Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there! And to my own mom who is sailing the high seas right now!

Just sharing a little something that I wrote recently. It had been on my mind a long time, and I was happy to get to put those feelings into words:

http://www.aswiftdoula.com/blog/mothers-day-essay-contest-winning-entry

PS. YES! I won this essay contest!

Turkish Choban Salad

Food is unlikely subject on the blog, since most of you know that I'm not a natural cook ;-)  But this simple salad you see around Istanbul this time of year can't even stump me. It's easy and a nice alternative to the lettuce-based salads we are used to.

Basic ingredients include tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley, olive oil and lemon. You can make a fine choban salad with just that. To spruce it up slightly, add dried mint, scallion (or green onion) and green pepper. We like to add pomegranate syrup which you can find here and has great flavour.

(On the internet you might see olives and feta cheese added to this - tasty, but not an authentic Choban Salad, it becomes an Akdeniz Salad, meaning Mediterranean Salad!)

This is the simple version we threw together the other night at dinner.

Afiyet olsun! 

(Bon appetit!)

20 words for snow

At home I am a creature of habit when it comes to my morning coffee. It's a satisfying cup, and I like it the same way everyday. When we travel, however, getting that reliable cup of coffee that tastes the way I want it becomes more difficult. I have yet to see an American-style drip coffee maker in Italy or in Turkey.

I realized yesterday that after 2 months of being here, we have amassed FIVE ways to make coffee in this house. I guess it shows you what's important around here - like how in the far North they have so many words for snow and cold weather, we have multiple methods for making coffee! :-)

First is the most traditional here, TURKISH COFFEE.  Not my favourite, and probably the last of the 5 ways I would choose to receive my caffeine intake for the day. Turkish coffee is strong and sludgy, and since it's a small cup, the satisfaction of lingering and savouring is pretty diminished.

The most famous brand of Turkish coffee is Mehmet Effendi. Turkish coffee grounds are ground very, very fine. It's almost a powder that you mix with your water and sugar in your pot on the stove. When you order your Turkish coffee, you would indicate how sweet you would like it: sade (no sugar), orta (medium) or shekerli (sweet). I go for orta:

Here's a little video on how to make Turkish coffee:



I love the cultural heritage of Turkish coffee and its many traditions... but the taste is far too strong for me and I usually only manage one cup of this stuff per visit. For me, Turkish tea or çay is a much easier custom to adopt.

Unless you are at a fancy coffee shop in Istanbul, if you don't want Turkish Kahve, you will be offered Nescafé as your next coffee option. They actually call it that, by its brand name. We have some of that hanging around too:

The slightly upper level version of this is something we lived off of last year, Starbuck's brand Columbian instant coffee. Is it that much better than Nescafé? Well, not really, but I enjoyed being able to vary flavour after a while.

When my sister-in-law came from South Africa earlier this month, I really wanted a quick and easy way to make 2 perfect cups of coffee for us quick and easy that would most resemble our at-home coffee makers. Enter the French Press:

I thought it would give us the best coffee the closest to a "drip" coffee maker. Here's a little tutorial on getting the best out of your French Press:



Did I follow all those steps? No, not really. Maybe for that reason our coffee was okay, but not great.

Our last coffee making device is the most messy and time consuming perhaps, but delivers the most satisfying cup, the Moka Pot:

Ozayr brought this back from Rome on his trip there this year, along with a bag of really great espresso coffee from Sant' Eustachio -

I didn't really understand how a Moka Pot works, but this diagram helps:

You put water in the bottom chamber, and espresso coffee grounds in the middle section. After a few minutes on the burner, the water in the bottom part begins to boil. The rising water/steam/bubbles go up through the coffee grounds, and end up in the top part - becoming a lovely, rich espresso. You can mix this with hot milk, and voilà!

Here is a little video that does a good job at explaining:



So there you have it - COFFEE. I'll leave you with my favourite coffee quote, and then I'm off to enjoy a cup myself...

“Without my morning coffee I’m just like a dried up piece of roast goat."

~Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Alfiyet Olsun!

Cappadocia!

We are back and rested from our week-long trip with the students to Cappadocia. It truly is one of the best places on earth, a World Heritage Site and full of adventure opportunities!

We did plenty of sightseeing and climbing with the kids, as well as getting to just relax and enjoy the view. This is the greatest part about getting to visit a place for a second or third time - you aren't focused on your camera or actively engaging with what you are seeing as much - you are just happy to be there. :-)

On our free day from the group, we decided to take a drive and try to find Sultan Sazligi Milli Park. We did sort of find it... but not the nice, boardwalk, developed area we were looking for. This is the route that we ended up taking - basically driving the whole perimeter of the place, ducking in occasionally, not finding what we were looking for, and then going back to the "main road" and continuing on. We ended up driving the perimeter of the whole park:

We mainly found a lot of barely drivable roads, marshes, farms - but AMAZING views. Not what we anticipated, but still a great (4 hour) drive. The sheer number of animals along the way made our day and kept the kids entertained:

 The drive back was not too shabby either -

All in all it was a lovely trip. Now we're back in our little apartment in Istanbul, going into our last month here in this incredible place. It just goes by too fast!

