New Delhi, Hold the Belly

We needed to do a lot of planning.  We still had no plans, at all, for our time in India.  We were starting to see that a good area to visit would be Rajistan, so we began inquiring into a few tour agencies.  Then we hired a car to take us around for the day to see some Delhi sights before our evening activities. Hiring a car is the best way to see India, so I'm told, and so far I believe it.  If only for the mere fact that they drive on the other side of the road.  But, along with that, it's like a MarioKart race of sorts, bobbing and weaving through traffic to get to the red light first.  But, that's another thing.  There were places where all the cars would stop, but I didn't see any stop lights, or stop signs.  So, it seems as if there are secret rules. Did we mention we saw Batman driving around Delhi?

Anyhow, we hired a car.  His English was quite minimal, so asking cultural questions and, really, any questions at all were not worth the time.  At one point during the day we were trying to explain to him that we wanted to buy some water and snacks at a store.  We used as many descriptive words as possible, "a place where they sell food/ things to eat/ water/etc and other variations of the phrase, and we ended up at a place where they sold textiles and handicrafts. Nope.

But, we did have a list of places where we we wanted to go that were well known, large monuments, and he was able to get us to those.  We saw the Gate of India (basically Delhi's arc du triompf), the president's house and all the government buildings, we went to the Lodi Gardens, drove past the ultra modern Lotus Temple, and walked around Houmayoun's tomb.  It was all pretty neat.  It was nice to walk around the tomb and the gardens, but it was super hot and humid.

We made our way back to the hotel to shower up before our evening adventures.  Seth found a street food tour online called Delhi Food Tours that seemed quite trustworthy.  What sold us was that the wife, Aisha, was the tester.  Aisha apparently has a very sensitive stomach, ever since she attended an American boarding school for high school.  So, if she gets sick within 2 days after going to a restaurant, they take it off their list.

The first stop on the list was to a tea shop where we were invited to try a variety of teas from India.  This is something Seth and I really enjoy and visiting the tea shop was an unexpected treat.  There were light white teas all the way to rich, full bodied black teas. A nice start to the evening.

Our second stop was a restaurant that is spposed to have food from the area of Goa.  That's a beach area in the south of India.  I really liked the food there.  They had a fried fish with chili powder and lime and it was so, so good.  I also really liked their chutney.

The next place we went to was fabulous.  There we tried something called a dosa.  A dosa is kind of like when you take cheese and slap it on a fry top until it turns into a chip.  But, it doesn't taste like cheese, it tastes like a cracker.  And really good.  And you use it like a nacho, dipping it into sauces.  I really liked the sauce that was like a tomato lentil soup.  So good!  But, what I, also, really enjoyed here was the coffee.  I don't normally drink coffee after about noon or so, but I was assured that this coffee would be different from any coffee I'd ever had.  And it was.  It was rich and caramelly and oh so good! And they do this thing to mix in the sugar where you pour it from glasss to cup, back and forth to mix in the sugar and make the coffee a bit frothy.  I really hope to find that again.

We, then, went to a place that specializes in BBQ.  I truly loved this place.  We had BBQ chicken that was spectacular.  It was perfectly cooked, not dry, but nice and juicy and jam packed with flavor.  Seth's favorite was the spicy lamb kabob.  I liked it too, but I was busy with the chicken.

Then there was the dessert place.  But, before dessert we had to try some of their main courses as well!  Seth and I each got lassi, one sweet, one salty.  The sweet one was just like in the states, but the salty one was not just plain yogurt.  It had spices in it like cardamom, black pepper, and salt. Both really interesting, but I liked the sweet one best.  We then tried the 'grenades'.  Seth tried one first, then waited for my reaction.  It was like a little puff that you crack open at the top, so that you can fill it wit a potato mixture and a green juice.  It explodes in your mouth and was quite reminiscent of eggs.  Since, I've heard it described as having a septic like taste.  Great.  Then came what has been lovingly named 'the compost pile'.  I truly liked that one.  It was little flat dumpling type things covered in a yogurt and pomegranate, ginger, and some other stuff.  Not sure.  I really liked it. A delicious dish came out next with spiced chick peas.  Oh so good! Finally it was time for dessert.  The sweets were so decadent.  My favorite was gulab jamun. Almost like a doughnut soaked in syrup.

http://vimeo.com/49016680

We were beyond full after all that.  It was a delicious evening and it was nice to meet some Delhi natives and some people from back home.

