Dinner and International Monopoly

It is an appropriate parallel that my second entry on this blog, like my first, should revolve around an invitation to dinner. Last Friday, July 29^th, was one of the better days of the camp. The lesson my team taught was about peace, and we did a little activity wherein we passed out index cards to each student, asking them to illustrate the first idea that came to their head with the word “peace.” Responses varied from the 1960s peace sign (often humorously missketched as the Mercedes Benz logo!) to people of different races holding hands. It was a very productive and probing exercise each time we did it with a class, asking why they considered peace a reasonable goal and why they drew what they did.

Dinner that evening was with a family whose two teenagers, twins, were both students at the camp, and the guests were myself and three fellow interns, one each from Tajikistan, the Czech Republic, and Sudan. After a forty-minute bus ride to the other side of the bay that Izmit wraps around – the destination being the town of Gölcük – we arrived, and dinner began. After I had lost my debit card to an ATM in Cappadocia the week before, I with my limited cash had spent very little on food and this dinner seemed even more of a feast for my inadvertent fasting; however, even without my persistent hunger it would have been a remarkably filling and delectable meal. A vegetable soup was first, followed by a sort of cracked-grain stew; there was salad – tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions – as well as several dishes I could not recognize save for the presence of meat, a sort of dough, and a smothering layer of sour Turkish yogurt. The yogurt here is a puzzle to my America taste buds, accustomed to yogurt coming primarily in sweet variations with the occasional plain serving; in Turkey, they only have sour yogurt, thicker than whipped cream and eaten with a fork, or salty (maybe even garlicky) yogurt, including a salted, diluted yogurt drink named ayran of which I only ever could finish one glass but which the Turks imbibe with a hardy vigor. Another foodstuff that they did better in Turkey than the United States: fruit juice. There was an enormous variety, but I loved how some of the most common flavors were peach, apricot and sour cherry – and the former two delightfully thick and pulpy, and all three on this magnificently spread dinner table.

After dinner, we moved into the other room and broke out a game of Monopoly – in Turkish. Instead of the ever-so-familiar Mediterranean Avenue, Park Place and Broadway, however, all the slots were places in Istanbul! Not to mention the fact that two of the railroad stations were (appropriately) replaced by ferry docks and that all the cards were in Turkish, or that the currency was based on the old Turkish Lira, long before 2005 when they lopped six zeroes off the end in order to bring it into some semblance of normalcy. The funnest part, however, was attributing the actions of the players to their home countries: at no other time would Tajikistan have enough money to buy out half the world, or the Czech Republic and the US be under international probation (“In Jail”)! Though we didn’t even buy out all the available properties, it was still a thoroughly enjoyable evening. I was glad to have the opportunity to associate with such a nice family, and to be in the company of my fellow interns outside the confines of the classroom. It was definitely another highlight of my internship!