Baklava and Ice Cream? YES PLEASE!

I never thought to put baklava and ice cream together, but after what seemed like the millionth trip to a belediye to meet some government official it was time for a change! The... mayor? ... of a town in Nevşehir invited us all to a dessert after listening to him speak about how marriage between Muslims and Christians is perfectly normal and acceptable. After ordering the usual chocolate ice cream, I kept an eye on the table of old Turkish men to see what they would order. When the waiter brought out baklava with ice cream I knew I must immediately revise my order! And boy was I glad I did!!! The vanilla ice cream has a way of taming the extreme sweetness of the baklava and the coolness is exactly what is needed in the Turkish summer heat!

Actually, finding coolness in the little places you can is somewhat of an art here in Turkey. There is a certain gravity emanating from the shade of city walls and buildings and trees that draws people to it. When one of the other belediye mayors took us to this underground labyrinth of caves and staircases made by Christians while hiding from the Roman government, we were totally amazed - and all the more so because it was a refuge from the heat. The contrast between above ground in the sun and underground in the caves was remarkable - I feel just as cool now beside the air conditioner!

We saw many other Christian sites in Nevşehir/Cappadokya, most of them also caves carved into the soft rock like this tiny little church:

Fastforwarding like 1000 years, we also went to an Alawi place. I don't know enough about Alawis to know if it is acceptable to call the place a shrine, but it felt like a shrine, and it housed the coffin of an old wise man and his followers. Not understanding Turkish at all made the visit to this place interesting. The whole time I thought it was a Sufi complex, but I noticed they kept mentioning Ashoura and Ali. I assumed it was because almost all Sufi orders claim that the line of their knowledge is from Ali. They were also using words like "pir" - which is like an old wise man. It wasn't until after we left and we were on our way to see an "Alawi dance" that someone mentioned the place we had just visited was Alawi. It was really fascinating to see how indiscernible differences are without language. See: