What's wrong with this country: a mini-series

In this edition of "What's Wrong With This Country?" we will be investigating a few items: tomato sauce, silverware, and oranges.

I shall begin with a question: Do you think the picture below is tomato sauce? Domates, by the way, are tomatoes. Say it out loud, you'll get it. The word right below "Domates" is pronounced, "Sal-CHA-zih." Go ahead... take your best guess.

If you thought that it WAS tomato sauce, you'd be wrong. "But why?" you might ask. "It's definitely tomato something, and salchasih sounds like salsa or sauce, kind of." That would be the logical thing to think. I once thought the same as you, my gentle reader. Boy was I wrong.

Salchasih means the equivalent of "paste" apparently. So when I went to make pasta (which means "cake" in Turkish by the way), I scooped out a lump of tomato paste as my ready-made sauce. The pasta was quite pungent when I finally ate it after the paste was a bit diluted.

To review: salchazih = paste, pasta = cake, macaroniye = pasta

Side note: The first scoop gathered on the knife I was using to put the paste on my pasta fell off of the knife onto my foot/sandal. It almost went in slo-mo. I could hear the sound of a bomb dropping, followed by a SPLAT! on the big toe of my right foot. Ah tomato paste. It came right off because it was so darn thick.

Silverware: Why was I using a knife to "spoon" sauce out of a jar onto my pasta? Don't they have spoons in Turkey? Or even forks? You're right, reader. A spoon or a fork would have been a wiser choice. Unfortunately, there weren't any.

That, folks, is my silverware "drawer." The rest of our 3 forks and 2 spoons (6 people in my apartment) are in the sink. I don't know if this is a country-wide phenomenon, but it does make one wonder.

Something else that made me wonder what is really going on here in Istanbul happened yesterday. I had been feeling a little scurvy-ish, much like the brother of a friend a couple years ago, so I bought some oranges to infuse my body with a bit of good 'ole fashioned THC - I mean, Vitamin-C. I registered for classes yesterday, which needed to be done on campus for a variety of reasons that I won't get into right now, so I packed myself a sandwich and an orange as a snack to tide me over until I returned home. When I finally began to peel the orange, I found that it had a thick skin, which only came off in bits the size of a dime or a nickel. While that was annoying, it did not compare to what happened after I had completed my task.

I finally had a peeled orange in my sticky, juicy hands and I was looking forward to eating it. I took a bite - and lo and behold! It tasted like Tang (c). Yes, the powdered orange beverage! I had found a Tang-flavoured orange. Upon further investigation, I found that were I to add some carbonation, I could have a healthy orange soda - a drink quite popular here in Turkey.

My question to you: Which came first? The orange or the orange soda? I'm betting on the latter.

Next time, how Turkish girls gossip. Clue: it's not around a Ouija board.