Black Sea Day 3: Biking to Giresun

Soviet War Songs

We woke up on the beach somewhere in Trabzon province, had coffee and breakfast, and packed up to cycle to the nearest town to find a café for my French class. The café that we anticipated to stay in was closed but we found another called Elit Café with very helpful staff. She couldn’t recall the password but she went to lengths to find someone who could. She also suggested Selim check another café that she knew had wifi. That other café wasn’t open but someone next door was able to provide that wifi password. There’s always a solution if we are patient enough 🙂 All that to say, I was able to successfully attend my class. It turned out the staff person was originally from Russia so Selim got to practice his Russian with her a bit. Oh yeah, he speaks a little Russian, too. But mostly just sings it. He knows a song called “Because We are Pilots” that he likes to sing whenever he meets a Russian person. It’s a Soviet Union WWII song and it’s about how the pilots can’t get married on the ground because they’re always in the air. But they also can’t get married in the air as there are no woman. He has sung this several times on our Turkey trip. He took a Russian language course at the Centre Culturel Russe in Tunis and it included a good amount of cultural education.

So Many Presents

At the café, the woman gave us baklava. That kicked off some strong gift energy that lasted the entire day. Around 2 PM, we left the café to head towards our destination for the evening, Giresun. On route, we saw many bakeries selling “Trabzon bread” or Vakfıkebir bread. This type of bread is made and sold in small towns that dot the highway in Trabzon. We stopped near one to grab water and the owner invited us to have a seat. He gave us water as well as some bread and cheese from the area to try. The province is known as well for it’s delicious dairy products, specifically a type of cheese dip called mıhlama or kuymak. It’s made with kashar cheese, butter, cornmeal, and water. You can dip fresh bread in it to eat. This bread shop was located just next to a second bakery. The owner who had invited us was waiting outside the shop to try to “catch” cars pulling into the shared parking lot to buy from his shop. At the competing shop which was better positioned right before his, there was also a woman doing the same thing. It got a bit awkward at times when drivers couldn’t decide between the two and then just gave up entirely on buying bread there. Evidently there used to be a third bakery in between the two but it went out of business so this car-catching job is an important one. The whole time while the man was talking to us, he was anxiously watching the road and jumping up any time a car made the slightest turn towards the shops.

While we were riding just after the bread shop, a family rolled down their car window and gave us pears. I especially liked this manner of delivering presents because it made me feel like I was in a marathon and didn’t have time to stop.

After that, we passed a fındık cart. And then another. We didn’t know what fındık was so we decided to stop at the next one. I asked about it and we tried to figure out if we needed a nutcracker or if they would be good road snacks. A man showed us that we could just open them with our teeth so we decided to buy some. Of course, they gave it to us instead. Turns out fındık is hazelnut and they grow in trees along the Black Sea. Later, we would harvest our own as well as purchase hazelnut paste and hazelnut/honey butter. Delicious.

Kemence and Huron Festival

After a good number of kilometers, we decided to stop for the day and check out Giresun. As we rode around exploring the town, we came across a Huron festival. We had a çay (ikram, thank you!) and Selim had a dondurma (Turkish icecream) and watched the goings-on.

On the stage, there were performers playing Kemence and below, people of all ages were dancing the Huron. The Kemence is a stringed bow-instrument. The bow is often made of horse hair and the instruments we’ve seen are usually wooden. The Huron is a traditional dance from this region. Wikipedia says the word comes from the Greek word choros meaning dance.

Midye Dolma

Another highlight of the day is that I finally got to try midye dolma. Midye is the Turkish word for mussels and dolma means stuffed. People make it by harvesting mussels, opening them, combining the mussel with some rice, herbs, and spices then stuffing all of that back in the bivalve shell. And you eat it by opening up the shell and squeezing lemon juice on it. We had seen many midye stands along the shore as it’s a popular street food snack in beach towns. Among some Turkish people it has a reputation for being dirty and not so healthy. But I still wanted to try it and I’m glad I did. I ended up eating 4 or 5. I believe they were 3 lira each. Really delicious, Selim enjoyed them, too. Here’s a recipe that is a bit more involved than the one we tried.

Life is Pasta عيشة مقرونة

After a chock-full day, we bought some groceries to make “white pasta.” Within our pasta category, we have “white” and “red.” White involves some kind of dairy like a small carton of cream (9 lira) or milk (3.5 lira). We found a campsite along a beach and camped next to a few empty tents. For some reason, we often see unoccupied tents along the beach here. In Tunisia, Selim’s family often makes pasta with hardboiled eggs on top. So that was our dinner…”white pasta” with hardboiled eggs. I don’t think that’s so common in the US or at least, I’ve never seen it, but it actually makes a lot of sense to combine protein and carbs like that. I would later show him carbonara-style eggs and pasta (stirring the egg in) which he had never seen. As they say in Tunisia, عيشة مقرونة (Aecha macaroona) = life is pasta.