Aşure

Aşure (Ashure) is a Muslim holiday commemorating several events in Islamic history. It is traditionally the day Noah's ark settled on dry land. Tradition holds that Noah's family made a Thanksgiving-like meal with what they had left after so long on the ark--namely some beans, dried fruit, and a bit of meat from the animals they sacrificed. This was made into a stew called aşure, or Noah's Pudding. Muslims celebrate this event over a season, making aşure pudding and giving it out to neighbors as a symbol of friendship and goodwill.

Three neighbors brought us some aşure as a treat. All of them had nuts, pomegranate, and figs which made it quite sweet. Two of them also had beans and chickpeas, which contrasted with the sweetness. All of them were very high in calories, which is why it's traditionally a cold-weather treat. 

The first bowl we received - it was beanless and the one we liked best.

The beans made this one a little iffy for us!

Turkish culture says that when someone gives you a food item, you return their dish with another food item in it, so Joni returned the bowls to the neighbors with some homemade pumpkin bread. It coincided with our own Thanksgiving, so we enjoyed the parallels. Justin attempted to explain the parallel to one of the neighbors and it was met with an "Okay." :-) We were very thankful that we had several neighbors wanting to reach out to us in this cultural way, regardless of whether we loved the dish or not!

Roses!

I can't speak for all of Ankara, but I have been so pleased to see that our neighborhood is completely covered with rosebushes! Although nobody has a yard, it seems that people are pretty serious about landscaping, so every building has a garden that someone keeps, and the public trail that I walk to/from Elias' school is beautifully landscaped by the city. I've been watching with great joy through the spring as buds are coming out on all the bushes, and now they're finally beginning to bloom! Our building has an arch covered in climbing roses that are just beginning to bloom out a gorgeous red.

Little buddy is waiting patiently on the doorstep for Mommy to take the picture!

 

The public trail has rosebushes at every gap where there's a sidewalk out to the road, and those are completely covered in buds, which are blooming out a bright and beautiful pink!

So thankful for the natural beauty I get to see every day even living in an apartment in the middle of a huge city!

Big Fun Day, Part 2: Cinnamon Critters

Elias isn't a very crafty guy, but one creative thing he loves to do is cooking! A child after my own heart! He gets a preschool magazine called Highlights High Five (which we LOVE - thanks to Nana for sending it to us from the States so he can still read it!), and each issue has a kid-friendly recipe in the back. One of the recipes last Fall was for Cinnamon Critters, and we finally got around to attempting it! Elias was so excited!! You just take bread dough, roll it in cinnamon/sugar into long wormy critters, add chocolate chips for eyes, and bake. Yummo!

The recipe

We can't buy prepackaged dough like in the States, but we have a bread bakery right across the street, and they sell balls of their bread dough.

A view of the bakery from my bedroom window. Not only is it convenient, but their bread is 37 cents a loaf. Yes, indeed.

This dough was stickier than it needed to be, so it didn't roll well. So we had more like long dough lumps instead of worms.

Notice Elias clutching the box of chocolate chips - we know which part he was most excited about!

But hey, they still ended up looking like critters!

Can you guess which ones Elias put the chips on?!?!

Elias definitely approved. They really were tasty!!

A mommy just can't resist an adorable chocolate face. :)

Fun in the Winter: Playing at Home

For the third and final installment of our "how we're having fun in the winter" series, I thought I'd just post about some of the fun things we do at home!  As you may recall, we are renting a furnished apartment, which has been really really great!  One of the especially neat things about it is that it was already "furnished" with some toys for Elias too!  One of the biggest hits so far has been a little three-wheeled scooter.

Elias loves tooling around on that thing, and it's pretty awesome because it doesn't make much noise either.

He actually prefers being pushed on it, but that's easier for the pushee than the pusher!

Another fun toy that was already here was the little basketball goal you can see behind Elias in the second picture.  We bought the little plush ball at Ikea, and he loves playing with it!  (The only downside is that now he knows who Spongebob is...  Ha!)