Kwa Heri Africa, Namaste India

Good bye Africa, hello India! 

It took us 24 hours of travel to get here, but we're in New Delhi, India.  We left our beach bungalow at 10am to get to the Zanzibar airport.  We took a short flight, about a half hour or less, to Dar es Salaam, then we had to wait for our next flight, which was 5 hours away.  This might be ok if we were in an airport like DIA (Denver Airport) where we could wander through the stores aimlessly, have a decent bite to eat, or even post up at the New Belgium Brewery in the airport.  But, Dar es Salaam is a tiny airport. There's 3 to 4 tiny shops that have the exact same items, and a restaurant that looked questionable and was severely overpriced, like the stores.  It was actually kinda funny.  We found little Kirkland packets of nuts for sale, but they were like $5, and not worth it.  A small pack of gum was $3.  So we sat and listened to our audio book.

Finally we took the 3 hour flight to Ethiopia.  We had another 5 hours to kill in that airport.  We had originally thought we were going to be there during the day, and that we would check in, leave our bags, and venture out into Ethiopia for lunch or dinner.  But, it was from 7pm to midnight, so we skipped that idea.  This airport was weird.  The shops were filled with random designer labels, but it all seemed fishy, like they were counterfeit, or they had "fallen off a truck".  Also, the shelves were fairly empty, there'd be a huge shelf with two or three items on it.  And there were TONS of cigarettes.  Apparently cigarettes from China are a hot commodity, because they were expensive, $50 a carton, while Marlboro were $16.

It was finally time to head to our gate.  When the man called for passengers with children, needing special assistance, and business class members, the entire group of people in the waiting area bum rushed the entrance.  And they began to enter without being let in.  Eventually we made our way up, but the people were so pushy and then so close behind us that I kind of wish we had waited for everyone else to board first.  But we needed to assure that we had overhead luggage space. They would push up against you, and when you turned your head they would apologize, but do it again and again.  Just before the plane there was a guy trying to check everyone's ticket, and we watched him turn away a passenger and realize that he might have been letting people on the plane who shouldn't have been let on.  Hmm.  I'm pretty sure there were some stow aways on that flight.

The flight was about 6 hours, after the delay, but it was not a bad flight.  We dosed ourselves with our respective knock out drugs and were able to sleep a bit.  Aside from the fact that I was awoken by people walking by and bumping into me with elbows and carts, we were awoken in the middle of the night for a meal.  I think we were in a daze because we sleepily ate a meal at about 2:30 in the morning.  Totally unnecessary, but we were zoned out.  Seth barely remembered anything the next day.

The plane landed and the airport in India was much more vigilant about the passengers on the plane.  They cattle blocked the exit and checked everyone's ticket stub, and if they couldn't find it, they had to wait.  I thought that was awesome.

We were picked up by someone from our hotel and we made our way into Delhi.  We landed on a Sunday morning, so traffic wasn't like it normally is.  We've heard a lot about Delhi traffic.  And, maybe it's because we just spent a few weeks in Africa, but so far New Delhi is not like we expected.  It is much 'nicer' than we expected.  But, I'm also going to assume that we are in the nicer part of the city.  When I looked up our area it seems to be the Silverlake of New Delhi.  But, when I say this, don't picture a street lined with pretty store fronts and welcoming restaurants.  I said it is the Silverlake of New Delhi.  We've already encountered areas that require ten gallon lungs to hold your breath.

