Ortakoy and Dinner at Fehmi's

After a busy and long day with Ates yesterday, which included the morning at RC, we decided to take it easy on Saturday and not get an early start. So, we relaxed a bit and around 9:00, we took our usual walk to Bebek and back. There, we stopped at a bookstore/giftshop and ended up buying another hanging evil eye ornament for our kitchen. We are obsessed with evil eyes for some reason, though we found later that Fehmi’s house was full of various evil eyes as well. The walk is an endless panoply of characters, usually fishermen and this time we were not disappointed. One of them had decide to swim, and we watched, as he put on his fins, then his rubber hat, then goggles, and finally, a pair of plastic gloves. After he was set, his buddies pushed him in over the side wall, and he dove in, coming up laughing. We went on but when we returned, it looked like he may have actually gone mussel hunting, as it appeared there were a bunch of them in a basket. It was a gray/sunny day, for our walk, still warm, and we had to take showers when we returend. As I am writing this, on Sunday morning, it just tarted to pour outside; I sudddenly heard the rain hitting the trees and looked up and it was raining. Anyways, we then decided to walk to Ortakoy for the afternoon, making sure we were home by 4:00 to get ready for dinner at Fehmi’s. It took little over thirty minutes to get there, a picturesque little village on the sea, with cafes and restaurants surrounding an old mosque. This has become a tourist haunt, as well as for Turks, with its narrow streets, lined with shops selling mostly jewelery, kind of the type hippies might want, as well as evil eyes and some painted Turkish plates, a typical gift from Turkey. We mostly browsed, ended up at a chai house on the water, and had our first baked potato, the speciaiity of this areas, as there must be tend to fifteen stands selling these for around 8-10 liras, depending on which stand you go to. They usually look like an ice cream stand, but they have huge pounds of toppings in front, things like onions, sour cream, pickled beets, peas, spiced bulger, etc. The potatos are huge…they open them up, more or less mash the inside, add butter, then top it with whatever you wish. We split the potato and we happy with it, enough easily for two. Everyone around us was eating the same thing so I assume you go to Ortakoy for this delight. We browsed abit more as we left, filled up both our phone and Akbill card with units and tokens, and walked back to our apartment, briefly stopping at Migros for food, buying flowers for Florette at a stand outside of the market. We then relaxed until Fehmi picked us up, around 7:00

As we went to Fehmi’s, the roads were packed with cars as usual, so he took the backroads through the villages, litterally alleys, hardly wide enough for two small cars to pass. We waited with hordes of cars to get on the Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror Bridge, which goes from about 16 lanes/toll booths, to fourlanes, so you can imagine the scrabble and confusion. We then came to the Asian side, and drove to Rumeli Hisar, where Fehmi has lived for the past 19 years. It’s a luxurious gated community of ten or eleven homes, with two shared swimming pools, a huge one for adults, smaller one for children, hot tub, and tennis courts below. As you sit by the pool, you look out over the Bosphorus, as nice of view as I have seen yet. Fehmi’s house sits above the pool, as do most of the homes, and it tropically landscapted, or so it seems, with terraces, outside gardens, and a lovely table, set beneath the trees where we ate our dinner under a full moon. We sat on the porch for drinks, with a low wall covered with cushions in front of our chairs. The view, again, is spectacular, as we look back towards the city, with the 1st Bosphorus Bridge’s lights blinking as we see the lights of the city, the boats on the Bosphorus, and the moonlight on the water. We had simple mezze, more like American, mostly three kinds of cheese, one brie, and a spread for crackers. We sat out on the porch, then the terrace, with the lights of the city blinking behind us, then Florette called us in for dinner. It was served buffet style, so we each picked up our plates and silverware, and helped ourselves to food, a leg of lamb, lettuce salad with dressing, pilav, and a cheesy squash casserole, which was quite nice. We ate outside on the terrace, talked, and enjoyed the night. At the end of dinner, the women cleared the table and disappeared into the house. Fehmi, Ahmet and I stayed outside and talked basketball mostly of the old days, but Fehmi also diagrammed his offenses for me, one he calls the butterfly which he is very proud of developing. I forget to mention that Nikki and Ahmet also came, bringing their friend Yasemin, I guess a friend of Florette’s as well. She was very nice and spoke excellent English, as she and her husband have a business importing laser surgery devices to Turkey from the States as well as Europe. We had Turkish coffee, but not dessert, perhaps they forgot becasuse the women has some inside. AS we were about to leave, about 11:30, Fehmi’s oldest daughter returned, so we got to meet Neslihan, who seems very successful and well spoken. She’s very cute, confident, and could speak pasable English. She worked for CNN for a number of years and now seems to merchandisng head for Steppe carpets, a high end carpet store in all the malls. The complex where they live houses not only Fehmi and Florette, but his mother, his two daughters, and I think his brother lives next store. The house itself is a bit small, with a downstairs made up of two bedrooms, the upstairs includes a narrow galley kitchen, a study with livng room combination, with a dining room off it. The outside terraces certainly create a lot more space when the weathr is warm. It’s the nicest house we’ve seen in Istanbul, much more warm and inviting then Ates more formal apartment, with it’s Turkish decorations, wall of books, warm woods and colors, as opposed to Ates’s white walls, sparse decoration, formal looking couches and chairs, two very different styles. Fehmi’s view and outside terraces and landscaping give it the major advantage, a view to rival any into Istanbul I would say, whereas Ates looks out on other apartments. I hardly talked with any of the women, though we tried early with Florette but we were both frustrated with our inability to express ourselves. Fehmi wants me to see his team play, so Tuesday he will pick us up at 3:00 and take us to his game with Hursit’s Besiktas team at 5:00. And Nikki and Ahmet want us to come to their house, so we will go there on Thursday evening. I feel guilty about our lack of car, as we impose on all of them, when we need rides. Ahmet and Nikki, for example, drove us home from Fehmi’s. And they will have to pick us up and take us home on Thursday. We have offered to take taxis but they won’t hear of it. And a bus or ferry seems out of the question…it’s not something their class would do anymore. We didn’t get to bed until 12:30, after a traffic filled ride home, as the city and its suburbs never seems to sleep. I woke at the call of the muezzin, around six, but went back to sleep until 7:15. As I write this, it’s now 8:40 and Evie is still sleeping, which is great because she has not been sleeping well the last couple of nights. It just started to rain again, though the sun continues to play hide and seek across the waterway. The next few days look like they may bring some bad weather each day. It was a full day, one we will remember always, especially for the moonlit dinner at Fehmi’s, with the view of the Bosphorus and bridge and city.