A Turkish Delight

Growing up my family often gathered for an Easter meal of ham and all the trimmings.  This Easter Tom and I decided on Turkey, the country though, not the food.  Although we couldn't gather with family this Easter, we were fortunate in being able to gather with some friends from home.  Lisa and Andrew flew to Istanbul from Toronto to spend the long weekend with us.  It's my blog, and I'll believe that they came just for us if I want to.  Thank you Lisa and Andrew!

With only about a two hour flight, Tom and I arrived in Istanbul a couple of hours earlier than Lisa and Andrew, so we did some walking around random streets and along the water in Istanbul.  Tom spotted a dolphin diving, which I thought he was making up until I saw several myself.  It was better than Marineland!
We met Lisa and Andrew on Friday evening for dinner.  It wasn't the best meal we had in Istanbul, but the beer was cold, the company was great, and the weekend's first round of baklava was delicious.

After a good night's sleep (better for Tom and I who were not on "Canada time", and who are used to 5am call to prayer), we met after breakfast and followed the tourist trail.  We started at the Basilica cistern, an underground water storage facility.  Tom and Andrew seemed really enjoyed taking pictures, and Lisa smiled through gritting teeth, now having to compete with two cameras instead of one to make it to the exit. 

Next we went to Istanbul's most famous attractions, the Blue Mosque, pictured behind Lisa and Andrew in the picture above, and Aya Sofya.  Both buildings were stunning, inside and out.  I found Aya Sofya particularly interesting, as it was initially a cathedral, but was converted to a mosque.  There is still plenty of evidence of its differing identities.  

After lunch we went for the necessary, if not infamous, Turkish bath.  You wouldn't go to France and not try french baguette would you?!  The boys opted for the self-serve option, and it sounds to me like they lounged around in pools and saunas for a couple hours.  Lisa and I decided to go all out and include the massage, a term used quite loosely to describe what was to come.  The first stop was the changeroom where we were instructed by a woman in too-small underwear to change into our birthday suits.  Thankfully she did give us towels to walk to the pools... more than can be said about the later trips around the bath.  The next couple of hours exceed the PG rating of this blog.  Let's just say that by the end I had shed plenty of dead skin and a little inhibition. 

You can tell that I was traveling with another female for once.  We followed the "spa" with shopping.  We went to Istanbul's famous Grand Bazaar, a maze of sensory overload.  Stores full of beautifully coloured scarves, pottery, rugs, lamps, jewelry and more lined the seemingly endless aisles.  I felt well-prepared for scarf shopping, having already experience in it in Cairo.  I thought that using my Egyptian scarf as a frame of reference would make for logical bargaining.  It may have been optimistic to believe that logic would help in bargaining.  I was kindly told that my Egyptian scarf was "a piece of junk" compared to Turkish scarves.  It only took two stores and some playful bargaining to get a Turkish scarf for the same price as my Egyptian one.  Score! 

I really loved the pottery in Turkey, so I made Tom do the bargaining for some bowls.  After leaving his favourite bowls over a couple of dollars and feeling non-buyer's remorse, he did find another store with nearly identical bowls that he managed to get for the price he wanted.  

After such a tough day, we headed back to our hostels for a nap (I guess I can't talk for Lisa and Andrew).  We met again in the evening and snacked on street food on our way to dinner.  I know it's not good to spoil your meal, but I don't think pastry with cheese it in could ever spoil anything.  Thankfully we did put that little bit of fuel into our tanks, as our lack of knowing where we'd have dinner turned into about an hour-long walk to finally settle on a restaurant that was busy and had a vegetarian dish on the menu.  That one vegetarian dish, vegetable casserole, was delicious. 

We left the restaurant to explore Istanbul's hopping nightlife.  The pedestrian street we were on was jam-packed with people, and there was thumping music coming from many establishments.  We agreed on the one that had dancing people visible in the window.  It had to be fun.  It was!  There was an eclectic mix of Turkish, English, and French music, with my favourite song being the dance remix of "I've had the Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing.  We even broke out our dance moves, which may have been a touch more provocative than the average dance move in a club in a Muslim country. 