Family and Fleurs

Our time in Istanbul this year is flying by! We've had a record number of visitors to Turkey this time around - I think getting up close to 20!  Our family has been having so much fun taking them to all the sights, drinking tea by the water, looking for dolphins and wandering in and out of the great mosques and markets of this incredible city. We've been eating well, to say the least.

After surfacing from all the busyness (and sadly lots of rain) I got to see the city come to life in a new way the past couple of days:

I have written about tulips in Istanbul before, and my love of them has not waned. We spent much of the weekend outside enjoying the sunshine and the beautiful flowers, so plentiful at this time of year! Something about the contrast between the urbanity of this busy, crowded city, and the colour and gentleness of these flowers, makes my heart swoon anew for my beloved Istanbul....

My next post will be from Cappadocia, we leave tomorrow. We are not doing the hot air balloon ride this year, but have been re-living the experience through our blog and our many, many pictures.

Will be in touch soon! xo

Birds and Boats

One of the many joys of being here in Istanbul is living without a vehicle, as I've mentioned before. Some people love to drive - and I am not one of them. Though even if I did, the thought of driving in any European city would be enough to turn me off. Too much traffic, narrow roads, unfamiliar rules and signage, crazy taxi drivers, and just too much plain chaos - all would make for a rather stressful experience I would imagine.

In the act of not driving, a whole new world opens up to us between our apartment and our destination - in-between spaces like metro stations, docks, bus depots, as well as the conveyances themselves, trams, funiculars, buses, ferries and underground subways. Our kids are at an age where getting somewhere is a new way is still entertaining to them and since our route and means of transport varies, they never get bored.

Hands down, the favourite way for us to get anywhere in Istanbul is by boat. There are bridges over the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, and an underground metro line too - presumably, I have never used it. Why would you, when you can be on the water instead?

This past week we took a ferry to the Asian side of the city, and saw dolphins in the water, and threw bread to the trailing gulls who would snap the pieces right out of the air.

All in a day's meandering around the city! Here are some other great photos from that ride across the Bosphorus:

The Democracy of Family Travel

A shift occurs when we leave the United States, and I think it affects me the most profoundly of all.

The pervading dynamic at home is one that is centered, for the most part, around the children. Parents spend a lot of their lives driving their kids to playdates, practices, and birthday parties. Every meal is geared towards their tastes and their nutritional needs. This is just sort of the expected norm, and it exists whether you work, stay at home with your kids, homeschool, or whatever. It is pretty much the way of things that our adorable progeny always comes first. When the narrative arises among mothers about "me-time," someone will inevitably say it's because it makes us "better parents" (not because we'd actually enjoy it!). I mean, it DOES make us better parents, but it is a valid need that needs no justification.

If this idea intrigues you, listen to this TED talk by Jennifer Senior. She discusses the modern notion that our children are our life's work, and that parents are responsible for their children's happiness. She asks if that is really a fair burden to place on a parent... Does your child need to be happy all the time, first of all, and is that really my job? Well, like the speaker, I don't believe so. In fact, my job often runs in complete contradiction to what they would say makes them happy. Sometimes "healthy" takes precedence over happy. Sometimes "safe" is more important than happy. Jennifer Senior suggests that we should focus instead on things that, as an secondary effect, might result in happiness, like feeling loved, or having a sense of purpose.

I feel pressure as a mom in the United States towards making sure that my child is content day-to-day, and confident and well socialized, with perfect manners, and eating habits etc. The level of judgment in some spheres is palpable. Sometimes I feel my identity and job in the world there feels largely defined by how well my kids behave in Target. ;-)

So this is where it shifts - we leave that world.

Three things happen almost immediately. First, the radical change in the environment becomes a massive learning experience that doesn't need to be planned by me, orchestrated or scheduled. This is a generation of kids who have not had the experience of spontaneous neighbourhood play, as much as organized meetings of parents and children in a protected, contrived, "enriching" environment.

Second, we begin to live in an in-between world in which we are not really part of (or judged by) North American society or Turkish society. Wear what you want, eat what you want. Awesome.

Third, each of us, Ozayr, Maymuna, Hafsa and myself, we are equal participants in this adventure. This experience is not geared to any particular one of us. We are all here to learn and grow and enjoy ourselves, and through this each of our experience here becomes equally valid. For myself, where at home, I am often in a support staff role in the movie of my kids' childhoods, now I am an equal participant in our adventure, where if I want to see something or do something, it is not second priority, but accepted immediately as completely on par with everyone else's needs. We all take turns accommodating each other's indulgences.

This is profound for me, as it resonates through our time here and affects our decisions and choices, it even changes our family dynamic somewhat. I spend less time cooking formal meals, and we get help cleaning the apartment, so I have to spend less time on household responsibilities. It offsets some of the difficulties of travel, and it makes life on the road very different for me than it is at home.

Here are some pictures over the years, of us doing.. well, what I wanted to do.

Listening to an opera singer in a piazza in Florence

Sitting in a cafe in Paris

Chasing tulips, spring in Istanbul

Private seminar on sacred geometry

Bought this carpet in the Grand Bazaar, Turkey - oops!

Rahmi Koç Transport Museum

Foregoing a second trip to Ephesus to hang out HERE