Our hotel, aside from our romantic anniversary night, is the nicest hotel we've been in.  Amarya Haveli is a cute boutique B&B where we were offered their delicious homemade iced tea upon arrival.  Our room is the Jaipur room, so it is themed pink, with a pink temple painted on the wall.  And the bathroom is glorious.  Aside from the fact that you have to keep your mouth glued shut in the shower (we're in India) it is amazing, with water pressure and extremely hot water.  And we had the best night sleep, probably since we moved out of our apartment in May.  AC, hot water, clean, and a comfy bed.  Awesome.

We ventured out for a walk to a park nearby.  We ended up finding Deer Park, where they actually have deer in an enclosure.  There was a lady there who was feeding them yellow rice and naan.  I have a feeling that she wasn't supposed to be doing that.

Eventually we made our way to a recommended restaurant called Park Baluchi (which I bet means deer park), where we would have our first Indian meal.  We ordered two beers, two vegetarian dishes, and two types of bread. The beer was Kingfisher and the waiter presented them to each of us like one would a bottle of wine.  It was interesting.  Then there was a well packed ball of ricotta like cheese in something similar to a vodka sauce (i.e. tomato and cream).  That was really good.  It had lots of spices and a bit of a kick. Yum! Then there was a spinach based dish with string beans, corn and potatoes.  That was, also, very good.  We accompanied those with regular naan and kolcha, which is what I believe to be India's version of pizza.  It was a flat bread with some chopped tomatoes, spices and cheese.  All very good.

We made our way back to our hotel and ordered some masala chai tea to keep ourselves awake so that we wouldn't fall asleep too early.  The tea was delicious. And so was our night's sleep. Aahhh...

Food - Pizza Island style

On our first night in Stone Town, asking locals where we should eat is fruitless. You would be met with a blank stare or an undecipherable jumble of swahili and english. The divide between a restaurant that a local would go to and a restaurant that a tourist would go to is massive. And if you don't know already, I'm willing to try all sorts of street meat, but the local restaurants are a non starter. Also, many of the restaurants on the beach serve alcohol and that's reason enough for these muslim men to refrain from going.

After wandering around a good deal we had just given up all hope of finding palace to eat that both looked good and fit our budget. Then we saw smoke rising in the distance and a crown starting to gather. As we approached we saw tourist and locals alike ordering meat, fish, crab, vegetables, octopus, squid, you name it it was skewered and placed on white hot coals. They piled it all on a paper plate topped it with some still sizzling french fries and covered it with piripiri sauce or if you were adventurous pirpirihoho, swahili for very hot chili. (piripiri a native african chili, fiery hot, but immensely complex and flavorful)

Only being free of my stomach woes from istanbul for a week or so I wanted to play it safe, so we decided to steer clear of the pre cooked dodgy looking meats and go with what the vendors were calling pizza.

As you can see, this is clearly not pizza, but it was delicious. It came closer to a pan fried chinese dumpling. They start off with a thin layer of dough, pile on finely diced onion, carrot, peppers and tomato. Then they mix in a piece of laughing cow style cheese, a small scoop of mayonnaise, piripiri, and then crack a raw egg and scramble it all together in the dough. Our cook Mohammed slaps the whole thing dough side down on a buttered fry top and cooks for about 10 minuets.

During our wait we noticed a large wheeled contraption next to Mohammad's kiosk. And saw five foot tall stalks of sugar cane along with fresh cut limes and big bulbs of ginger being fed through the device, the juice was trickling down into a tub with large blocks of ice. We couldn't resist, we bought one, then another, then another. They were 1000 TZS each, that's about 75 cents. Ice cold, tart lime, sweet cane juice, spicy ginger. The only way they could have been better, and they were already superb was with a splash of white rum.

If some entrepreneurial person is reading this, find a way to get one of these machines to venice beach, south beach, pretty much any beach in america and you will have a line of people down the block.

Turkish Cooking and a Wild Goose hunt

We made our way to our meeting point to meet with Olga our cooking instructor for the day.  We headed out to the Asian side of Istanbul and wandered around the market. We stopped at various stalls to learn about local things and try foods native to the area.  I especially liked the Turkish Coffee.  We've tried some pretty good coffee here, but this one was the smoothest.