I mentioned another fun toy we just purchased in my last post - a little toy piano.  Elias has always loved playing the piano, but what's really special about this one is that it has a microphone he can sing into!  He was leery of it at first, but quickly embraced the joy of hearing his own voice amplified.  Here he is singing his own lyrics to "76 Trombones!"


And lest you think Elias is the only one having any fun, I'll point out in the third picture behind Justin you can see that we've bought an antenna for the TV that came with the apartment.  Not only is watching Turkish TV good for our language, but some of it is really entertaining too!  We've seen Turkish versions of Deal or No Deal, America's Got Talent, and Wheel of Fortune - all of which are highly entertaining!

So these are the solutions we've found so far for keeping ourselves sane while we wait for winter to finally end.  We got even MORE snow today, but we're trying to hang in there!!!

Heating our home (Turkish gas adventures)

(Justin) Being a cold winter here, natural gas is an important commodity. The apartment buildings here are heated by a gas radiator system, either centrally controlled by the building or individually controlled by the residents. In our building, everything is individually controlled and our hot water heater handles the radiator as well as the running water.There is no tank, it heats running water as it goes (similar to what we had in Moldova). The dial on the left is radiator temperature, the dial on the bottom right is faucet water temperature (the magnets are the local delivery services-- McDonalds, local grocers, water, etc.).

One nice aspect of the natural gas system is that it is prepaid, the meter outside our door tells us how many cubic litres we have left (and is a daily reminder of how much we're using). We refill by taking a prepaid card to a local office and paying cash.  If you run out, no more gas until you reload your card.

When we moved in, the apartment had sat empty for months and the heat was turned on only the day before, so the apartment was quite chilly (it was -22C the night before our arrival). There wasn't much credit left on the meter and the payment office would be closed for the next two days--the weekend.  I was rather concerned about the chill so we turned the heaters up to maximum hoping the apartment would eventually get warm (it did). The gas meter was steadily decreasing and I was concerned that we might not have enough gas at this rate to make it through the weekend. I made sure to get to the office when it opened early Monday morning to be first in line to put money on the card, or else we'd have run out that day. This was officially our first bill paid in Turkey.  

Last Saturday, we had another adventure with the gas as suddenly the faucet hot water quit working while the radiators worked fine.  I called our landlord, Mustafa bey (who speaks perfect English), and he walked me through some possible steps, including adding more water to the system. Apparently the valves are really sensitive and before I knew it I had overloaded the system and water came gushing out of pipes in our kitchen, all over the floor. Mustafa sent some of his employees over to look at it, and they tried a few more things (including putting water all over our bathroom floor) to no avail and they called a repairman for later in the day. 

We've been very pleased with Turkish service and I was eager to talk to the repairman, who knew no English (I haven't found a conversation partner yet, so I take what I can get). He discovered that the valve that allowed hot water to flow into the pipes wasn't lifting properly ("yukarı gitmez"). After taking the heater apart and blowing dust out of the connections, he got it to work again (this took about an hour). He decided that the motor pushing the valve might be going bad and if it happened again it'd have to be replaced ("değişmesi gerekir"). This procedure cost us 50 TL (about $28) and some awkwardness as I offered him tea and he used phrases to decline the offers that I didn't know and I probably didn't respond appropriately.  But I learned how the heater worked.

Gas, water, electricity, and internet are things we tend to take for granted.  Joni and I have lived places where these didn't exist or weren't an everyday thing, so we're reminded to be thankful. 

Here's the view from our living room today as we picked up another inch or two of snow. If you look at the bottom of the picture you can see that the neighboring buildings have solar powered water heaters.  

Our apartment is on a corner of a top floor, so the exterior rooms are exposed to too much, so we keep them mostly shut in order to save gas. Judging from our neighbors' meters, they use gas as sparingly as possible and probably live in fewer rooms during the winter.  The expensiveness of gas is something we had inadequately budgeted for, honestly, and we're quite ready for spring to come.