Raki

Raki - the so called Turkish national drink is also my favorite form of alcohol, especially in the summer time back home on the Aegean sea with some good food and good Turkish music. I unfortunately never drank ituntil the age 19 (it has a very strong aniseed flavor). It all started when I was away from home, traveling in the USA for more than 45 days. I missed it. It seemed pretty strange then - you can't miss something that you have never experienced before, right? Now, when I look back I see it as a minor identity crisis of a guy in his late teens.

Turkey, especially in the 90's was becoming very Americanized, not in terms of
values and thoughts and ideas but in a very materialistic way. So I grow up in that era and almost everything I like in those days (music, film, magazines, books...) is either a direct or an indirect product of the USA... Finally when I made it to the USA for a long vacation, I clearly remember how I felt when my uncle picked me up from Logan and we started driving back to his house: like a kind of home, like a religious-Zionist Jew that found his way back to Israel... Fast forward
a month, I spent time with a friend from high school studying at Drexel at his house in Philadelphia, at a YMCA children's camp in upstate NY, in Boston at my uncle's house and at the end I find myself installing a nice picture of Istiklal Caddesi on my uncle's desktop, downloading bunch of MFO songs and desperately missing Raki.

I guess during my high school and early university years I developed a sense of belonging to merica through the popular culture items that I've chosen to accept from the set that finds it's way to Turkey. What I hadn't considered was that the group of items I've chosen to identify myself was only a very small subset of what USA has been producing and the big picture probably was a lot more different then what I thought. Those 40 days was a time where I, on a subconscious level, realized the surreality of my sense of belonging. Missing Raki was an instinctive reflex to find another notion to belong - because a person always needs to belong - and it somehow helped to figure out my relationship to the land where I was born.

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Raki: How it's consumed? and my current favorite.