Lunching in Kocaeli
Jun. 26th, 2011 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerOur hostess is married to a Turkish fellow who grew up in a village, so yesterday we went to have lunch with his parents and his little brother's family. They've moved into a house on the outskirts of town now - little brother and family in the top floor, the parents on the floor below, and on the ground floor the sheep and the chickens.
You can't smell the barnyard at all in the house, or even in the garden unless you walk right up to it, and because they (being Muslim) have no pigs, it doesn't smell bad, anyway; just a little startling to a city-slickers' nose.
There's a stove inside for cooking (and also a flat screen TV larger than ours), but the mother and the little brother's wife Fatma still do the weekly baking in a stone oven outside. Heat it up with a fire, rake the ashes and embers into the door to keep it hot, and then whip the bread and pides in on a long wooden paddle to bake.
Pides are amazing. Fatma rolled out flat ovals of dough, incredibly soft dough that must be so hard to work with, covered them with beef or feta or a spinach-tomato cheese mixture, then folded the dough over so they looked like stuffed bread boats - and all this incredibly fast, flapping her headscarf a little because of the heat roiling off the oven.
And then once the pides were done, unexpected visitors pulled up and ate half of them. The pides were sacrificed so the men could keep the visitors over under the green plum trees, instead of letting them descend on the picnic table to eat our delicious chicken.
Unexpected visitors are apparently a thing in Turkey. Later in the day we descended on the summer seaside house of an acquaintance of our hostess's husband. Used to be, you could dock a boat right beneath the house, but then the government built up a boardwalk beside it to lengthen the beach and the town became a seaside resort of minor acclaim. The acquaintance, who doesn't use the house much, chatted about his plans to convert it a tea houses.
Western Turkey is, or has been, growing richer fast. The highways are clean and smooth and new, dotted with the half-built hulls of new gas stations, and new highways are coming soon: there's plans for a road straight from Istanbul to the underused Kocaeli seaside. And it's not just the rich: in half the villages we passed kids played on shiny new playgrounds, watched by mothers or grandparents from shady second-floor porches. At one of the beaches we saw a village family, with tractor; they had ridden it there.
Tomorrow we're going to Istanbul; we'll see a different slice of Turkey there.
You can't smell the barnyard at all in the house, or even in the garden unless you walk right up to it, and because they (being Muslim) have no pigs, it doesn't smell bad, anyway; just a little startling to a city-slickers' nose.
There's a stove inside for cooking (and also a flat screen TV larger than ours), but the mother and the little brother's wife Fatma still do the weekly baking in a stone oven outside. Heat it up with a fire, rake the ashes and embers into the door to keep it hot, and then whip the bread and pides in on a long wooden paddle to bake.
Pides are amazing. Fatma rolled out flat ovals of dough, incredibly soft dough that must be so hard to work with, covered them with beef or feta or a spinach-tomato cheese mixture, then folded the dough over so they looked like stuffed bread boats - and all this incredibly fast, flapping her headscarf a little because of the heat roiling off the oven.
And then once the pides were done, unexpected visitors pulled up and ate half of them. The pides were sacrificed so the men could keep the visitors over under the green plum trees, instead of letting them descend on the picnic table to eat our delicious chicken.
Unexpected visitors are apparently a thing in Turkey. Later in the day we descended on the summer seaside house of an acquaintance of our hostess's husband. Used to be, you could dock a boat right beneath the house, but then the government built up a boardwalk beside it to lengthen the beach and the town became a seaside resort of minor acclaim. The acquaintance, who doesn't use the house much, chatted about his plans to convert it a tea houses.
Western Turkey is, or has been, growing richer fast. The highways are clean and smooth and new, dotted with the half-built hulls of new gas stations, and new highways are coming soon: there's plans for a road straight from Istanbul to the underused Kocaeli seaside. And it's not just the rich: in half the villages we passed kids played on shiny new playgrounds, watched by mothers or grandparents from shady second-floor porches. At one of the beaches we saw a village family, with tractor; they had ridden it there.
Tomorrow we're going to Istanbul; we'll see a different slice of Turkey there.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-26 03:17 pm (UTC)So where you are is still in western Turkey? A friend of mine traveled in Turkey in the 1990s, and at that point, it wasn't so easy to be an American traveling in eastern Turkey.
Are you wearing a headscarf?
We were just talking about unexpected guests here. (We just finished having some expected guests, which is why I've been offline.) In Japan, arriving unannounced can be a good thing because it removes the burden from the host of having to get everything just perfect--it establishes a certain level of informality.
Interesting to read how your hosts accommodated unexpected guests!
no subject
Date: 2011-06-27 07:05 am (UTC)I'm not wearing a headscarf. Among people my age there seems to be a fifty/fifty split between headscarf/not-headscarf; older women (outside of the cities) all wear headscarves, little girls don't at all, and women in between might do either.
Of those who do wear headscarves, most wear bright patterned cloth that covers the hair but expose the face. Only a few wear the black Iranian chadors, and I haven't seen anyone wearing a Gulf-style abaya, which covers everything but the eyes.
And fascinating, about unexpected guests in Japan. I can see how that would be a big relief.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-26 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-27 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-27 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-27 07:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-28 07:24 pm (UTC)Pides are great! I like best the ones filled with cheese. Sadly, the unexpected guests seemed to have nabbed all of those.