Random Turkish Delights – Part 1
As we continue our 4,000 km, 14 day road trip, we have fallen in love with Turkey.
Food: The food here is delicious. Our options (thankfully) are more varied than meat-on-a-stick (though shish is available everywhere). And yes, they have Turkish Delight here. But interestingly, they don’t eat turkey, the bird. Go figure.
Religion: The Turks seem to pick and choose which parts of Islam they want to implement. Alcohol can be found in many restaurants. The divorce rate is 30%. There are more love marriages these days then arranged marriage. Scarves are still the norm for women here though, and the mosques are central to every town we visit.
Football: Like most of the world (save Canada and the U.S.), soccer is huge in Turkey. We were fortunate enough to be here for the Euro Cup semi-finals, with Turkey facing off against Germany. Ironically, we were in Konya, the driest city in Turkey, where only one restaurant serves alcohol. Not the wildest party of our trip, but fun nonetheless. Unfortunately, we didn’t win the game. Which at least meant no gunshots in the air and accidental Canadian victims.
Turkish Weddings: We witnessed first-hand a Turkish wedding. It was all quite traditional, with a live Turkish band, dancing and of course, no booze. We were a bit surprised by the choice of the first song for the bride and groom though– Careless Whisper, circa 1983. Seriously.
History – There is a ridiculous amount of history in Turkey, and our guide Ugur seems to know about 9,000 years of it. We still can’t tell you if the Ottomans or the Seljuks were here first, but hopefully, by the end of the trip, we’ll have it down.
Language – Turkish is really, really hard to learn, and we’re not entirely meeting our one word-a-day goal. Mel is still struggling to learn to say ‘Thank you’.
Weather– We are essentially melting in Turkey. Our warmest day so far was 45 degrees. We haven’t seen any clouds yet, though our Guide assures us they do exist in Turkey, he’s just made special arrangements for our visit.
Cake time – OK, we aren’t sure if this is actually a custom all over Turkey, but basically, this involves a man carrying around a large cake and saying “Cake time!”, as though this is an obvious part of the day.
Tags: Travel, Turkey
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