Transport: Turkey has an amazing bus system, if somewhat chaotic-looking on the surface. Over a hundred companies run buses everywhere at all times. And we’re not talking old school buses with wodden seats and baggage mushrooming above the roof. Most of the buses are very modern Mercedes behemouths (some are double-deckers) with air conditioning, moderatley reclining seats, lights, fans, music, and dubbed Amercian movies. Saw Men of Honour with Robert Deniro and Cuba Gooding…even with no Enligh I could tell it was cra-ap. Also saw a Turkish film starring one their singers, about a female journalist falling in love with him. An Turkish engineering grad who just finished his 5-month military service and befriended me on the bus to Cappadocia admitted it was crap as well. The bus always serves chai (tea) or coffee, and usually a fruit muffin, followed by the ritual lemon cologne, which you rub on your hands and face to freshen up. The buses always have at least two or three employees: the driver, ticket-checker (tickets are never checked until about 30 minutes into the ride) and another guy who seems to jump from the bus and get people on and off very quickly. They also seem to stop and pick people up at random, in the middle of the freeway, at 3 am. Punctuality is amazing, the driving skills even more so. If they were speeding and turning like this in a sports car, you’d call it reckless. I believe Turkey has the third highest accident fatality rate in the world. The roads are pretty bad and under constant construction. A 12 hour bus ride over 700 km costs about $25. There are also dolmuses, or mini-buses, for town to town trips that leave when they fill up and cost a few bucks. In the cities, there are far less scooters than Greece had, and rare to see someone on a bicycle, though the opposite is true in the villages.
Food: I’ve seen a variety of varations on “traditional” Turkish food because with western influence and tourism (which is probably the largest industry in Turkey) a pide (pizza) in one place tastes and is spelled different in another. Generally the pide has ground beef, tomatoes and onions and cheese, baked onto a roll that is flatened and sliced into wedge shapes. I’ve also had the crepe-like pizza with potatoes and cheese, very good. Kebap, like a souvlaki wrap, is sold on street corners everywhere for $1-2. A doner here is not like what you get at Eugenes back home: it’s chicken from one of those rotating vertical spits, but spread with a salad into basically a baggette. Tukish delight is their gummy-like candy with nuts, but expensive. In Istanbul a smit stand was two or three to a block. 50 cents gets you one, which is like a bread pretzel. Chai is drank everywhere at all times from small glasses with twice the sugar you’d expect. You’ll see boys with trays of it running from a tea shop to a group of men a block away playing the most-popular game of backgammon. Oh, and I’ve got a powerful craving every meal for Ayran, the national sour salty yogurt drink, sold for 50 cents in foil-sealed yogurt-looking containers.
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