Off to acquire a tirbuşon, corkscrew. Wine is şarap. Fortunately it’s pretty obvious what’s in the bottle. Also fortunately sek is pretty universal for identifying dry wine. And bira is in the majority world tradition for beer. Took a class years ago on teaching ESL in which they said that people learned best if given the vocabulary they personally needed. Well here it is. Though also have the words for whole wheat. We won’t die of hunger or thirst.
China Bazaar seems the most likely spot for a corkscrew, or indeed anything inexpensive and widely used, from t-shirts to dinner plates to electric fans. Think of a cross between Walmart’s very downscale relative and an overgrown pound store. And it does have corkscrews. Actually three kinds, one of which contrives to combine a corkscrew with a vegetable peeler and a church key type bottle opener. Something for everyone. We buy the cheaper of the two normal ones. It won’t last a lifetime but should see us through the season.
Then second visit to Minder for a late midday meal. The food is wonderful. We’re the only customers and treated like royalty. A bit of vocabulary expansion here as well. Now know the word for aubergine. The restaurant is a cross between hobby and passion for the couple. They had careers before it. The husband studied in England and spent twenty years as a bank manager. They’ve lived in other countries but love traditional Cypriot village cooking. And the wife had no desire to stay home in her seventies. So as pandemic restrictions eased they opened with two tables and a limited menu. An act of love and we leave feeling as though we’ve just had a transfusion.
Addendum: Well, the corkscrew not lasting a lifetime bit was right. The seeing usthrough the season not so much. Pretty useless design. Even dismantled and down to bare metal it becomes obvious that it could never have worked. All not quite lost. J and penknife pare enough from the sides of the cork that it can be pushed into the bottle, a task made more difficult by the fact that the ‘cork’ is actually made of plastic. Then pour round the plastic cork and filter the wine to remove a few plastic shavings. Result is a drinkable Turkish wine, though not perhaps one worthy of the performance.
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