Firni; yummyyyyy iranian desert

I met Pouya in Elgoli park in Tabriz, and he invited me to come to his house for a traditional Tabrizi lunch. I thought, why not... and accepted the invitation.

After the very special homemade Tabrizi kufte (which according to iranians is very hard to make) we had a nice iranian desert, which is much easier to prepare. So I thought it would be nice to share the recipe with you, in case your culinary creativity needs some stimulation ;)

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Ingredients:

1 liter of milk

100gr of rice flour

Sugar, cacao... or whatever else you fancy

Preparation:

Pour the milk in a large saucepan and add 5 or 6 tablespoons of rice flour

Stir it with a spoon, then put the saucepan on the stove, keep stirring and cooking on a medium flame

When it starts boiling takes the consistence of syrup add sugar (3 to 5 tablesspoons), stir it for about 3 minute until it becomes thick (thicker than syrup but less thick than paste)

Leave it on the stove on a low flame for about 5 minute, after that remove from flame,

you can add cacao instead of sugar.
If you are patient enough, let it cool down, put it in the fridge and eat it cold :)

My kurdish family

I will never forget the week I spent with the Suluntay family in Urfa. From the first evening we met, they accepted me as one of theirs (kucuk Aishe if you can remember my last article about them). The second time I visited them it was clear that I had no choice but to go and pick up my bags and 'move in'. They prepared a room for me, which was freezing but had big blankets and all other comforts. I planned to stay 1 or 2 days, but I felt so much at home that I ended up staying longer. So 2 days became 4, and 4 days became 7 when I realised that I might have to go back to being a lonely orphan lost on the roads of Turkey.

The evenings were not spent watching TV, but generally sitting on the carpets in the only heated room in the house. This is the room where we ate, talked, played music or even footbal, laughed, where the men prayed several times a day and where several people slept regardless if any of the above mentioned activities were going on. It is a perfect playground for kids who loved to run around and jump on the pillows.

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Picture: Mihdya's children after climbing on the pyramid of mattresses and blankets

The Suluntay family could participate in a cast for a kurdish comedy and would surely win (with me as the protagonist of course :)). Mother Aishe (Buyuk Aishe), with her big belly, smiling eyes and traditional clothes is a star. One evening she was sitting next to the place where her husband was preparing to sleep. While he took off his 'upper clothes' she started laughing, poaked me and pointed at him saying: "eskeletor!". He is indeed very skinny, I told her that she should give him some fat and she laughed again. This big kurdish mother is just so loving, touchingly genine and she is just 'taking it easy'. Maybe that's the positive effect of having 10 children and many more grandchildren.

Hasan, the youngest son of19 years old, decided that he should marry my sister (inspired by my suggestion and some pictures). He is also a very good actor. So one evening he put on his cloak, took a small bag and entered the living room declaring that he was going to the airport in order to fly to France. In the video you see him kicking his mum with his foot and his sleeping father (Ali tended to sleep early...) with a stick. Nothing worked and he ended up postponing his departure ;).

 

One evening, while I was trying to fix a kurdish scarf on my head, Hasan, Memo and Adile decided to make me wear the full kurdish outfit. 

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And the last one is a video of another family which I visited. They have lots of babies hihi :)

Maybe I am a little crazy

Pictures: Old men selling tabacco in Urfa, Omer the carpet seller, me with the kurdish headscarf and my two movie director friends, grandmas, mums and kids in a home in Urfa.

I arrived in Ankara on monday evening, exhausted after three weeks of solo travelling and hitch hiking around Kurdistan (mummy don't worry I take rigourous security measures). The way to Ankara was long, as I made the mistake of hitching a ride on a very slow truck. I told myself never to hitch trucks again. I might go back to taking boring buses just to go easier on my nerves. The good thing though, is that hitch hiking is the best way to learn languages. The driver usually talks to me about his life all way long and I end up understanding some part of what he is saying and can make some comments like 'oh, interesting!', oh I just tell him that I really like strawberries.

Arriving in Sıla's modern, familiar, open minded and not religious home felt great. I spent the whole day at home yesterday watching movies and reading articles on string theory on the internet (thank you Siavash for opening new intellectual horizons to me, I think I will be blind of too much reading soon and my brain will fall out of my ears).

