Look out Istanbul, I have arrived.

After another fantastic international plane trip full of joy and excitement we arrived in Istanbul. I was incredibly keen to get in to the day and get ahold of some Turkish food. But I had developed a keen cigarette habit in KL so the first thing I needed was a nice sweet drink, preferably coke. But believe it or not the kiosk that I went to had no coke! so I was reduced to drinking coke zero, bloody terrible stuff, but here I am pretending to be excited about it. Hey, given the opportunity I'll be enthusiastic with just about anything.

After a train ride with a thousand sweaty turks, we got off at Sultanahmet station and trudged through the snow to our hotel. The Hotel Seraglio is a lovely little boutique establishment tight in the heart of old Istanbul. We had arrived early but they had put breakfast on for us. It was very very different from all of our breakfasts in SEAsia, (of course). The highlight of the breakfasts at Seraglio were the omelette's, freshly cooked by a chef behind the breakfast serving table. They had red onion, plenty of yellow cheese, capsicum, and some crazy looking ham that was bright pink, you can see a little bit of it sticking out of the edge on that photo. Crazy coloured processed meats aside, the omlette was cooked wonderfully, it was light and fluffy and the combination of flavours was perfect, the cheese all oozy the ham and cheese nice and salty. Suffice to say the omlette was on the menu everyday in Istanbul. There really was alot of cheese around in Turkey, it was the ubiquitous ingredient everywhere we went. It is usually unmatured, so its soft and white and relatively low in fat. Here you see the Turkish version of string cheese Dil Peyniri, it was fibrous and kind of chewy. there is a type of Beyaz Peynir, what we would call feta cheese that alot saliter than the string cheese and a little sour, very nice with the rye bread toasted. Behind that you can see the chicken loaf with some dried apricots in it, and a dandy little cheerio. Carbs and fat for breakfast anyone?

A special mention has to be made of the pancakes they served for breakfast. These things were obscenely decadent, doused in a chocolate sauce that had a flavour reminiscent of nutella but a heck of alot richer. The pancakes were all perfectly cooked, with a nice firm texture but not too stodgy.  I must have had dozens of these things over the week.

After my adventure into Istanbul Ink we discovered the first of many Narghila Bars. We ended up sitting here all day drinking cheap Turkish beer and smoking apple and melon flavoured tobacco. nothing better to warm you up when its snowing out than profuse amounts of alcohol and tobacco. There were very few locals about anywhere in sultanahmet, it really was all about the tourists, and of course the prices were reflective of this. Whilst I say here that the drinks and everything else was cheap I'm sure that these kind of  indulgent days would have been entirely out of reach for the average turk.

Lunch was a delightful kofta wrap. This has to be one of the cleanest and most balanced wraps I had in my two weeks in wrap countries. I call them this, Turkey and Jordan, because wraps are everywhere. If you're eating meat, your probably eating it on a wrap. But this wrap was great, the kofta was nicely spiced with some garlic and paprika and a hint of somthing like rosemary. There was tomato and cucumber as well, also everywhere in this part of the world and, all of this was dressed with a great yoghurt based sauce with a hint of mint and garlic. Really fresh and tasty, a great lunch when your drinking way to much beer. A little expensive though to be honest. There is no way that any turk would pay this much for a wrap. It was pretty comparable to what we might pay here in Australia for the same thing. But it was good, so I wont complain too much.

Then there was raki, oh wow, raki what can I say. This stuff was just terrible. now I don't like aniseed at the best of the time, and I dont much go in for straight alcohol either, but this raki took nasty to a new level. According to wiki raki is an unsweetened aniseed based beverage that is popular in Turkey, Greece and some other Balkan countries. It tastes like ouzo on steroids, with a really mean streak. All I can say is yuck, clearly these people don't have taste buds or if they do they've been burnt away by years off drinking raki.

Then came dinner, and man this stuff was the bomb. Its called a guevec, which is basically a lamb casserole. I had had guevec back in oz but this thing put that stuff to shame. It was incredibly robust in flavour, jam packed with tomatos onion and garlic with a big whack of hot paprika. In side was a whole pile of  veg like zucchini and celery. The lamb was cut into small cubes and was sucelent and tender. A real powerhouse of flavour. They cooked it in these fantastic cast iron pots and served the same, right at the end they sprinkle it with a matured yellow cheese that melts and bubble as they bring it out to you. THe cheese was all stringy and stretchy and went perfectly with the rich tomotoey sauce and the tender lamb.