Turkish adventure: up the mountain!

Yesterday after school we hitched a ride with a coworker to her part of town and then got on the Teleferik, which translates to "cable car" or "ropeway". For ₺8 apiece (about $2.20) you get a ride up and down the side of a mountain. We didn't do a good job of taking pictures at the top, but there's a whole village there including a shop called Et Evi (Meat House) that will sell you raw meat to cook at one of about a hundred little picnic stoves around. The Meat House wasn't open on Wednesday at 5pm anyway, so we'll have to go back for another adventure sometime soon and get some proper pictures.

Spoiler alert! Here we are at the top!
No line on a Wednesday afternoon.
Many cars out of commission presumably due to the low crowds.

Up we go!



At the top looking out over the mountains, as opposed to the city view in the first picture. Side note, I think Earle's Pixel camera blows my 5X out of the water.

We walked most of the hour journey back to explore a part of Izmir we hadn't spent any time in. On the way, Earle ordered a Turkish classic, lahmacun*. The basic premise is similar to a pizza (dough + toppings), but has a very thin crust and it topped with minced meat and whatever else; cheese seems to be less common. This one was ₺7, or $2.00. The restaurant also served lamb brains, trotters (feet?), and a full lamb head, but we did not get those.
*Pronunciation note: 'h' in Turkish is aspirated and the 'c' is pronounced like the english 'j', so lahmacun is roughly lah-ma-joon)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My First Turkey Adventure: Charted Boat out of Teos

Image
"Okay Kimberly," I hear you say, "all these rambly posts are great and all, but what are you actually up to in Turkey other than, like, learning Python? You can do that from anywhere, you know!" I do know that. So we are making the most of our weekends, starting with last weekend, which was my first weekend here. In Turkey, it's really useful to have friends who speak Turkish, and James has done a great job of meeting many excellent people who speak Turkish and   love adventures as much as we do. Once of his coworkers chartered a boat last weekend, which is ridiculously cheap: ₺600-₺700 ($165-$195) for a boat that holds 12 complete with captain. Then they bought a bunch of meat because there is a freaking barbeque on the wooden boat  and so in addition to our private cruise, we also had delicious meals. We stopped at a bunch of places and jumped in the water. It was a bit cold, being the end of September, but really nice in the shallow areas and hanging
Read more

Kimberly's recommendations for a Croatia trip

Image
I got back from Croatia last week. My friend Emily and I went to Croatia because we were already planning to be in Italy and, in looking at maps to explore where we could go after that, Croatia was right there . (I did not know this; this souvenir pictured here from the Zagreb airport would suggest that others also do not know this.)  And, upon seeing it on the map, I jumped on this opportunity literally because of some Instagram pictures another friend had posted from July. Turns out Croatia is ridiculously beautiful, with tons of small and medium-sized cities along the coast and some very cool geography inland as well. So, all this to say, Croatia's a great place to go if you're looking to extend a trip from Italy or somewhere else nearby. Or just go to Croatia on its own; we filled 7 days there and definitely felt like we had plenty more to do. Here's the TLDR: A ferry from Venice to Croatia takes a little over 4 hours and is quite pleasant. Rent a car for getting b
Read more

Emergency Adventure (aka Kicking the s*** out of Option B)

Image
My dear friend Melissa was planning to come visit us in Izmir in October. Plane ticket bought, schedules cleared, Google Doc in the early stages of planning... and then the news hits that the US and Turkey are no longer issuing tourist visas to each other's citizens. We sit on this news for a week or two hoping it will sort itself out. I search [turkey visa] on Google News on a daily basis to see the latest. We're down to the last week--Melissa's supposed to be arriving on Friday and we need to make a call. So we start looking at flights. Our friend Tristan had mentioned Budapest awhile back, and we decide to start there, since we can both get there fairly cheaply. We look at some maps and decide we'll do Budapest, Vienna, Zurich, and Paris. Paris was already planned for Earle's birthday the last weekend of Melissa's trip anyway -- plane tickets purchased out of Izmir already. But no matter. We'd get to Paris some other way. Maybe by train! Car! Air! Who
Read more