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We've adapted well to life in Turkey. Food is abundant all year round. Whatever produce is in season is plentiful and cheap. When something is out of season, it's nowhere to be found.

So we've learned to buy food first, and then decide later what we should make with it.

The cherries at left are an example. When we first arrived, cherries weren't in season. The first cherries sold for about two dollars a pound. Later, they went to about fifty cents a pound. At the weekly market, this vendor had three piles of cherries early in the season, each at different prices (see the white signs), representing their quality.

Beyaz peynir, white cheese, is ubiquitous. The display at right of white cheese at a weekly market was only one of about twenty cheese stalls, lined up one after another. The vendors are happy to provide tastes for you, a good thing, because it's hard to choose which one to buy without trying a piece. Some are saltier, some crumble most easily, and some have a strong taste.

Like everywhere in the Mediterranean, olives and olive oil are an important component of the cuisine. You'll find olives at every meal in Turkey: the Turkish breakfast contains tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, white cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and bread with jam.


This man we saw in an inland (non-resort) town was making a sort of beignet, or fried dough, putting a dozen or so in a plastic container, and handing the containers out to people for free. We never did figure out why. He was outside a teahouse, so maybe he was thanking his customers for their business. He made up the batter in the large kettle, and fried ladlefuls of it in boiling sunflower oil.

Simit, a round bread encrusted with sesame seeds, looks and tastes like an oversized sesame bagel. It isn't hard to find a simit man around town during the week, or around the weekly produce market, or anywhere people congregate. We eat simit as a between-meal snack or instead of normal bread with dinner.

 

The tea man is an institution in Turkey. Turkish workers drink tea all day long.

Here is a tea shop in the middle of the shopping district. It's behind the shops, hidden from view; tea is delivered, often even to restaurants. The tea man pours the tea into a tulip-shaped glass, and it will be put on the tray for one of the young men at right to carry to its destination. He'll come back later to retrieve the empty cups.

The best customers call the tea man on an intercom and pay for the tea with plastic chips. Tea costs us about seventeen cents in a café, and we think the chips cost about half that.

 

One of the tourism brochures we received in Turkey tells of the importance of tea and the tea man, which we can paraphrase here. A lion escaped from the zoo in Ankara, Turkey's capital city. It found its way to the offices downtown and hid in the basement of a government building, surviving on eating bureaucrats and even ministers of state. Finally, it ate the tea man. That was it; the people rose up and formed a posse to capture the lion.


Some cornerstones of the Turkish economy are shown below. Carpets and kilims are in shops at every possible place a tourist might visit. The woman at left is making a kilim, a flat-woven rug. Turkish carpets are made with knots and are virtually all handmade. This kilim will take the young woman three months to finish.

Fake designer goods make up another pillar of the tourist-based economy. At right, a vendor shows his stock of fake designer jeans. Pile after pile of identical jeans show the embroidered emblems and logos of famous designers, but otherwise each pair looks just like the next one. Sometimes shirts, sunglasses, or underwear are in identically sized packages, but printed with Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, or Armani, all in the typeface you'd see on the real thing. These goods sell at prices of about one dollar a pair for underwear, and ten dollars for "designer" sunglasses.