We then went to Olga's home to cook.  We whipped up an assortment of traditional Turkish food.  We started by preparing mezze (starters).  We made one with green beans and one with eggplant.  I absolutely loved the green bean mezze, which is not characteristic.  But, they were so good!

We, then made the stuffed eggplant.  It was stuffed with garlic, onions, tomatoes, and a beef and lamb mixture.  That was also really tasty.  Even though I'm a big eggplant lover, I'm not usually a fan of stuffed eggplant.  But, I think this is because they are usually stuffed with rice, and I'm not a huge fan of rice.  So this was delicious.

We made bourek in triangle form! Filled with a sliced cured meat, a feta like cheese and grilled onion mixture, wrapped in Turkish filo dough (which is a little bit thicker than other filo).  Those were amazing.

For dessert we made what Olga called a sponge cake.  And spongy it was! It soaked up a ton of simple syrup.  It was served warm out of the oven with Turkish ice cream, which is made with a type of orchid root which has kind of a gummy consistency, much like the mastic we found in Greece.  Delish!

That night we did some laundry and ran into some ducklings waddling around outside our hotel.  They are adorable, but I'm not sure how much longer they're going to last without a mommy.

Turkish Ducklings from Seth Cobb on Vimeo.

Today we went on a wild goose hunt.  Yesterday, we learned from Olga's Turkish husband who used to work in tourism, that many people here would rather give you an inaccurate answer than tell you that they don't know.  We definitely encountered this today.  We asked the tourist office If there was a UPS.  He told us yes then gave us directions.  But the directions did not lead us to a UPS.  We asked around and people kept pointing us in different directions, when finally one man in a hotel checked on the UPS website, and found it's location, which was quite a walk away.  But, he told us there was a DHL down the street.  Then we had to walk in circles for quite a while asking people for directions and being sent in all sorts of directions.  Finally, after about an hour to an hour and a half we found the DHL, but they wouldn't ship half of our things.  So we went for the regular post office, and had to wait a half an hour for the place to open.  Once it was open we were sent on another hunt to buy a box, because they only had one size, small.  My goodness.  I wish people would just tell you to ask someone else if they didn't know.

We walked around for a bit and found a pide place that Olga recommended.  Pide is Turkey's version of pizza.  It's pizza, but the dough is shaped almost like a boat.  It was pretty good.

Back in Istanbul, and it's Still Not Constantinople

Okey Dokey.  We're back in Istanbul and we're really enjoying ourselves.  Istanbul is such a cool city.  After getting settled in our room, we made our way to a part of the city we hadn't explored before.  See, Turkey lays on two continents.  Part of it is in Europe, and across the Bosphorous is the Asian Continent.  So, we visited the Asian side our first night back to meet up with Emily and Neil, our buddies from Cappadocia.  

The Asian side of Istanbul was very different from the European side.  It was lively, even more friendly, and there was just a buzz in the air.  There were people performing in the street, locals hanging out on corners, and way less tourists.  It was homey.  The Asian side has character.  Something we saw right off the boat and continued to see were these  people with large metal buckets filled with mussels.  Wow, we're going to have to try that.  But, maybe in a restaurant.  We're told they are cooked with rice and raisins on the inside.  You squirt lemon on them and viola!  

Emily had cleverly made a reservation at Ciya Restaurant.  She had heard about it on Trip Advisor and heard it was delicious.  And, delicious it was! You start out by visiting the 'meze bar'.  What is this? Well, it is a self serve, pay by weight, salad bar, but not salad like Sizzler.  It's all Turkish salads.  There were choices with eggplant and parsley and those were really good, but I think the winner was this greens salad with some sort of lemony drizzle on it.  Then, you head up to an entree counter where you can choose between delicious Turkish fare with combinations like chic pea soup in a yogurt dill broth or pureed eggplant and yogurt with lamb stew on top (obviously I like yogurt).  There were so many tasty dishes to try, and we tried a lot of them.  Dessert was interesting.  Emily had heard that they had an eggplant dessert that was supposed to be awesome.  It was interesting.  It was kind of like a small candied eggplant and they accompanied it with a type of whipped cream.  I wasn't a huge fan.  There was, also, a layered dough, but it was milky, and that was traditional for Ramadan, it was interesting.  My personal favorite were these little powdered sugar topped round cookies with a fruit (perhaps fig) filing inside.  It was simple but delicious.

