Frazzle fried in Kızılay

Time has already begun to quicken with the pulse of daily habit. Nearly two weeks since my last entry, with little to note but the hours spent working on the novel. Last Friday brought something new but unwelcome in the form of our first sick day. Callie had thrown up at school and needed to be retrieved just twenty minutes after Lizzie dropped her off with the taxi. This necessitated a return trip in another taxi after catching a bus home. Poor thing was down with a stomach bug, but after hearing a few teachers and fellow students talk about the "polluted" tap water mentioned on the news, she was convinced an errant sip of it had done her in. Bottled water from here on out, I guess.

She was feeling better on Saturday, and Lizzie was itching for an excursion, so we decided to brave the big bad city again in search of an elusive brand of recorder specified as requisite by their music teachers and, if time remained, more robust sneakers specified as requisite by their gym teacher. (Chuck Taylors don't cut it evidently. Are all private schools so picky with their supplies? Their art teacher demanded certain brands as well.)

We took a bus to Kızılay, a shopping district, and walked many blocks down crowded streets, pausing now and then to locate our position on the map. The first two music stores we found were dead ends, but the third delivered the goods. (Across the street, a heavily doctored actual size poster of Taylor Swift looked down on us with beatific approval.) We were elated enough by our own success to stop at a cafe and celebrate with milkshakes and smoothies, but fate had other things in mind.

A table in the back offered good shade and we took it despite the tarp hanging nearby and the workmen beyond it doing god knows what. Puffs of plaster rained down on my neck, but scooting in seemed to solve the problem and we set about scouring the menu for our rewards.

No sooner had we made our selections when a loud explosion sizzled over our heads and a corner of the building burst into flames. A workman had errantly touched a metal pole to a live wire and caused an electrical fire that quickly threatened to engulf our side of the building. Amazingly, almost no one else reacted with any degree of alarm. The workmen kept slapping wet plastic on the fire, which only succeeded in turning the flame a chemical blue. Finally a waiter arrived with a fire extinguisher and ended the crisis. 

We moved across the restaurant, evidently still alone in our concern, and sat down again to order. Alas it was not to be. The fire and/or explosion had killed the power to the building and they could no longer offer us milkshakes or smoothies. Might we want some tea?

If only that was the last disappointment of the day, we might have retained the trust of our children. Hours later, after braving sketchy, subterranean shops with grey market knock offs and a subway station that looked like an outtake from World War Z, we finally acquired the necessary footwear. Surely another celebration was in order, right? Surely we must reward the children (and ourselves) for their endurance. So off we went by foot to the mythical Beer Garden, tales of which had been tickling our imaginations and teasing our palettes ever since our arrival. Besides, they supposedly had legitimate cheeseburgers which are as rare in this country as window screens and good beer. Speaking of which, there was little to be had at Ye Olde Beer Garden. Sure, they had bottles of Miller, and Corona, and Becks, Heineken, and Carlsberg. They even had a Guinness, but all of them were so overpriced it would have required a total rewiring of my brain to order one, and none of them (barring perhaps Guinness) are any better than Efes (the national swill) anyway, so we ordered two giant mugs of that, along with a double cheeseburger for me and three singles for the ladies. 

Alas, Lizzie forgot to specify "just meat and cheese"—a normally automatic qualifier drilled into our brains with countless, desperate reminders from the kids. No one remembered this time though, at least not until said cheeseburgers arrived encased in an inextricable coating of mayo, pickles, lettuce, mustard and tomato. The look of abject horror and hopelessness that fell across Callie's face was enough to drive any man to drink and drink I did. And drank some more.