Ankara Over the Tracks

Great day today! Not that yesterday's presentations and insights weren't sublime, but it was nice to indulge the five senses a bit more today. As Kant says: concepts without percepts are blind.

After the usual breakfast gorging we squeezed ourselves into our minibus (an hour later than usual - we felt like it was a weekend) and headed into the the city center.

Spent the morning at a school for the preservation of traditional Turkish crafts. They had a nice tour of a museum there - with some exquisite examples of the crafts they are preserving like Ottoman bath sandles, brass Hammam boxes, embroidery, more embroidery, a rather fascinating (speaking from my woodworking animus) Koran stand, and lots more embroidery. Then we got to do some "ebru" - this amazing marbling technique where after you powder and swirl paints on this long tray filled with water and some sort of fruit mash (that makes it gelatinous). As soon as the swirling is done, they set a silk cloth over it and - voila! - the design sets in the silk immediately.

Then we went to the Ulus area (the older part of town - we are going back there tomorrow too)for lunch, and pressed on to a poorer area north (?) of the city and took a tour / q&a session first at a social service center for women and families, and at a woman's cooperative. Apparently a typical pattern in poorer families is for women to take in textile piece work. Some middleman, for example, hires them to do embroidery or sewing at home. The cooperative was a group working to cut out the middleman, and find and complete their own work.

So, all of this provided some interesting information and impression about lower class family life here. It was also great to simply be in that part of town. Unlike the more touristed areas, a busload of Americans was something remarkable here - and a clot of onlookers (mostly kids) were gathering around as we came out of the cooperative.

You get a strong impression that there is a lot of street life here in Ankara - and Turkey generally - people tend to be outside chatting, playing, and more or less prefer to pick up things at one of a zillion streetside shops as their needs dictate. In this part of town you see more colorful traditional dress, kids running up who want to practice their English (which is fairly limited to "Hi"). So - it was one of these places you would not see without a pre-arranged tour.

People were feeling pretty tired and maybe ready to get back to the hotel - but there was an arranged Turkish cooking actitvity that was a lot of fun and buouyed everyone up. The tour had booked a little family restaurant in the neighborhood, and after the usual round of water and tea - we piled into the kitchen downstairs to do some cooking. They had set up four stations: gozume(?)(a kind of filled bread that is rolled thin, wrapped around cheese or vegetables and baked on this big inverted bowl cooking surface); dolmus (stuffed grape leaves); the ever popular baklava; and a bulgur salad. So we learned a few dough recipes, some amazing rolling techniques (for the gozume and the baklava), some interesting new ingredients for the tabouleh, and we even figured out the mystery behind how to make the really good tea here. The kitchen was hot, but it was a lot of fun.

Afterwards there was a "saga"(?) player - a three stringed guitar, and we ate what we cooked (and more).

For the gozume dough: flour, water, milk, salt - no yeast.
For the phyllo stuff: they take ten little balls of dough, roll them into pancakes and stack them by tens, and then roll a stack of ten thin. The smart idea is to cut the baklava or spanikoppita BEFORE it cooks. That way it will puff more, not bog down and it will absorb any sauce you put on the top. The Turks put sugar syrup on top - no honey (those damn Greeks!) - it's very nice, a bit lighter and nuttier, less sticky.

Back to the hotel around 7. We were warned to be in by midnight when the Turk/Croatia World Cup game ends - they fear street "rambunctiousness". I gather in the provinces they still do that fire guns into the air thing that you see in news from Iraq. The government puts pictures on TV of the little children being hurt when the bullets fall. So- maybe the hotel bar for a raku and the game a little later.

I am really looking forward to tomorrow: Ataturk's mausoleum (saw it from a distant hill and the thing looks HUGE) and a tour of the citadel and the Museum of Ancient Anatolia which supposedly has all the real pearls of Turkish archaeology.

Most Remarkable Thing:

I'll vote for the Koran stand. I've got to make my own secular version of this. It's really just two boards with a diagonal crosscut, but that have been overlapped around a box cut that makes the thing fold out into a stable X shape.

Pictures:

This is the Ataturk bust at the Turkish craft preservation school (set up by Ataturk himself). His picture is everywhere - even when you dont see it, if you look a bit harder you'll find at least three. The inscription on this one reads: "We owe everything to You!"