This late night (for us old people anyway) led to another good night's sleep, and a pretty lazy next morning.  Tom and I found a church to celebrate Easter mass, and we met Lisa and Andrew around lunch time.  We walked to Taksim square, "the heart of modern Istanbul" according to my guide book.  It was not more interesting than a traffic circle in Cornwall or Barrhaven.  Tom and I grabbed "gozleme" for lunch, sometimes called "Turkish pancakes" although they are more pastry than pancake, wrapped around yummy savoury filling, spinach and feta in our case.  These were SO good!  Canada really needs to work on its street pastries. 

We checked out the modern art museum, Lisa bought some suprisingly reasonably priced Ray Bans, then Lisa and I had Turkish ice cream, which is not nearly as good as North American ice cream, in my humble opinion.  Next we went to the spice market.  It was a feast for the senses (and cameras of course), with great smells and colourful displays all around. 

Before heading for dinner we relaxed on a rooftop terrace with a view of Europe and Asia.  Turkey is actually in both continents, and a fairly short bridge connects the two continents.  Dinner plus more delicious baklava brought us to the end of our third day in Istanbul. 

We decided to use our last day to see Topkapi Palace, the residence of Ottoman sultans for several hundred years.  The grounds were very pretty, with more green than we've seen in months.  Every room was ornately decorated, with beautiful patterned tiles and elaborately painted ceilings.  The treasury included an 86 carat diamond which was purchased for 3 spoons.  That person must have been even better at bargaining than me.

Pide (Turkish pizza) for lunch, followed by baklava of course, plus some Turkish delight for good measure, brought us to the time to part ways.  Sadly (for us) Tom and I were headed back to Cairo to work, while Lisa and Andrew were heading out for some travel in other parts of Turkey.  We've had a good year of travel, it can't always be our turn. 

A Taste of Egypt

"Will you (vegetarian freaks) be able to eat much of the food in Egypt?"  This was one of the most common questons we heard upon announcing our move.  To be honest, we really didn't know.  So we asked anyone we knew who had traveled to Egypt about the food.  The overwhelming response made me think of the way my brother Billy described the first cake I ever baked as a young girl ... "You can eat it, but it tastes like sh!t"  Thankfully I disagree, not about that first cake (it was awful), but about Egyptian food.

There are many delicious vegetarian dishes local to Egypt and the Middle East.  Sorry omnivores, I can't comment on the traditional Egyptian pigeon.  What I can share is that Egypt's national dish, kushary, is a carb-loaded and protein-packed stack of tastiness.  When I get back to Canada I can even share the dish itself with you, now that Tom and I learned to make it on Thursday evening.  We won't share Egyptian wine with you at the meal though, despite quite enjoying our winery tour to cap off the weekend.

Thursday evening the teachers became the students.  We invited four colleagues over for a kushary making lesson that we persuaded one of our Egyptian running friends to teach.  You may think that 7 cooks is too many for one kitchen.  This is not the case for kushary, a meal that includes rice, two types of pasta, lentils, chickpeas, 3 sauces, and fried onions.  I now understand why most stoves in Egypt have five burners. 

The eager-to-help grade one french teacher started the kushary preparation with the tear-inducing task of chopping one onion per person.  A few of us got to work on the sauces, although Linda would claim that she slaved over two entire sauces on her own.  We learned the secrets to making the kushary as delicious as possible, and wondered if the real secret is to just buy it from one of the "fast food" kushary stands for only about $1.  We cooked for well over an hour, while Tom "supervised" over a cold beverage.  At least it was an Egyptian one. 

We chopped, fried, measured, mixed, boiled, blended, laughed, took pictures, and even belly-danced.  The final result:  an exhausted Egyptian teacher, 7 servings (+ leftovers) of delectable kushary, and 6 quiet teachers, enjoying their learning more than my students ever do.  I ate so much I felt a little sick, but it was well worth it!

