şalgam suyu istiyorum!

Never having run across the lovely refreshing drink called şalgam when I was touring through Turkey, it was a nice suprise not long ago to experience it for the first time. I was looking for interesting vinegars and this was in the same asile at my neighborhood Turkish imports shop. I read the label and thought I might be able to use it in some kind of pickle making: "Juice of carrot, partially lactic acid fermented with yeast, salted" The cashier's curiosity was piqued (as it sometimes is in that shop since I'm always rooting through everything they have in stock in search of yummy things) and he asked me if I had ever had it before. He explained to me that this is a great drink that comes at different levels of spiciness, and it is really great to have before a meal as it stimulates the appetite. I got it home and drank the whole bottle in a matter of two days. It just tastes GREAT. I think this will be a great drink on ice during the summer. A little more research and find out that it's fermented in Mulberry barrels and spiced up with turnip juice and all kinds of lovely things. It has got me thinking of the wonderful time I spent touring around Turkey.
The first time I went to Turkey, in my impetuous 20s, I chose to travel alone. I went on an impulse, it just seemed like a good hot sunny place to go. I flew down from Frankfurt straight down to the sourthern coast with my camera and not much else. By the first afternoon I was riding with some vinyard workers from town to town in minivans. I was navigating from an outdated travel guide and unfortunately picked a town, a small fishing village that was written up in the guide as a town with a clean and reasonably priced hotel. The sun was setting as I stepped off the minibus and waved goodbye to the old man who had helped me count my change. He stared past me as the minibus drove out of sight leaving a trail of dust behind it. As the dust settled I heard the siren call of the mosque and also saw a tea house with some men sitting outside, watching me very carefully. I approached the the hotel where I'd planned to stay, and saw in the twighlight that the door was missing. Indeed, the hotel was closed, it was being completely rebuilt, it was a construction site. I spoke not one word of Turkish, there was no other place in town, and darkness would fall soon. What to do?

A little boy who had been playing among the sacks of concrete jumped out and pointed at me and said something in German. I just stared at him, and he ran away. The child returned with two men, one older and one close to my age. They younger man spoke to me in German, and finally they realized that I could really only say I was looking for a place to stay. It was really just a coincedence that I was mistaken for a German at first, I was blonde and the child had no doubt heard of German tourists in the region, since the southern Turkish coast attracts them. We were near the Syrian border and this was clearly not a tourist town. I flipped through the tour guide index with the common phrases and we managed to somehow communicate. The mayor of the town (the older man, who was also the owner of the hotel) found me a place to stay for the night in one of the finished rooms.

The next day, after I'd managed to find my way down back to the place where I'd been the night before, a place that would have been the lobby in the middle of the construction site, a small table was set with clean pressed white linens and silver. I had been invited to breakfast with the mayor. A boy in a brillliant white shirt brought us a Turkish/English dictionary from the year 1918 on a tray. We had a beautiful simple meal. I drew pictures and we made hand signals and he was thoroughly amused with me, and he ended up lending me his car that day. I returned it with the gas tank full as payment. Those days will never come again, I suspect. I toured around and saw everything there was to see. It was rather stupid for a 23 year old American girl to take off to Turkey all by herself like that, but I learned about being a traveler back then. I suppose it was my high visibility that had people kindly looking after me every step of the way. I was treated very kindly in Turkey and I will never forget my experiences there.