Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Turkish Tuesday

Tried a new Turkish restaurant for dinner tonight and was quite impressed.
I wandered around Turkey a bit after University and I don't remember being particularly fond of the cuisine. In fact, I seem to remember the whole group of us being laid up in Austria a couple days after we left Turkey while our bodies reaclimitized themselves to western food.

Turkey itself was fantastic, though. Friendly people, amazing sites and possibly the craziest drivers in the world. To them, karma decides if they will live through another day on the roads or not and they seem to have great trust in karma giving each of them two thumbs up.

If you keep one bit of information from this, just remember - do not drive in Istanbul if you value your life. Yes, there are trafic lights, the occaisional street sign - even lines on the road. But none of these mean anything. It wasn't unusual to see a public bus driving on the wrong side of the road while at the same time the streets were crammed with pedestrians - either skillfully weaving in and out of traffic or trying to sell you something. The highways were even more insane.

The only way we survived the experience was to become one with the turks. "Let the turk out" became our motto when driving. It almost seemed like our brains usual danger signals had turned themselves off as we swerved in and around cars on the highway, usually with only a few meters to spare between us and oncoming traffic, or inventing that mysterious third lane in the middle of a two land highway. Ahh karma.

These days I think I'll stick to an Adana kebab and some turkish delight.

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