After one day off, largely spent cleaning kushary dishes, we dove back into tasting Egypt.  We traveled about three hours north of Cairo for a tour of the country's only winery.  We started with a snack of croissants and fruit, then headed out to the very unimpressive vineyard.  We then toured the receiving area, processing plant, fermentation area, and saw some antique wine making machinery.  Next it was off to the most interesting room, the wine tasting cellar.

On the menu:  bread, wine, and cheese.  We enjoyed it, maybe a little too much.  We tried their sparkling rosé and sparkling white, one type of white wine, and three different red wines.  We bought the most expensive bottle of wine available to take back to Cairo (aka drink on the bus ride back to Cairo).  It cost us all of 85 Egyptian pounds, or about $15.  You can drink it, but it tastes like... 

The Other Pyramids

The saying goes "Rome wasn't built in a day."  As it turns out, neither was Cairo.  The iconic pyramids that most people associate with Egypt are the Pyramids of Giza.  These are the ones on countless Egyptian postcards, the ones that every tour bus goes to, and the ones that Tom and I were taken to in our first week in Egypt.  You may remember the photo from our very first Eg-cellent blog.  The pyramids in Giza can be described as the pinnacle of Egyptian pyramids.  They include the world's largest pyramid, the only remaining wonder of the 7 wonders of the ancient world.  These pyramids are picture perfect, built with  optimal slope.  There are over a hundred pyramids in Egypt, evolving in size and construction.  This weekend we had the opportunity to see some of these "other pyramids".

Similar to many of our adventures, our trip to the other pyramids was a Maadi Runners event.  We met the other runners too early in the morning to catch a bus for the half-hour ride south of Cairo to Sakkara, home of the first pyramid ever built:  the Step Pyramid.  Unfortunately we did not enter the pyramid site, but we did get to see the famous Step Pyramid from afar along our running route.

The longest stretch of the 10-mile run followed a dirt road along a canal through an Egyptian village.  The cows, goats, and sheep along the path gave it a true rural feel, while the palm tree forest lining the trail reminded us that we weren't in rural Canada.  The villagers we met along the way were much friendlier than those that try to run us over in Cairo, with adults directing us through the only confusing part of the path, while the children cheered us on.


The run lead us to a second set of pyramids, the Pyramids of Dahshur.  The first pyramid we approached was the Red Pyramid, which didn't look very red to me.  I followed another runner up the stairs part way up this pyramid, thought to be the first successfully built smooth-sided pyramid.  It is also the third tallest pyramid in Egypt, after the two larger pyramids in Giza.  My legs realized soon after that it was pretty silly to climb stairs with some running left to do. 


This site is best known for the "bent pyramid", the first attempt at a smooth-sided pyramid.  The bottom of the pyramid has very steep sides, but (likely due to instability) the slope was changed halfway through construction, and the top half is less steep.  Actually, the top half of the Bent Pyramid was constructed at the angle which was soon after used to build the red pyramid, and  also used for the pyramids in Giza.  The "official" finish line of the run was with one hand on the Bent Pyramid.

After some group photos at the pyramids, we headed to one of the runners' beautiful house nearby to have some Egyptian asshole for brunch.  Sorry, that should have read assel, the Arabic word for honey.  You can imagine the confusion when an Egyptian man tries to use "hello assel" as a pick-up line.  The brunch, including its assel, was possibly the best post-run brunch on record.

I'm not sure if I've ever written about bread in Egypt.  Its almost exclusively what we would call pita in Canada, although Egyptians, even those fluent in English, have no idea what the word "pita" means.  It's eaten with virtually every meal.  After eating a piece of this Egyptian bread fresh from a clay oven, I understand why one would eat it with every meal.  The warm and delicious bread was complimented by homemade fateer, which are like really big, flattened mille-feuilles with assel.  There was also garden fresh vegetables, foul (Egyptian beans), 3 types of cheese, banana choco chip muffins, and peach cobbler made by yours truly.  I think that the thing I will miss the most about Egypt is the Friday morning run with brunch, and the assels I've had the pleasure of sharing it with.

