Class, Sass and Breakfast in Turkey.

I like this sign for many reasons, one of which is that it has the same rhyme & rhythm as a 'roses are red' poem. My favorite of such poems, by the way, goes as follows:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

You think this will rhyme,

But it ain't gonna.

Other likable traits of the sign: 1) it's sassy, 2) the language wanders outside the lines of conventional English grammar, 3) and it hangs on the wall of an otherwise classy establishment. Said establishment served me one of the finest cappuccinos this side of the Bosporus and, like every other place in Turkey, was exceedingly friendly.  I opted for cappuccinos because Turkish coffee is a bowel-liquefying, neural shock-wave of caffeinated sludge that aggravates my latent schizophrenia. I do like that it comes in a mug no bigger than a shot glass though, complete with a tiny handle.

My friend and I, BM, hit up every restaurant & cafe on the block, returning most often to a place that was as cl/s/assy as any other place. The only difference was that it served warm wine and the waiter told lewd stories about how he went to Kazakhstan, flagged down a job as a masseuse, and ended up a successful and over-sexed man-whore. Apparently the men of the country  were too drunk to perform their duties.

Another friendly, grease-haired waiter with a bow-tie, who we called Brooklyn because he claimed to have learned his English there (which he backed up with an accent), began telling us weird stories once the formality of small-talk was done with. He worked for a secret service as a sergeant and killed a terrorist. He ran amok until his mom told him to come back home. So naturally, he works at a pizza shop now, but has a special passport (that he couldn't produce) putting him above the law.   

Our hotel staff were fun too. The receptionist was a thick brick-wall of baby fat and smiles. He claimed to be a professional footballer. The maid kept trying to talk to us in Turkish and made breakfast for us each morning, which we shiveringly ate on the roof.  And by "made", I mean she put olives, cucumbers slices and single-sized packets of jam on our plate, with pieces of bread on the table. Olives for breakfast, how I miss thee.

What people put in their mouths first thing in the morning defines them as much as anything else.  Fish, steamed rice and miso soup = disciplined people = Japanese.  Olives & cucumbers = class.  And I don't mean to harp on "my own", but seriously, 'Cheerios', 'Special K', & 'Fruit Loops' etc. seem to say "I refuse to be an adult".   Speaking of Special K, did you know the 'K' refers to potassium? It does. Special K used to have lots of it.  "K" is the symbol for potassium on the periodic chart of chemicals. 

Potassium, by the way, has nothing to do with the mustache I had in Turkey. I photographed it as a proud mustache-bearer should, and then lost the pictures. Since I'm instinctively anal about where my pictures are, I wasn't surprised to find that I had simply uploaded it to my external a day or two ahead of schedule. Along with my mustache pictures, I found these as well: night shots of the fountain in front of the Blue Mosque, a place classy enough for Allah:

For the photography buffs out there, I learned something new with these shots.  See the way the light star-bursts off the streetlamps (click on the image to enlarge, btw)? That effect can be replicated with your camera on aperture priority and cranked rather high (these were F/22).  Plant the camera on a tripod, and shoot. The tripod is necessary since the increased aperture will require a slower shutter speed (8 seconds, in the picture above).