily nor I had heard of such a thing before. The host had us each try a piece and... it's a similar taste and concept to gum arabic, although a little less jawbreaker-like in consistency. It's not a flavor I'd've thought to add to pudding, and certainly not one that I'd choose to highlight. But, I think it was added to serve as a jelling or binding agent, as we really couldn't taste it in the final product at all. We added the sakiz to milk over heat, along with (again) sugar and rose water, and a few other ingredients that I've forgotten. Once it started a decent rolling boil, the host stirred for a few minutes and then poured it into three smaller dishes while the crew stopped filming to help set up the set for the last part of the show, the tasting.


The guy in charge, pondering muhallebi placement

While the crew argued over what size of plates to use, Emily and I got to decorate the güllaç, using pomegranate seeds and the leftover walnuts. We embellished the pudding with a large pomegranate heart, with walnuts sprinkled around the edges. The crew really enjoyed it, and got quite a few closeups of the heart güllaç. When the set was ready again, we joined the host on-camera to try our creations and wish our audience a heartfelt "Affiyet Olsun!" (Bon Appetit). The cameras cut, everyone applauded, and the crew all came up to grab some güllaç.


We all stood around and chatted for awhile, and we asked the host where she'd learned to cook. It turned out that she'd studied in Paris, at Le Cordon Bleu, which was pretty impressive. She also told us that she has a cookbook, and is sending us copies of it, which I'm very excited about. I chatted with one of the camera guys for a bit, who was really excited that I was from Ankara, as he said much of the crew was also from Ankara. We talked about neighborhoods, and apparently they're all from Aşağı Ayrancı, which is literally down the street from me.

After a bit, we headed back towards the dressing rooms, where we filled out paperwork, asked about airdates, and got 80 lira apiece to cover our travel expenses. The guy walking us through the paperwork told us that the show will start airing in April, and will be on 3 times a day, 10:30, 3ish, and just after midnight. I'm not sure if it's on every day, but I'll find out once it starts airing. Our episode will appear sometime in May. We also may or may not be mailed a copy of our episode on DVD; I wasn't quite sure on that part, but I really really hope it's the case, because my brief Turkish cooking show stardom is something I want to preserve for posterity. If I do get a copy, rest assured I'll post it here.

We got a ride to Arnavutkoy from one of the crew, and arrived there just in time to meet up with my friend Cat (also Emily's roommate) and her visiting relatives for dinner. The restaurant was on the 4th floor of a building, overlooking the Bosphorous, and as we climbed in view, Cat's reaction to our heavily-made-up faces was priceless. It was a little something like: Cat: "Oh hey guys, you made it....Oh My Gosh! Relatives, my friends do not normally look like this". Laughter, of course, ensued. After a great dinner of fish and mezes, I said my goodbyes and headed to Taksim to catch a bus back to Ankara. I got in at 5am, and promptly headed to bed, exhausted but exhilarated.

The experience was so fun; both the host and the crew were great, and clearly were used to yabancis with much less Turkish. We wowed them with our grammar and vocab, which felt quite nice. This is something that I never would have thought I'd be doing, yet there I was, bantering with the host and crushing walnuts on a Turkish cooking show. I find it bemusing. It was such an incredible experience, and it's such a great story.

In my still-crazy-but-not-as-glamorous everyday life, I went to pub trivia last week, where my team won again, beating a team of my friends by a scant half-point. So we're writing questions for next month. Over the weekend I went to a Beer Festival at the British Embassy's pub, which was quite nice and a chance to have some non-Turkish brews. This weekend I'm heading out to Safranbolu I think, with friends of mine from Istanbul; Safranbolu's embarrassingly close to Ankara, and I've never been. So that'll be good. In my spare time, I'll be hitting up my guidebooks again, doing some planning for March, when my good friend Danaijo is visiting. So life will be full, but not really so busy.
On that note, I'm off,
kib,
-R

The Kindness of Bolulilar

I went skiing yesterday, with a friend from Istanbul. It was one of the most wonderful, absurd, and essentially Turkish days I've had yet. Cat and I had decided to meet up Thursday night in Bolu, a town of about 120,000 located directly between Istanbul and Ankara, to hang out and do a little skiing at Kartalkaya, the nearby ski centre. As Bolu is just 2 hours from Ankara but apparently 5 hours from Istanbul, I got to town first and got busy checking hotel prices and bargaining. I was quite pleased with myself, as I managed to get this gorgeous hotel down from 160 lira/night to 100 even, but in the end we went with the 75-lira place across the street (Bolu and Kartalkaya have reputations for being very expensive, and this is a case in point: I've never paid over 20 lira/person for a hotel in Turkey, except at Palandoken, which was an all-inclusive package ski deal). Having secured that, I grabbed a sandwich and a coffee before meeting up with Cat. We had a great time catching up and gossiping, of course, and turned in early so we could get up early Friday and hit the slopes.

