Some Weekend Ironies

So I know I’m interrupting my admittedly slow-going Bayram post series, but I’ve got a few fun things to share from the weekend.

Friday: Good food. Good friends. Let’s just keep it simple, eh? 

Went to dinner with a good chunk of my Fbright crew at a Manti Evi (manta=excellent handmade tortellini pasta bits; evi=house of) in downtown GTep. Now, we all have our culturally degrading expressions for tightwads who like to itemize and split the check. In the US, some call it “Going Dutch” and the Turkish phrase essentially means “the German way.” Well, this restaurant wasn’t gonna put up with any kind of European stingy BS. This was our hesab (check).

Saturday: A little late-night Chocolate-->Coffee-->Conversion

After some city exploring with Kelsey, (AKA getting lost in the rain and finding good coffee places and eateries) I felt a little chocolate craving creeping up on my walk from the tramvay to my apartment. When I stopped into Halid’s, (yep, it’s been a while since I talked about my favorite little corner market) I knew I was taking a risk because my stops in to pick up a few things often turn into you-must-drink-tea-and-chat seshes. This 11:00 PM stop-in turned into a Nescafe sit-down right quick. Which turned into a “what do you think about Allah?” conversation. To be fair I’ve been friends with these folks for two months and it’s never come up. I’m a stickler on this kind of stuff, though. No matter how confused people get, I reject the Christian assumption and say my parents practiced no religion. It went relatively well. Still I couldn’t shake the feeling that Obama and Michael Jackson were not Muslim like my pals insisted.

Sunday: Visited a Church-->Prison-->Mosque

Not many buildings I’ve come across take that trajectory (the church-->mosque thing happens but the prison bit was a new one for me). Also, the name Kurtuluş Camii loosely translates to “Freedom Mosque.” Appropriate for a building originally constructed as a pre-republic Armenian church, used as a prison (likely for those same Armenians) during the war for the republic, then triumphantly made Turkish with a minaret, a raised women’s section, and a reoriented Mecca-facing inside.

(conspicuous.)