'Tis One Kind of Season

Sorry to interrupt things, but the İstanbul saga must be put on hold for the next few installments. Santa waits for no one!

So, on Christmas Eve, I attended one of the best Rotary Club dinners yet. It was not held in the usual local hotel, but in a Mediterranean restaurant called "Akdeniz Akdeniz," literally meaning "Mediterranean Sea Mediterranean Sea." It is an old place, with the indoor seating sunk down half a floor so that the diner is greeted with an eye-level view of the charming outdoor seating area, vacant then but for a few smokers huddled in the December chill. For the season, the interior of the restaurant was haphazardly decorated in red and green New Years decorations strung from the rough-hewn beams and tacked to the old plaster walls. The atmosphere was warm and cheerful and the place was packed with many merry Turks, all out for some pre-New Years fun. The table next to ours was even longer and was full of another large and boisterous group. Our table was lavishly and inexplicably decorated with at least fifty floating red balloons (which we took to popping throughout the night), tiny evil eye beads, glitter and confetti, and little, blinking, plastic diamonds. There was a three-piece band playing what seemed to me to be some kind of Cuban or South American jazz.

The food was delicious. There were the standard 12 or 16 small dishes of appetizers, including roasted-eggplant yogurt, mixed-vegetable yogurt, potato salad, seaweed salad, a fish salad I was unfamiliar with, mussels filled with seasoned rice (a Mediterranean favorite available on most street corners, along with roast chestnut stands, cup o' corn stands, at which one can buy a small cup of corn topped with your choice of mayonnaise, ketchup, soy sauce, or any gross combination thereof for only one lira, and, at night, a stand that sells delicious rice mixed with a few chickpeas and topped with shredded chicken and salt and pepper or pickles for only 2.50 TL), and many other tasty salads and yogurt to be eaten with the ample supply of bread provided. After having our fill of these, some nice fresh calamari was brought out with a good pink calamari sauce. I was allowed a glass of red wine or two with dinner, which was a nice treat. Of the four choices of fish, I picked the Norwegian salmon, which was nice with a little lemon and salt. The whole dinner was very merry and the music was beautiful.

About half-way through the dinner, a woman came up with the band to sing. She began with a few big French songs, moving throughout the night to the most familiar Turkish ballads. She was very animated and passionate and had a beautiful voice. Many people got up to dance in the tiny space in front of the band not filled with people. Turkish music is very fun and has a lot of beautiful, catchy, heavy rhythms, and I did my share of shoulder-shaking along with the rest of the group.

I kept checking the time to make sure I knew when the clock struck Christmas. It's my absolute favorite holiday and is the source for my name; my mother's family is Italian, I was born three days after Christmas, and the Italian word for Christmas is Natale. Not only that, but it's the only time in winter or spring that I ever get to see my dad and his family and all of my mom's family in Ohio, so it really is a special time of year for me, and I was worried about how I would handle being so far away for that day in particular. So finally, midnight came, with the festivities still in full swing in Akdeniz Akdeniz. I immediately reached across the table and kissed Aylin on both cheeks and wished her Merry Christmas, then doing the same to Korhan, Fatma, and the others who were sitting around me. I was then urged to go around the whole table to kiss everybody and wish them "Merry Christmas," or, in Turkish, "Mutlu Noeller." People were a little surprised, because in spite of the red and green décor and the ornaments and little fake trees available in some super markets, not many Turkish people that I've talked to know too much about the exact date of Christmas, why it's important, or other bits of general information known to the rest of the Christian world—understandably! Many Christmas traditions like putting up lights and even getting a full tree have been adopted as New Years (Yil Başı) traditions, here. After I'd fully startled the party goers with my kisses and foreign well-wishes, I sat back down next to Fatma and right away I just sort of melted and started crying , which I tried to hide in her shoulder. I couldn't help it! I kept picturing my family back in Ohio. After a minute or two of back patting, when I was still weepy but feeling a little better, the president of our club reached over the table and took my hand and led me around over to the dance floor and just started to do some kind of dance with me! I was still crying and I was just being twirled all over this tiny dance floor and I kept stepping on people and I was laughing and crying and sort of letting out little squeaks about not knowing how to dance but he taught me the step pattern and right there and so, in some restaurant in Turkey, with some forty-something year-old Turkish man, while crying and laughing at the same time, in the wee hours of Christmas, I actually had my first ever formal dance with anybody. It was so strange, but at the same time, it was exactly what I needed to make me feel better and help me forget what I was missing so I could think about what I was, and am, experiencing.

After dinner, a large portion of the group piled into a few cars and went to a 24-hour soup/food place. It was a little too brightly lit for my taste, but I liked the baked pudding that I had ordered and it was comforting after what had been a very tiring night. Most of the men and a few of the women ordered a certain soup that is the after-dinner-and-drinks standard when Turks have a night out on the town. It's made, I believe, out of some portion of the stomach of cows, and is served with vinegar poured right in it, along with heaps of hot pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. If that wasn't enough, the waiter also brought out a little plate with a big long curled up thing on it, which was, I gather, a whole intestine stuffed all the way through with seasoned rice. After THAT, another plate was brought out, and it was even MORE gruesome! Imagine chopping off some animal's head, taking out the brain, and then just taking all of the meat left of the whole thing, cooking it, and putting it on a plate. There were tongues and cheek meat and forehead meat and eyeballs, all in one big brownish heap. I stuck with my pudding.

We finally headed home at about 2:30, picking up my little sister Söğüt from her grandma's on the way home. I fell asleep in the car, woke up long enough to stumble inside, put on some PJs and some Christmas music, and fell right to sleep.

More to come later of Christmas, my birthday, and, this weekend, New Years in Cappadocia!!

I love you all and I hope everyone is having a very merry holiday season!

Love,

Natalie