Anyways, sometimes I wonder what drives me to travel the way I do. Maybe a psychologist would categorize me as a high risk taker-high achiever personality with a constant need for more excitement, novelty and adrenaline. Recently I took a test on the internet involving picking colours (link: www.colourquiz.com)

My result started like this:

"Needs excitement and constant stimulation. Willingly participates in activities that are thrilling and offer adventure."

And my 'problems' turned out to be:

"Is afraid she will be held back from obtaining the things she wants leading her to act out with a hectic intensity."
"Fights resistance or limitations, and insists she is free to develop in her own way. Rewarded by accomplishing things on her own, with little to no help from others."

I thought it's all quite true. Thank you colour quiz for helping me to understand myself ;) You should try it and tell me your results :)

In three weeks, I hitched 11 cars, 2 trucks and 3 buses. I spend time with school teachers, carpet traders, kurdish movie directors, policemen, truck drivers, footbal players, iranian political refugees, kebap shop owners, several kurdish families... All this is tiring and sometimes nerve racking. There are times when I am so tired (physically and mentally) and I want to snap my fingers and be back to a place I know. There are days I just don't want to wake up and take the road again. Sometimes I meet dishonest and manipulative people and lose my good spirits and positive attitude. But next to this, there are many priceless encounters. I met people who showed me so much genuine kindness, and I met many very interesting people from whom I could learn. I was accepted in families as one of their children or sister. All the experiences, the good and the bad ones, are priceless. I learn so much, and as long as I stay alive and well, I think even the hard times are for the best.

Dancing headscarves :)

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When I got off the Kamaz tanker that had taken me from the armenian city of Areni to the Iranian border, I knew that I was enjoying my last moments of freedom before entering a country where the laws are very different from any place I had been to before. At the armenian passport control I knew that I had to put on my headscarf, so I went to the bathroom and put it on as best as I could, so that it covered all of my hair and neck. I was nervous and constantly putting it back in place, afraid that my skin would stick out from somewhere. I didn't want to be refused entry on grounds of 'unproperly put headscarf' hehe. At the border, I met four friendly looking Iranian men carrying large luggages and tons of wallnuts. I thought, 'this is my chance' and striked a conversation with them (I like wallnuts...). 'Salam... chetori? Ok that's all I learned in farsi 101... where are you going? No I am not ukranian, I am french, but my passport is dutch... I am going to Tabriz. Are you going there too? Huh? YOU TABRİZ!!???? Ah Tabriz YES YES! Ok.. can I go with you? Ok no problem!'. Ah it wasn't that hard to get a ride! In the car I am just happy, excited to be finaly inside of Iran, and still wondering if I am going to be arrested for something. I am still holding on tightly to my headscarf, but at some point I open my window to fill my lungs with some fresh post-border iranian air and pfiouuuf... it flies of my head. One of the men taps me on my shoulder and points at my exposed hair saying 'police police!'. Huh.. I am going to have to be careful from now on...

During the first days I first found it kind of stylish and cool to wear a headscarf, but at the same time I felt very self conscious and I was always nervous that it would fly away. But as time went, I learned how to adapt to the obligation of wearing something around my head every time I went out. I discovered how putting a large clip on the back of my head helps holding the scarf, which helped me to stop worrying about it and encouraged me to get out in the morning. I also learned that the police was more lenient than I thought regarding scarves and I saw many girls wearing them 10 cm behind their foreheads, with curled or dyed hair stylishly and purposefully sticking out.

There are different fashions, and Masty encouraged me to loosen my hair and put it out in front of my scarf, but you know me I am so conservative I didn't dare. And as a tourist it is always good to avoid provocation ;) Check out the pictures with the different scarve styles from good-iranian-girl.com. The first one is the first picture I took in Iran, in the car with my border friends wearing the scarf really tight. The woman in the chador doing sports is what my never reached ideal of a proper outfit which I passionately pursued but never achieved although they tried to make me look like that when I had to enter official buildings. I guess I will always remain a liberal but not too rebel iranian girl ;).

 

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Finaly, you can admire the dancing headscarves, with lale and niky after coming back from university. That's what happens when you try to restrict crazy young people...

A long time wondering, news from the South East

'Kucuk Aishe! Ere? Chtoni Anne Aishe?'

