Raki, Tankers, Cats, and Love

My husband and I like to explore, but neither of us are the type of people who love to plan for a trip. We like going places, but we don't excel at geeking out on details about routes, lodging, etc. Now, give my husband a map of a wilderness area, and he will study for hours, but tell either of us to figure out an international trip and we flounder.

We decided the only way to get through this was to just book a flight. So we bought flights to Istanbul, which maybe isn't the most introductory place to travel to, but it certainly isn't the most intimidating.

Istanbul is a really cool, really alive city. While I have no doubt if we were better travelers we could have gotten into more nooks and crannies of the city, the thing I ended up loving the most was not seeing the world heritage sites (which were stunning) but something much simpler.

On one of the early days of our trip, we took the street car to the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. We spent the cloudy winter day wandering around the museum. One room we went into had white walls and powerful orange lights. Once you stepped into it, anyone in the room became grey and the rest of the room was orange. It was like your eyes became a photo filter. It was the weirdest thing I have ever seen, and insanely cool.

Then there were rooms and rooms of art which were very authoritarian. Lots of looming figures in military dress and gas masks with small women and children running from them. There was a room full of red yard that made a maze you could walk through. It made you feel as if you were walking through the valves and chambers of a heart.

Eventually, we wandered past a bar which had one side entirely made of glass. The windows looked out across the Bosphorus, the straight that is critical to international shipping and divides Asia and Europe.

"Oooh," my husband said. "Let's get a drink and watch the Russian tankers."

So we sat at the bar. The bar tender asked us what we wanted.

"If you are visiting, you should have raki," he told us. "It's our drink."

I knew raki had a heavy black licorice vibe, and told him I didn't really like the taste.

"Oh, no problem. I will make you a raki cocktail. It will be better," he said.

He gave my husband a double of raki, poured in the some water and plopped in an ice cube and the glass went from clear to the murky, incandescent white that I would come to realize was the visual hallmark of raki.

When he had my drink ready the bar tender said, "This is for you. Raki, but less anise tasting."

He set down a yellowish drink with some mint and... pepper. The man made me a raki cocktail with what I ultimately learned was black pepper, pineapple and mint. Side note, this does not actually make raki more palatable if you are someone who does not like anise flavor. Turns out pepper and pineapple amplify the flavor of anise.

But, my husband loved the raki. And he loved watching the tankers on the Bosphorus. In fact, he was so excited watching them, and making up stories about them, and drinking the hazy raki that even though I was not at all enjoying the taste of my drink, I also loved sitting there.

After that, we returned to that water front multiple times. We would find a restaurant that looked across the water. My husband would order raki and I would order halloumi (fried cheese which we can all thank Cyprus for) and he would drink raki, and I would eat cheese and we would watch the tankers sail into the grey skyline, and sometimes a cat would wander by, and even though we could sit and eat and drink in our house with our own cats, I loved those moments with him. I loved smelling the water. I loved watching all the incredibly fashionable people walk by donned only black. I loved the murmur of languages I could not understand. I loved tasting flavors I had never experienced, and I loved how satisfying it was to just sit and take in a new world.