Friday morning we got up unconscionably early, because Bolu is still 40 km from Kartalkaya, so we had a bit of a journey ahead of us. We asked at our hotel about transport options up to the ski centre, and were told that there were no busses or dolmuses, and that our only option was a taxi. We were a bit shocked, as we'd heard there was a bus up, and were determined to not take a ridiculously-expensive taxi. So we headed for one of the town's squares, and stopped at a shop to ask if they knew of a way to get up to Kartalkaya. They suggested the Belediye, which is the town hall/mayor's office. While we were a little confused as to how the mayor's office might be able to help us go skiing, we set off for the Belediye, and ended up on the second floor, asking I think the mayor's secretary about ways to get to Kartalkaya. They had us wait, and offered us tea while they got on the phone. When the woman came back to us, she told us that a taxi was our only option, but that we were now Guests of the Mayor's Office, so we could get a special discount on the taxi: 70 lira instead of 100 lira. We were a little nonplussed, as 70 lira one-way was still more than we were hoping to spend, but we were a little stuck, so we agreed and she went off to call us a cab. A few minutes later, she came back, to report that she had cancelled the cab, as a man in the office had offered to drive us up. The guy turned out to be the Chief of Police. We headed out of the Belediye, running into the mayor on his way in, and stopped to chat for a bit with him. He, like most people we'd met so far that day, seemed a little bemused by us. We headed out with the Chief of Police, Erol, stopping by a police building briefly to pick up a friend of his, a woman named Eylem. Erol had called her to come along because she spoke English, as he didn't know that we spoke Turkish. We had a really fun ride up the mountain, chatting the whole time about Bolu, what they did, travel, and why we were determined to get up the mountain. Part way up, the car got stuck, and we had to rent snow chains from these guys on the side of the road. Erol wouldn't let us pay for them, even though he was driving up only because we wanted to go to Kartalkaya. We eventually made it to one of the mountaintop resorts, Dorukaya, and Erol and Eylem came in with us for a tea before heading back down the mountain. Again, they wouldn't let us pay for the tea, or anything for gas for the trip. We repaid them as best we could, by giving them some of my freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies, which they had never seen before and really appreciated (this is how I spread my Fulbright goodwill--one cookie at a time, apparently). Before they left, Erol took the cafe manager at Dorukaya aside and told him that as we were Guests of the Mayor's Office, he should help us find a cheap way down the mountain once we were finished skiing.
We said goodbye to Erol and Eylem, and headed to get our skis and passes. We were able to successfully bargain down the ski rental price by 15 lira, and the lift passes by 10, although the passes were still exorbitant. We headed out, and started skiing finally. It was decent skiing; the best part about the slopes is that they were almost empty; I don't think there were more than 15, 20 people there skiing that day. Of course, this was partially because the winds were so high that all but 2 lifts were closed, but it was still quite nice and empty on the slopes. Cat grew up in Colorado and could ski before she could walk, so we were at very different skill levels, but I improved a bit and even skied off course a bit with her (not necessarily successfully, but it was pretty darn fun). I stayed pretty much on red pistes, as those were what was open. The snow was fierce; it whipped around in the wind, and the falling snow was roughly the consistency of unflavored Dippin Dots, so on the lifts we had huge pellets slapping into our faces. It was a bit like being sandblasted with sea salt.
After we'd spent a full afternoon skiing, we headed back in to Dorukaya to figure out how to get back to Bolu, so we could grab dinner and a bus back to Ankara and Istanbul. We talked to our guy Ahmet, who Erol had spoken with earlier, and he checked around before telling us that there wasn't anybody heading down the mountain that evening who could take us with, and offering to call us a taxi. We figured our luck couldn't be awesome twice in one day, and asked him to get us a discount on the taxi if he could. While we waited, we chilled with some sahlep and cookies (incidentally, they were the perfect post-ski snack). Ahmet came back, and told us that "there would be no taxi". We were a bit perplexed, but then he told us that there was a bus we could hitch a ride on. One of the guys on the bus came to escort us, and we started talking. It turned out that we were on the local university's ski club bus, heading back to Bolu after a week on the slopes. And the guy we were chatting to was a basketball player who had spent a good part of last year playing ball and studying in Lithuania. The entire bus was pretty interested in us, and we spent the trip down the mountain chatting and singing loud Turkish songs at the top of our lungs. Our basketball player friend offered to help us buy our bus tickets and take us to dinner, so when we got out at the town center, we did just that. We ended up at his family's restaurant, a manti restaurant (manti might just be my favorite Turkish dish...) just off the main street of Bolu. We met his father, his cousin, and his 5-year-old cousin, who was adorable and had just spent a month in America. The 5-year-old was incredibly excited to practice his English skills with us. As we sat down and started chatting, we heard our names being called: we looked up to see Eylem, from earlier that morning, having dinner at the same restaurant, with her father. We ended up all eating together, and she admonished us to be safe with our adventuring. It was a really great meal, delicious, and a little bizarre to be eating with our friend from the morning and our friend from the evening ride, along with their respective families. After taking a quick photo and attempting to pay for dinner (the owner wouldn't let us), we dashed off to the bus station, and on our respective busses, back to our cities and flats and everyday lives.
I was just blown away by how the Bolulilar we met just went out of their way to help us out and get us where we needed to go. And they all refused payment; we saved over 150 lira at least, figuring in 2 taxis at a ridiculously discounted rate plus dinner plus tea. And we had great conversations, in both Turkish and English, got to share some Americana through the guise of chocolate chip cookies, and were Guests of the Mayor's Office. Simply Incredible. Cat was one of my travel buddies both in Cappadocia and in the Southeast; I'd say we're pretty legendary travel companions.
And Bolu is just a fantastic city full of wonderfully nice people.

