Now that Nur is here, Fikret and I are like children. She feeds us, takes us out. Thanks to her, now we act according to instructions like “don’t eat this”, “don’t eat that”, “this is that”, “say ‘gracias’”, etc…

It almost constantly rains in here. It’s like India during monsoon season. Maybe this is why I keep calling Mexican money, “rupee.” Some obstacles like rain and the difficulty of renting a car forced us to delay some of our plans – for example, drinking rakı beneath the Ottoman clock tower.

There is a fantastic park here, called Alameda Central, which we shortly refer as Central Park. It is fantastic but also a bit “Turkish.” You know how they don’t let us walk on grass in Turkey. Here, they took the measures one step further and surrounded the area with safety tape. Moreover, there is no grass. (Edit: One of our readers, Gökçe, who read the blog warned us that they might have fertilized the soil recently. If that is true, I apologize to the Municipality of Mexico City for my false accusation.) We didn’t have time to drink rakı in the park. But we had the chance to take a photo of our money collecting and bizarrely perfectly English speaking performer friend drinking rakı.

Tülay has been living in here for the last 5.5 years. She is a sympathetic friend who is in tourism business with Ercan, and she is a member of büyükkeyif.com. They have a company called Mega Tourism, which has bureaus in many South American cities and sends tourists to a bunch of countries, including Turkey. Thankfully, she took us to a magnificent and authentic “cantina.” So, unavoidably, our alcohol tourism started with tequila.

Our first encounter with tequila made us realize how wrong our ritual with this beverage was, back in our homeland. There are no shots, no salt-licking from the hand, no lemon-biting; if we did those things in here we surely would be the laughing stock. People here drink tequila from the longer and thin glasses, taking small sips. No quaffing. And they drink with it a Virgin Maryish, spicy drink made with tomato – just like the way we drink turnip juice with rakı.

With the help of Nur’s longing for hearing and speaking Turkish, we compensated our small “betrayal” by drinking half litres of Yeni Rakı back in our hotel.

There is a museum of anthropology here. And I resisted going there as much as I could. But the intellectuals of the group, Fikret and Nur, talked me into it by mentioning the Mayans and Nibiru. Yet, I loved it. I was like a child that resisted drinking soup and asked for another.

The DF Museum of Anthropology is a giant and sexy museum. The only problem is that all the writings are in Spanish and it made me swear a lot.

Nur and Fikret will give the details on the museum and the Mayans later… For now, here are some photos for you.

In here, they have a strange habit of eating jelly after meals. In my opinion, jelly is a thing that a human being should never serve to another human. However, the jelly they served on the menu during lunch was had anise in it. We ate it just because it resembled something else…

In the evening we prepared a rich rakı table at Ercan’s house.

It was majestic. Grilled cauliflower, stuffed wine leaves, kidney bean, green beans, and more… This table 10,000 kilometres from homeland blew Nur’s mind off the most. Drinking rakı, listening to Turkish music, talking in Turkish after about seven months satisfied her in many ways.

Fikret and I drank a considerable amount of alcohol. Like at every rakı table, we saved the country, talked about philosophy, and then gossiped. We tried talking about art a bit,  but I thing we weren’t very good at it.

If you will ever attempt to rent a car in Mexico City, take some time chewing coca leaves prior to that. Then try to calm down by drinking some linden tea or sage tea. Foot massage, spa, reiki, yoga or meditation should work, too. Because renting car is a very annoying adventure. First of all, you may hear a different price from the same company every time you ask. After a long campaign on telephone, Nur managed to decrease the daily price of car from 130 pesos to 50 pesos. Thanks to her talking skills and vast experience on car renting, we got a Jetta for a superbly fair amount of money. Hopefully, we will be driving it for the next ten, fifteen thousand miles.