That's the furthest my conversations go with my new kurdish mother. Her name is Aishe, she is Buyuk Aishe (big Aishe) and I am kucuk Aishe. This new name gives me full rights to family membership; long dinners sitting on the floor and sleeping on the living room's carpet. I now have 10 brothers and sisters' of which 6 are already married. So at home it's pretty quiet and I find some time to use my software engineer-computer expert sister's laptop. She just left for work after a breakfast of naan, spicy omelete and burn-your-throat peppers (nooo this one is sweet I promise! Yeah yeah I don't believe you anymore!!). The family is big and they seem to occupy the whole building. They are all intrigued by me, my blond hair, why I don't call my parents every day, and how I can carry such a big backpack. I have learnt some kurdish, so I can say some funny things like: 'what's your problem?', 'what are you doing?', 'who's this?', 'I love strawberries' and it makes them laugh.

My time since my arrival from Iran into the kurdish region of Turkey had been interesting yet lacking a little bit in memmorable encounters and adventures. What I was seeking seems to have been hidden in a little corner of Urfa all this time, waiting for me to come. First I met Celen, a dusty sculptor with a big smile and australian looks. Then, walking alone in the market, I was invited for some tea by a fruit stall, and my romance with the turkish police started all over again.

A man came, who was apparently drunk, and said that he wanted to be my friend. My new fruit selling friends pushed him away, but he got angry and they worried for my life. I tried to get up to leave, but they told me to sit, gave me some more cups of tea, and called the police. They asked me where I wanted to go next, took me into their police car, fed me some lahmajoon (burn your throat again!) and dropped me off at the fish lake wishing me a good time in Urfa. Here you go, attract some attention.

In a shop while bargaining hard for some scarves with little boys in a mixture of farsi, kurdish, turkish and english, hemre shows up. He seems cool and speaks good english, so I guess that he is not just one of those lame guys looking for money or a foreign girlfriend. Hemre and Memmet are fantastic. Memmet sells carpets in Japan half of the year and spends his days walking around Urfa drinking tea and eating liver kebap with the whole city the rest of the year, and Hemre currently works in a jewelry shop. They are adorable, fun, and know everybody in the city. The first evening, we got offers to play in a kurdish movie, popped into a traditional wedding, and had our first dinner with the family that I am staying with now.

Going around Urfa with Memmet is a unique experience, he greets everybody, from the garbage man to the begger and the city's best restaurant's manager. On the bazar, we are offered tea and other things in every corner. In the carpet department, after 1 hour of tea and discussions, I get the cheapest of all possible prices for some 60 years old carpets. They are a little heavy, but good souvenirs to take back home...

Soon, after working for a few days in a tea house to pay for my carpets, and maybe playing in that kurdish movie... I will go to Adana and then Ankara to see my lovely Sıla!

Trampers in Sakartvelo (Georgia). Part 3: the KIDNAPPING!

 After more than 10 days of unbearable suspens (I had to let my bruises heal and recover from the psychological trauma...), let me tell you the story of our kidnapping.

As we prepared to explore the wildest part of Svaneti (the area between Ushguli and Lentekhi... extreme travellers only...) Tabea and I were abandonned by our last male travelling budy as he just couldn't bear the thought of all the dangers that were ahead. Ok, the truth is that everybody had told us that no car was even going that way and Josh had no time to waste, Tabea and I decided to stay in Ushguli a little bit longer, and soon we were offered a ride to Lentekhi. Ignoring the chill in our spine, we decided to leave with the relatives of the family in whose barn we had stayed. We quickly put our things together and hoped that they wouldn't leave without us. But when we came back to the car, we found the men having lunch and drinking rakhi (Svan alcohol). We joined the table and had some food to get some strength for the trip (they say georgian cheese is good for chasing bears away...). After a few hours, two other meals and many more rakhi shots, we were finaly ready to go.

The road was beautiful, it was narrow, and so were our seats as we were squeezed at the back of the red Niva with a not so sober man who had serious thoughts of marrying Tabea. On the way, we met not bears and wolves but two men with whom we had another bread and cheese meal and series of toasts (for Jesus, for friendship, for the pretty girls in the car... and many other things) during which the 2L bottle of rakhi got finished...

After a few hours driving in the beautiful and empty mountain landscape, we reached a little village. All the men except the driver were pretty drunk by then, and they started driving us around the village, stopping everytime we encountered somebody and showing us around like war trophees. Tabea and I were having some fun, waving at people and enjoying the feeling of being exposed rather than being the ones watching people. Somehow, that's always what makes me feel bad when I travel, and I am glad whenever I leave the place of consumer and become the one who is being observed.

