Last night after the Turkish Bath we had dinner at Wonderland Café this delicious amazing place in Rumeli Hisarüstü. Everyone was pretty tired and Mom and Titia’s stomachs were still iffy because of their sickness so a place with American, Chinese, Italian, Indian, French, and Turkish food would be perfect. Wonderland is designed after Alice in Wonderland; it’s a cool concept, sort of this place where you can have whatever you want from all over the world! The inside of course is very Turkish, in that it has huge couches and lush seats!
Today I took them to Ağac Ev (Tree house in Turkish), a great restaurant on Hisar Campus of my university. It’s cheap, has delicious food, the best cappuccinos outside of Italy and small portions, pretty much exactly what we needed. After lunch I showed Dad around my dorm. He’s so cute with his little video camera he took videos of everything. I’m sure that I’m going to be so happy that those videos exist in two months when I’m missing Istanbul like crazy and wishing I could be back in these moments.
In the evening we headed to the Southern part of the city to visit Istanbul University and the Galata Tower. Istanbul University is one of the oldest in the country other than that I don’t know much about it. But we walked around the main part of campus and took pictures in front of the beautiful Ottoman gate they have.
The Turkish Night show at the Galata Tower was just absolutely incredible. First of all the views from up there are INSANE. I thought I loved Istanbul before, but on a clear night from the tower, this city is just completely mesmerizing. I took a thousand pictures and I still don’t think the beauty of this city was covered.
After we walked around the outer terrace we headed to our table and were greeted with not only unlimited local alcoholic drinks (!!!!!!) but a HUGE plate of meze, which are Turkish tapas. After that we were brought a huge green salad, more drinks, and the show started with instrumental pieces from all over Turkey. Then we were brought our entrees, we all ordered mixed grille plates oh and more drinks. So it came with a piece of grilled chicken, steak, beef patty, and a lamb chop. Jesus I have never eaten and drank more in my entire life. This was when the real show started. A Sultan came and sat on stage with his two ladies. They were all dressed very Ottoman like and he kept feeding the ladies fruit on these ridiculously long toothpicks, really a sight to see! Of course like any good dinner show they started dragging audience members on state to participate and of course they picked Mom to go on stage to be a lady for the Sultan!! Ahaha he fed her tons of fruit while a 90lbs belly dancer strut her stuff on stage. We were all speechless, especially Reuben!
Then of course they grabbed Mom to belly dance, she didn’t disappoint, those Manipuri days are still paying off! After that they had male dancers come on who were awesome, they threw daggers, did backflips, jumped around, oh and called Reuben and Cevdet on stage!! Reuben, as you all know is a born show-man! He was a great sport and even tried to upstage the dancer…what a fool! Cevdet go the short end of the stick and had to lie on the ground while they covered his ‘man area’ with a wooden board so they could throw daggers at it ahh! After that they gave the audience a break so we could eat our huge dessert towers and drink more. Ah the food here, we got a huge tower included: fresh fruit, nuts, dried fruit, cream, and traditional Turkish desserts. Needless to say it was incredible!
The closing act of the night was a cute little old Turkish singer. To preface this, Turkish night at the Galata Tower is usually something done by tourists, so at each table they put the flags of the people sitting at the table. Our multicultural table got: USA, India, Nigeria, and Turkey!! So this incredibly talented man sang a song for every language in the room. How does one learn to sing in that many languages?? Other than anything African that is. Horribly offensive and incredibly funny at the same time; when he came to our table he sang in English and Hindi (Turkish he did at another table) we reminded him of Nigeria and so he put his hands on the small of his back and flapped his arms. Actually that’s pretty accurate; most women in Uganda did dance like that. But the bad part was that instead of just playing African sounding music, he literally opened his mouth and said “Aye- yai-yai-aye!!” Oh geez. Haha all in good humor though, and we’re great sports. At the end of course he pulled all the couples on stage and we all got out little solo dances. Overall it was a great night. I went home with a full belly, great pictures, and oh yeah I was pretty drunk after all that unlimited alcohol!
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