We then found our way down the street to have a tower of beer and nargile.  What?  Nargile is what the Turks call hooka (aka water pipe).  It was really nice to hang out with travelers.  It's, also, kinda funny that they're both 'from' Colorado.  I hope we continue to meet cool people from all over the world.  It's nice to trade stories and share differences from home.  

While we were drinking a man pushing a cart with a rabbit and a baby rabbit walked by our table, and because I had seen carts like this before and was so curious, I stopped and asked him what it was about.  Apparently it was a fortune telling rabbit.  I really wanted to hold the baby bunny, so I let the momma read my fortune.  Unfortunately, the rabbit only wrote fortunes in Turkish, so I have no idea what my fate will be.  But, the baby bunny was amazing!

The next day we were going to head to the Grand Bazaar, but apparently it's closed on Sundays, so we found our way to the Egyptian Spice Market.  In our search to find the market we found what they call their garden bazaar.  And aside from a few plant seeds and pots, there were a variety of animals and creatures.  The first we saw were the buckets of leeches.  I guess blood letting is still going strong.  Then there were tons of different types of birds.  Chickens, peacocks, ducks, parrots, finches, pidgins, and many different species within them.  Some of them we've seen before, but many were new to us.  Really interesting.  There were, also, things like bunnies, hamsters, and guinea pigs, but they were not nearly as exciting as the birds.

 

When we finally made our way into the Egyptian Spice Market it was way more touristy than we had expected, and there were way less spices as well.  There were lots of stalls selling Lokum (turkish delight) and scarves, some with ceramics, but wholly a tourist attraction, rather than where the locals buy their spices. Similarly, we were later told that the spice vendors cut their spices with cheaper things to increase their profit.  Not cool.  Oh well.  We ended up buying a kilo of turkish delight, though.  About midway through our spice market trip it started to rain.  We had been hoping that the clouds would open up, and open up they did.  The sky dumped sheets of water onto the streets of Istanbul.  We were fine walking through the light rain, but when it started pouring down buckets, we ducked into a shop to wait out the worst.  Eventually the rain subsided.

The next day we took care of some travel details, then spent a leisurely day around Istanbul.  We walked around the Ramadan market and went out to dinner at a place where locals break the fast.  That was nice.

Food - Ciya Sofrasi in Istanbul

We were invited to a restaurant on the Asian side of Istanbul by some friends we meant in Capadocia, Emily and Neil. It had great trip advisor reviews, and made the top 200 restaurants in Europe list by a travel site that I can't remember right now. The restaurants name is Ciya but its pronounced chiya. [mapsmarker marker="2"]

A bit confusing at first, but after our waiters explained the process it all made sense. First, you go to what Americans think of as a salad bar. This self service bar had all sorts of interesting spreads, dips and cold items. This is payed for by weight, Berkley beat everyone's weight. Her plate cost 21 tl or about 12 dollars. Our eyes were a bit too big, we loaded our plates up, leaving very little room for the hot food that follows the salad bar. But that didn't stop us from ordering a wide variety of dishes. The food was good, but the fun of meeting fellow Americans who share our love of travel was refreshing.

[caption id="attachment_695" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Turkish restaurant on the Asian side of istanbul[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_696" align="aligncenter" width="500"] 21 tl worth of Turkish Salads[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_698" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Crispy chicken skin stuffed with rice and nuts, very good![/caption]

[caption id="attachment_700" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Berkley got to hold a baby bunny, also gets her fortune read after our meal was over.[/caption]