We visited of one of the men's family, whose wife, instead of supporting me not drinking alcohol for medical reasons heavily insisted that I had to drink as well. Then, we left again, and went back into the wilderness. We drove around, hd some more stops here and there and then were driven back towards the last village.

At this point, Tabea and I understood that we'd surely not make it to our destination and would have to wait until the next day. The men told us that they would take us to a nice house for the night and that we would keep driving the next day. But things happened a little differently. We were taken away from the village to a house, that was probably nice 50 years ago, when it was not overgrown by stinging nettles and still had windows and doors. The driver drove off leaving us there with two drunk men. I told Tabea, 'We don't want to stay here right? Let's go...'. We started to walk away quietly while the men where speaking and staring at the house. Now relax, I am sure that they wouldn't have harmed us, as we knew their families, and they just weren't the kind of violent guys. But as they came after us and told us to come back we started to run, jumped over the gate (and I fell in the stinging nettles, leaving my whole body burning for the next hours and giving me a huge bruise), and ran to hide somewhere in the forest. Again, we could have gone away calmly and they probably wouldn't have done anything to us, but hiding in the forest seemed like the best idea at that moment. We were laughing, high on adrenaline, and also wondering if they did actually have bad intentions.

After looking for us with torches for an hour, they left and we quietly walked back to the village. We knocked at the first house we found and I explained with a mix of georgian and a lot of mimics the whole story. They were surprised and amused and the daughters seemed very curious about the two strange muddy girls that just broke into their house. As it was a small village, those people turned out to be friends of our kidnappers, but they took very good care of us, fed us and let us stay for the night.

The next, day, we had some conversation using my phrase book and I took some pictures of the girls. Then, surprise, one of our kidnappers appeared in the house, smiling, as we said in georgian 'bad boy!', he laughed and said that he could still take us to Lentekhi. We said that we'd rather go by foot and left with our backpacks. We hadn't walked for 30 minutes when a man told us that the police was about to come and drive us. I don't know if they'd come just for us, but soon the captain of the Svaneti police arrived and graciously took us until he found somebody to take us all the way to Lentekhi! That was the end of our Svaneti kidnapping story ;)

Trampers in Sakartvelo (Georgia). Part 2: police cars, barns and hay trucks in the wilderness of Svaneti

Mestia is a beautiful mountain town, but it is currently under complete reconstruction. In the middle of the huge mess, one can find a brand new tourism office, street names (which the inhabitants seem to not even know) and ATM's. For the rest, its dust and construction trucks. One of the man who supervises the construction said that everything would be done within a week, in the georgian conception of time I guess...

The environment is wild, it is amazing to see what mountains are like without skiing resorts and hiking paths. It is however, too easy to get lost, and we did. Although we had a beautiful map given by the tourism office, our glacier hike led us deep into the bushes, where we met a group of people picking berries. Elmira, one of the svan women there, spoke english and amazed me with joy and positive attitude. 

We never saw the glacier, but instead found the road and rode back on a hay truck.

The next day we decided to leave early for Ushguli, one of the highest human settlements in Europe (it is actually right at the geographic end of Europe, if one considers it being the Main Caucasus range). We had some more funky rides at the bac of trucks and police cars.

I was stunned by the beauty of Ushguli, its unpaved streets filled with tiny piglets and goats, villager kids riding on horses, women wearing traditional clothes, the many medieval protective towers. It really seemed like a piece of heaven at the end of the world (which it was almost litteraly seeing how hard it was to reach, and the fact that there was no true road connecting to the rest of the country until about 1935). We met the policemen who had given us the last ride to the village in the only caffe of Ushguli, and after sharing some food and drinks with us they offered to take us to the glacier with their jeep. It was a crazy ride, which was also one of the best georgian lesson that I got. One of the policemen decided that I should stay with him in Georgia, but well, I thought a few hours spent together might be enough ;)

Then, we decided to give up all of our comfort privileges and to look for a free place to sleep, which, not having enough warm sleeping bags for 3 people, had to be a comfortable and well insulated barn. We spotted a good one, and managed to explain with feet and hands to the owners that we wanted to sleep in it. They accepted, and it was the beginning of the real rough part of our trip. We were introduced to the family as we asked them to heat our disgusting food on their stove (you had to see the look on their faces as they saw that we were going to eat pasta cooked with canned olives and tomato sauce...). With my georgian phrase book I managed to make some sort of conversation, and they all seemed to be amused by the weird tourists that were so excited to sleep in their barn.

