TRAVEL | FOOD | COFFEE

Trying Our First Turkish Coffees

We were embarrassingly clueless!

Turkish coffees at the Istanbul airport. Photo Credit: Author

I’m starting a challenge with myself to post small stories that are related to photos that I find hanging out on my computer. The idea is to see a photo, then remember the story to go with it. I feel like I saw this prompt from somebody else at some point, but now I can’t remember who. If you are reading this and it is you, please let me know:)

This evening I clicked on my Bulgaria folder to see what was in there, and this came up. Although this photo was not taken in Bulgaria, we were transiting from Varna, Bulgaria to Athens, Greece through Istanbul in 2015.

We had just spent about 10 days of our 6-week holiday in Bulgaria. We traveled from the capital, Sofia, through the center of the country by bus, and ended up in Varna, on the Black Sea. We really loved Varna and could have stayed longer, but we had a Wwoof-ing gig lined up for 2 weeks on the island of Paros on the Cyclades Islands in Greece.

(For those that don’t know, WWOOF stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms and is an organization that arranges for people to volunteer on farms around the world.)

Our flight from Varna would transit through Istanbul. We were both excited about this, having never been to Istanbul, and looked forward to even just seeing the inside of the airport. Actually, it was during a very interesting time in Europe and a huge wave of refugees was coming through Turkey from Syria. Russia had also recently ordered all of its citizens to leave the country. So while we were excited to see the airport, we were also a little (irrationally) worried about being in Istanbul.

The layover wasn’t long but we figured that we would have plenty of time to make it to our next flight. But when we came off of our first leg, we were astounded by how busy the airport was.

I wrote about it in my blog Just Some Wandering:

We landed in Istanbul and disembarked the plane. As we exited the gangway that linked the plane to the airport, we merged into a thick stream of people. I instantly felt like an ant passing through its tunnels in the ground. I imagine that they come and go from off shoots, but the main corridors are packed with them jostling back and forth. I quickly asked the gate agent if we needed to pick up our checked bags. For some reason, of which I can’t even conceive of right now, I thought we may need to transfer them through customs as we were heading on to a different country. He glanced at my boarding pass for the next flight and said “Gate 222, upstairs!” I assumed at that point that we didn’t need to worry about our bags.

We ascended the escalator to the upper level and filed in with yet another massive amount of people. I swear I have NEVER seen so many people coming and going in an airport in my life! We found the sign pointing to our gate, and immediately felt like we were swimming upstream.

Hoardes of people were walking here and there, many with blank looks in their eyes, not sure where to go. One poor guy had his boarding pass in one hand and was looking every direction with an equally frantic and clueless look on his face. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, and a need to help, but we were in a bit of a frantic state ourselves. We kept looking for signs pointing to our gate number. I don’t think I have ever seen so many signs pointing every which way. The gate numbers went into the 500’s! We even passed a digital clock that told us how long of a walk it was to our gate…it said 15 minutes! Wow!!!

‘How bloody big IS this place?’ I thought to myself.

I must say, I wish we had had the time to stop and smell the roses a bit. I saw all sorts of neat things that we could have checked out. One of them being a little kiosk that was selling Turkish Ice Cream. It was attended by a guy in the cutest little outfit I think I have ever seen. He reminded me of Abu from Aladin, with a cute little boxy hat and everything! However, nothing got more than a sideways glance as trying to move sideways in the wave of people would have been like playing a life or death game of Frogger to get to the far side of the stream.

After a while, probably about 15 minutes, and much struggling “upstream”, we found our gate. We still had a bit to wait, so we asked the gate attendant when we would be boarding. He said we had half an hour.

Next to our gate was a little cafeteria/shop area. We decided to head over there to see what we could find. At the counter, we saw signs for Turkish coffee.

Oh boy! We hadn’t had Turkish coffee before!

There were tiny bottles of wine available as well, so we got two bottles of that and ordered our coffees. The cashier announced “Fifty six Lira please.” I cringed and handed over my Visa card with absolutely no idea of the exchange rate. I still haven’t had the guts to check my visa statement yet on online banking. Oh well! Chalk it up to another experience!

The coffee was super hot (apparently they boil it three times) so we decided, in Chris’ words to “have our downer, before we have our upper.”

The coffee was crazy strong, and we were very thankful that we asked for sugar in it as well. I drank mine down first and noticed a thick sludge in the bottom of the cup, filling about 1/3 of the way up. We both examined it, and thinking it looked like pudding (but really not sure at all what it was), we decided I needed a spoon. So Chris got up and asked for one. I scooped a bit out, tasted it, and immediately realized that it was definitely NOT pudding, but was in fact super finely ground coffee grounds. EW!!

And we wonder where the expression ‘stupid tourist’ comes from! I laugh hard at this now, 7 years down the road as we can now say that we lived in Istanbul for 2.5 months, drinking numerous Turkish coffees.

But at the time, we didn’t know.

In Canada, we filter our coffee. There are never grounds left in the bottom of your cup.

Never Ever!

But I know now that much of the world drink their coffee in the way that we did above. In fact, the very next day when we were in Athens, Greece and we tried our first ever ‘Greek coffee’, it was exactly the same!

Thanks for reading about our adventure of trying Turkish coffee. It’s just another of those embarrassing stories that are always great when you travel because you know these people will never see you again.

In fact, I wrote that in my blog post as well:

I’m thinking maybe we were drunk off of our wine, as immediately I knew it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. I’m sure the staff were wondering what the hell these stupid tourists were doing. Either way, the great thing about travelling is that you CAN do stupid things, and people will never see you again. Hooray for that!

Hi there, we are 2 Canadians, Jill and Chris from Artistic Voyages. We have been nomadic since 2017 living in numerous different countries, and experiencing the life and diversity of our planet on the ground and firsthand. We have now been on the African continent for over 2 years!

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