-R

Erzurum

This is me in one of the Georgian churches we visited while not skiing, last weekend in Erzurum. This is also my new haircut, it was about time and then some.
-R

News and Notes

Well it's been a bit of a whirlwind, as per usual. I got home from my last trip a few weeks ago, had just enough time to relax, unpack, and catch up on errands, and then left again. This time, just for a long weekend, to the east of Turkey. I flew to Erzurum with a few (...or 16) friends to go skiing at Turkey's best ski center, Palandoken. We had a great all-inclusive deal Friday through Monday, as most of the folks going were diplomats, with 9-5 M-F-type jobs, so couldn't just leave whenever as I generally can. It didn't turn out quite as we'd expected: Palandoken normally has a good 2-3 metres of snow cover, but due to the worst snowfall in remembered history, they had a whole 10 cm. Not exactly decent ski weather. A few of us did head out Friday to see if it was at all skiable: I went down the only open run once, and decided I didn't need to ski over rocks and ice, and that was the end of that. We did day-trip to another nearby ski center, at Sarikamis, on Saturday, which was excellent. They did have snow, luckily, and I worked my way up from a blue hill to a black, so that was good. We were a motley collection of skill levels, but everyone ended up with at least one partner to hit the pistes with. Sunday we took pretty easy, after a thoroughly enjoyable Saturday night at our hotel, venturing out to Erzurum for lunch to try the regional specialty (cag kebap, it's grilled horizontally, oooOOOooo...) and stroll for a bit. I headed back early with two of the others, and we took a walk up a pist, avoiding the occasional skier and rock. We got to the top right as they were closing the gondola down, and luckily got the very last gondola down the mountain. At the bottom, we met up with the rest of the group for tea and cards before shifting over to dinner, and more cards.
Monday was also a bit of a late start, as we checked out and packed up before heading out to see some relatively-nearby Georgian churches. They were a bit out of the way, in tiny villages way off the main road, so it took awhile to get there. They were beautiful though; fallen into disrepair, and in one case roofless, but majestic and imposing nonetheless. They were also really fun to clamber over. That took most of the day, and we returned to our hotel to pick up our luggage just in time to head to the airport for our 7pm flight back to Ankara. It wasn't quite the skiing holiday I'd anticipated, but it was a lot of fun, and I got to know some really great folks, so it was worth it. Also, from that trip plans were made for more skiing, closer to Ankara this time, so I really can't complain.
This week, I'm doing a bit more catch-up, and hopefully going to a lecture on the Yoruks (a minority group in Southern Turkey) and kilims (Turkish carpets). I'm also starting to take a look at what exactly I'm doing after my Fulbright finishes, which is frankly terrifying, but I suppose it's good to look earlier rather than later, and to have a few options, inshallah. I'll also be preparing to give a presentation on my research to 3 different audiences, in Izmir, Bursa, and Erzurum, organized by the Embassy. The talks won't happen til April, but it'll be good for me to figure out what I should and shouldn't mention.
Ankara is surprisingly warm for February: it was 6 Celsius today, and it rained last week. I remember the last winter I was here, they had record snow and had to call in the military to clear roads around ODTU's campus. I think I prefer this winter.
On that note,
kib,
-R