The Beigery

Haven't you heard?  Beige is the new green.  That's what we're telling ourselves in the desert anyway.

While there is not much green to be seen around Cairo, there is a lot to see.  When we were evacuated from Cairo in January and unsure as to whether we'd ever be back, we realized all the things that we hadn't seen and done yet.  We hadn't been to the Egyptian Museum, to Coptic Cairo, to Khan el-Khalili, Al-Ahzar park, the Cairo Opera House... the list goes on.  Cairo is (or at least was pre-revolution) a tourist center.  There really is a fantastic amount of history and sight-seeing to do here.

Upon returning to Cairo we vowed that we would do all the tourist stuff.  Sadly that was easier said than done.  Things weren't as stable as we'd have liked them to be, especially at tourist sights, so we barely got out of our neighbourhood for the first month we were back.  Thankfully things have settled down quite a bit over the past few weeks, and we finally made it out for a day of Cairo tourism.  After some rooftop city seeing and a traditional Egyption lunch of koshary, we went to our first major stop:  Khan el-Khalili bazaar, more commonly called "The Khan".  This labyrinth of stalls sells everything from spices to robes, paintings to alabaster, papyrus to t-shirts, perfumes to candles, herbal remedies to shoes, pillowcases to tents, brass, gold, silver, and camel and pyramid souvenirs of all shapes and sizes.  The market has existed for over 600 years, though I wouldn't imagine it having quite the same products in the 1300's.  There is some beautiful medieval architecture throughout the market, making for an unforgettable and almost surreal atmosphere.   

My shopping list for the day was scarves and a belly dancing skirt.  Scarves are very popular here in Cairo.  Many Egyptian women wear them as headscarves, making a beautiful and diverse scarf selection available all over Cairo... certainly not to be missed in the Khan.  I wanted scarves partly for warmth, and partly for style.  It's already getting much warmer here, too warm to wear a jacket most of the time.  Still, it can be chilly waiting for the bus in the morning, and you wouldn't believe the difference wearing a scarf makes.  Many years ago, in trying to convince a very cool pre-teen me to wear my toque, I think it was my mom who told me that as long as your head is warm, the rest of your body will feel warm.  I think it's true about the neck as well.  Plus, like I said, scarves are really used as a fashion accessory here by Egyptian women and foreigners alike.  After a lot of bargaining, I happily bought two scarves, one very colourful one, and one all-purpose beige one... for days when I want to blend in. 

Mission 2:  a belly dancing skirt.  Many of you may be aware that I took some belly dancing lessons back in Canada.  For whatever reason, I could make plenty of excuses, I did not take any belly dancing lessons pre-revolution.  I'm in Egypt, what was I thinking?!  I started taking belly dancing lessons a few weeks ago with a colleague, and have been having a great time of it.  Our instructor is exactly what you would picture an Egyptian belly dancing instructor to be... I'm not sure if there's a stereotype she does not meet.  She wears over-the-top clothing and make-up, gets extremely animated about the smallest of hand gestures, "beautiful hands Kitty", and can move her hips like you wouldn't believe.  The class is actually quite challenging and a great core workout.  Once I committed to sticking with the class (two hours weekly, since any less wouldn't be enough to yield results she says), I knew I'd have to get my own belly dancing skirt, as I sent my other one home in revolution packing.  Again, I had to do lots of bargaining, not my favourite thing.  I had fun this time though.  We were about 50 pounds apart in price when the saleswoman offered to come down by 1 pound.  Even she laughed when I offered to go up by just one pound.  We eventually agreed on a price, which my instructor said this week was "not too much Kitty".

You've gotta love a shopping day when you find everything you wanted.  For Tom's sake, our next Cairo tourist destination will likely not include any shopping.    Next on our list are the "other pyramids".