Munich and Istanbul Trip

On Thanksgiving day, we took the "Two Markets, Two Continents" foodie walking tour with Benoit of Istanbul Eats. It was supposed to be six hours (9-3) but ended up stretching longer, and it was us and two other American couples (both randomly from the DC area, and both, as Robert said, "us six years ago"--i.e., foodie yuppies, dual-income-no-kids). What a great day! I couldn't keep count of the number of things we ate or stops we made for food, and Marcus and Samantha were really good the whole day. Marcus would ride when he was tired, and walk when he had energy, and both tried nearly all the things we ate.

The tour started near the Galata Bridge, and our guide (a Belgian who'd lived in Istanbul for decades and had an excellent insider/outsider perspective on the city, the culture, and the food) met us there. We then walked through a great little hardware/industrial market area near the bridge, a working fishermen's market, essentially, and had tea in one place and breakfast in another.

Marcus was fascinated by all the fishing tackle and chains and accessories, and by the different little machinist shops we saw--one shop had a master artisan who would make a screw of any length and size you needed, to fix any old machine, and the stall next to him had another master artisan who would make a spring, similarly, to whatever specifications you needed in order to be able to fix any old piece of equipment.

We all rode the ferry over to the Asian side of the city, to Kadikoy, and we walked around the little shops and streets over there, having bread, pastries, tantuni (amazingly delicious roll-ups with lemon), sweetbread sandwiches, pickle juice and pickles from a third-generation pickle shop, different types of baklava-type sweets, spoon sweets. . .

. . . ayran, a foamy yogurt drink a la a lassi, cold meze, lamacun (delicious with lemon and parsley and sumac), pide. . .

. . . and cig kofte, a raw meat and wheat meatball that I loved, again with lemon, served with a lentil soup you flavored to taste with garlic water.

Along the way we learned a lot about the city, we visited a small working Greek Orthodox church, we sampled dried nuts and fruits, we went to one of the best Turkish coffee places, we ate a lot of Turkish delight (offered to the kids at nearly every stop), and we saw some cat-condominiums built for the neighborhood cats in a vacant lot.

At the end of the tour, we walked up the coast a bit and took the ferry over to the Old City, where we went on our own to the Spice Market again to buy some cheese, and then back to the our hotel. Here you see Marcus having discovered chocolate baklava for the first time (inauthentically enough, the chocolate filo and chocolate filling are then drizzled with Nutella over the top). Sam napped on my back for part of the tour, and Marcus was asleep for the end of it (everything after the ice cream, until we got near home and got the baklava), and it was a wonderful, wonderful day.

More. . .

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Created: 12/1/13. Last Modified: 12/4/13.