 

Trampers in Sakartvelo (Georgia). Part 1: from mountain peaks to the Black Sea

I already said that I loved Georgia, and that as much as my heart leaped everytime I crossed the Armenia-Georgia border, it mourned each time I had to leave Tbilisi to come back to the country of khash and aveluk (sorry armenians, there is a lot of sarcasm in there!). Anyhow, to satisfy my apetite for always more of Georgia, I decided to spend a month in this beautiful country (and hoped to maybe get tired of it ;)). Many visits to the hospital (south caucasian water+air mustn't be good for me...), and waiting to get my driving license (don't ask me how I got it having never learnt how to drive backwards, I guess we could call it a miracle, or the miracle work or blond hair in a corrupt country...) delayed my departure a little, but on August 24th, Tabea and I were sitting in a huge truck on our way to the Georgian capital.

On the taxi to get from the outskirts of the city to the center, I start speaking with myprimitive georgian and doing georgian dances, amuzing both Tabea and the driver. But after a few minutes, I realised that the driver was actually armenian (I had forgotten that half of the taxi drivers in Tbilisi are armenian) and I started talking to him like a normal person. That's me.. hehe...

After a few days in Tbilisi, spent between oversleeping, going to embassies and wallpapering my friend's appartment, Tabea and I decided to go to the Georgian Mountains. We found our tramper group (for definition check tramper.com), adventurous, sporty, and open to anything that comes on the way. Tabea, Josh, Behzad, and I left Tbilisi with bags full of camping equipment and food for a week. We hitchhiked towards Kazbegi, and had some first adventures as Behzad and I didn't make it to our destination but got invited by the police to stay in an empty hotel for free ;) I know we are very bad tourists that don't stimulate local economic growth, but that's what happens after travelling for so long... you become an expert at living cheap and seizing opportunities. And its the best way to meet 'real' people and learn about their lives. The days in Kazbegi were nice, but quite low in surprises and adrenaline. Sleeping on the balcony of a guesthouse (free of course), meeting more israelis than georgian and celebrating the shabat...

Back in Tbilisi, Behzad decided to make his way to Yerevan, and Josh, Tabea and I were off for more impressive mountains: SVANETI! However, the next morning, we had our feet in the Black Sea as one of our drivers was a Turkish man from Batumi and invited us to stay at his house (you know... cheap, spontaneous, and cultural.. we were in!). It was great, nice turkish family and food (I almost became the man's second wife as his actual wife was on a holiday, but we managed to leave on time ;)), it was good to see and feel the sea after a year without a glimpse of anything bigger than lake Sevan.

The ride to Mestia, the largest town in Svaneti, was a long one... Through a half built mountain road, full of slow construction trucks and workers. In a dangerous part of the road, one of our drivers forced me to take of my seating belt, saying 'ok ok no police, no problem !!!'. I guess I was offending his driver's pride, and I was happy he was quite a good driver after all. It takes a lot of faith to travel!

To be continued... Check out part 2 ;)

 

My favourite Azeri-Armenian village

It's been three months I regularly go to a small village located about an hour south of Yerevan near the border of Naxichevan (the Azeri exclave South Ouest of Armenia). This village is called Tigranashen and has a peculiar history. Many of its inhabitants came as refugees from Karabakh and Baku and have traumtic war experiences behind them. I also heard about how it used to be an azeri village and that at the time of the war the armenians threw petrol on the houses before setting the village on fire (after which its inhabitants left in a couple minutes they claim). I also heard that this village had another name: Karki. But what I didn't know is that this little peace of heaven with just about 40 houses has got something even more interesting to hide! I found this on Google Maps.

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I wondered what the white line around the village meant, and after some research I found out that Tigranashen is actually 'de jure' an exclave of the Naxichevan exclave, and therefore an Azeri enclave in Armenia. But de facto, it is part of the Ararat province of Armenia. The geopolitics of the South Caucasus will always surprise me... And nothing will make me stop loving Tigranashen-Kargi, even if it was a lost island in the Pacific ocean :)