Skip to main content

An indescribably awful meal...

We were seduced by the cushions. They looked so 'authentic', colourful and inviting. We were choosing a restaurant last night in Istanbul. The dampness of one of the cushions might have alerted us to something amiss (as might the absence of any other diners). But most of our party were punch drunk after liberation from a four day workshop. The signs were ignored.

The waiter appeared cheerful, extolling the virtues of Manchester United and a stew baked underground in a clay pot and brought flaming to your table, where it is broken, liberating the said stew onto your plate. We ordered two of these.

Whilst waiting for the food, the dampness began to acquire an odour - of cats. They apparently liked the cushions and had made themselves fully at home in them, if not domestically trained to them!

We debated whether we should leave but the appetizers had arrived and were boundary acceptable.

The waiter had become yet more jovial. His favourite British TV programme, he declared, was 'Celebrity Tunes'. What did we think of it? None of us, though all British, had ever heard of it. He looked crestfallen, declaring that we could not be 'proper British'!

The cats pee was beginning to penetrate the noses of the sensitive (thankfully not mine) and two people found their trousers becoming suspiciously damp.

Like mesmerised participants in a horror movie, none of us moved!

The main courses arrived. The first - an indescribable splat of a grey-red substance claiming to be moussaka - was declared inedible and sent back. The second, a vegetarian casserole, seemed to be have been made with chicken stock. It was sent back. Third was a pile of 'meat' surrounded by cucumbers. This appeared to be edible.

The two clay pots arrived, surrounded by flames that appeared to be fuelled with diesel, and which the waiters showed no signs of knowing what to do with. Nor did the pots show any signs of having been buried. The flames swirled round. The waiters struggled. I thought one was in danger of self-immolation. A Japanese tourist took a photograph and hung around ghoulishly hoping for more. They were finally broken and a dark brown, watery sauce encompassing some kind of 'meat' slopped out. If you avoided the sauce and simply ate the meat, you could eat some for hungers sake. It was accompanied by a cold spoonful of rice and a mound of 'Smash' (re hydrated mashed potato, last encountered in our remote childhoods)! The waiter even called it 'Smash' in a tone that suggested it was some form of local delicacy!

At this point, distraction was needed, and we found ourselves recounting past experiences of terrible hotels and frightful meals, to much laughter. This episode could join them, eventually. At the time it was too disappointing (and frustrating).

The mesmerism finally broke and we paid (a reduced bill) and left. My last act was to warn off two Australian ladies who were about to sit down to 'dinner'.

We went elsewhere for dessert, and copious alcohol to drown taste, and dull the memory! 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev