oh you sexy plate of olives!

I know I that I've said this about other olives before, but today I ate the best olives I've ever had in my life.  Oh my, I do love my olives.  I'm not kidding when I say Turkish olives had a bit of an influence on my decision to move here.  There is nothing quite like a delicious, salty, meaty, rich olive.  Or, as Greg Lee would say, a 'sexy olive', as he did in Greece when he professed his love to a plate of round, rich, ripe olives drizzled in (what else) but olive oil.

Just to bring you up to speed on how I got my greasy, olive oil slicked fingers on this delicious food, I should recount my first day in Turkey.

I had a really great first day....no rushy, stressy nonsense like my first days in other places I've moved to, but a chilled out, get the essentials done, relaxed kind of day.  I met the other foreign teachers and we went for breakfast at Starbucks and then got ourselves equipped with a Turkish mobile phone.  A lovely Turkish Celta trainer from our language school went with my group, made up of a fellow Canadian girl, a Scottish girl and a bloke from Manchester, England.  After getting set up with an over-priced, well out of date Nokia phone, our group set off in search of cheese and olives in Real, the huge grocery store near campus.  We had a fantastic time navigating the aisles, searching for the essentials and checking out Turkish cuisine.  We stepped up to the deli, salivating over the amazingly wide variety of local cheeses and olives.  The deli man must have saw me wipe my drool away because he offered me a sample of cheese to try.  It was delicious.  It was creamy, rich, salty and crumbly all at the same time.  Don't ask me how thats possible, and any of you cheese experts would definately have a much better way of describing this amazing food.  The nice deli man also gave me several olves to try, but I knew exactly which ones were coming home with me.  Dark, rich and plump, these olives were incredible...and also the most expensive in the deli.  Oh well.  If you're going to do it, to it right.  With the help of one of my new-found friend's guidebooks I managed to order a half a kilo of these beauties, for the bargain price of only ten lira!

Having accomplish our mission, we grabbed a cab back to our appartments and decided to tackle the huge pile of paperwork for us to do.  We decided to do our paperwork together, and so we hung out in my flat, and drank Turkish wine (not bad) on my balcony.

Later on, we changed into slightly nicer clothes and met the rest of the school staff for dinner.  We had a fabulous night chatting with the friendly Turkish teachers.