Istanbul to Plovdiv

We had one final day wandering around Istanbul's old city before our night train to Bulgaria. We'd been feeling pretty good about where we stood on our list of things to eat while in Istanbul - just a few more things to check off. We took a long stroll up the main hill in the old city for our last incredible mosque (there were way too many to fit in on our trip). The Suleymaniye mosque is a bit less visited than the Blue or New Mosques (which are closer to other common tourist destinations), but is often considered, for good reason, to be the most beautiful of the grand mosques in Istanbul. While I'm happy to be entering the part of the world that is home to countless beautiful old churches, I will miss the unique majesty that being inside these enormous buildings invokes. I think it's the combination of  overwhelming symmetry and  the use of intricate arabic calligraphy for design. 

We passed a number off craftman-ish shops in the neighborhood around the mosque -  sometimes I'm glad that our limited carrying capacity on this trip keeps me from purchasing absolutely ridiculous things.

The last few things on our Istanbul food list included Helva (a sweet tahini based confection - sold in bricks and has a harder, grainy peanut butter like consistency), one of the fresh fish sandwiches sold by a number of dock-side floating kitchens by the Galata bridge, and iskender - a traditional roasted meat/tomato sauce/yogurt/bread combination. We were able to knock out all three during our last afternoon, to mixed results. The fish sandwich wasn't all that interesting, grilled fish (no clue what kind) on a piece of bread with some onions. A generous dousing from the available bottle of lemon juice and some salt and it wasn't half bad - just nothing too remarkable, save for the pin bones that I somehow avoided swallowing. For helva we were able to take advantage of the generous free sample offers from a small nearby bakery. We both agreed that it may be our job when we return to the US to try to introduce more sweet tahini applications to the world of American pastry. We shared the iskender at a restaurant just around the corner from our hostel that has been serving it as their signature dish for decades. Shaved roast beef, a rich tomato based sauce, pieces of pizza-crust like bread, a healthy mound of yogurt, topped with a single roasted long hot. The buried chunks of bread seemed a bit odd at first, but the richly savory, deeply flavored sauce brought everything together - a great cold night dish. 

Our train to Plovdiv left Istanbul at 10pm - and ended up as a fairly bizarre experience. We were originally in a compartment with a young student from Azerbaijan (he seemed surprised that we had even heard of his country) who was en route to a math competition in Sofia. When the conductor came by he asked (through our new companion's translation) if we wanted to move to a "special compartment for married people". Sure, why not? Naturally, it was just an identical, nearby empty compartment and the expectation of a big tip (out of Turkish lira, I handed over the few US dollars I was holding in my wallet to his disappointment - sometimes the language barrier is a good thing). We got to the border sometime around 4am, were unceremoniously herded out onto the deserted platform for to wait for exit stamps, and then back in before Bulgarian border officials came along for entry stamps. Within a few minutes of clearing the border, the same gruff conductor from earlier knocks loudly on our compartment door and ushers in an innocuous looking middle aged woman who immediately drops to the narrow floor between Cindhu and me, crushing our feet, and scrambles underneath my bench, quickly pulling out two black plastic bags holding, if movies have taught me anything, what I can only imagine was some sort of drugs. She disappeared just as abruptly as she showed up, leaving us, already groggy and disoriented, wondering if reality had come completely unhinged.

Plovdiv is a pretty interesting town. Very quiet this time of year (or maybe always), tons of great grafitti, old cobblestone streets, a beautiful old roman amphitheater, cheap beer and resturants that seem to serve unreasonable amounts of meat (and salads and potatoes). We've spent most of the past two days just wandering aimlessly around the city. After experiencing the unexpected feeling of readjusting to a city where there are actually a large number of other tall guys walking around, Bulgaria has offered the same experience reacquainting myself with the fact that there are women who are taller than 5'6". 

Lady on the far right is in a Harlem Globetrotters jacket - I've noticed a lot of older people wearing clothes with obscure American logos

Bulgaria's rendition of the fried-in-front-of-you street donuts. So ridiculously good.

On a recommendation of a college friend who grew up in Plovdiv, we visited a popular local restaurant that served traditional Bulgarian fair - chicken lungs and all (we opted out). We ordered some "potato meatballs", mushrooms stuffed with minced pork and local cheese, some "arabian" garlic bread, housemade grilled sausage, a glass of house wine and an absurdly cheap pint (I'm glad to be in the part of the world where they serve true pints) of local beer. Everything was really solid - we really dug the condiment dishes holding paprika and some sort of seasoned, coriander based blend. It was the kind of good hearty winter meal that you can eat at three in the afternoon (which we did) and coast through dinner time still satisfied. We spent the rest of the evening hanging out in our hostel with some fellow travelers from England and trying to sort out how the heck we're going to get to Croatia. We're thinking mostly through Serbia. We'll see!