A Day At The Market

Where are there a lot of Turkish people? This is a question that follows me around like a cocker spaniel, exactly like a cocker spaniel save for the fact that not once has it provoked furious anger in me. Just curiosity, warm and perplexing. My first guess (vis a vis where Turkish?) was Istanbul. No, you’re right, too obvious. Ankara? That is a made up name. My third guess struck gold – Berlin. Because Berlin is vastly underpopulated – before WWII it had 4.5 million people, now it has 3.5 - and because there’s more work here than there is in most of former East Germany, which isto say some a lot of immigrants come here. Specifically Turkish immigrants. Much has been made about there being more kebap stands (doner, falafel, etc) than wurst stands in Berlin, but this ruckus ignores the fact that wurst, for the most part, is sort of gross, and kebap, when done well, makes Jesus Christ our savior look like gutter trash.

One of the best things about Berlin is a market held every Tuesday and Friday in Kreuzberg, near Jesse Andrews’ old apartment. This market is a Turkish market. I go at least once a week to purchase hummus and sesame rings and the occasional set of ingredients for a misguided curry. Once we got butter cheese there, my girlfriend and I, under the correct rationale that if someone offers you cheese with a higher fat content, you should purchase it or die trying.

The best thing about the Turkish market is the cheap and plentiful food goods. One of the worst is the crowding, the shoving, the loudness that emerges from tourists who don’t speak German well or at all arguing with vendors who don’t speak German well or at all. An amusing but still somewhat horrible thing about the Turkish market is the abundance of 70ish Turkish and Lebanese women, the tallest of whom is 3 ft. tall and the least square of whom is completely cubical, wandering like enchanted concrete barricades through the narrow central aisle, pushing either their grandbabies in strollers or a large personal shopping valise, or both. Sometimes they bring friends along, to walk around them in circles pointing at things and knocking into people.

In Berlin, nobody has cars, and at Berlin stores, you have to pay quite a bit for bags. So when people completely flip out and try to buy more food than they can fit in whatever shoulder bag they have with them, they either have to have a canvas sack on them or, in emergency situations, they have to carry this huge wheeled carrying case with them. If they don’t have someone to watch their children, and they almost unexceptionally don’t, they bring their kids as well. To make this somewhat difficult aspect of shopping more harmonious, most Berlin supermarkets have complicated gates to push through in order to get into the store.

Which is fine. But sometimes a crazy capitalist fever comes over me when I’m in the Turkish Market, and I become convinced that the hummus stand I like will either run out of hummus or burn down before I get to it. And having to wait for people negotiating a small, inanimate army of packaging becomes mad stressful.

Usually after the ordeal of the Turkish Market I treat myself to a falafel at KING OF FALAFEL, a small stand Jesse claims is the best Falafel provider in the city, but is in fact second to Babel, a falafel stand near my apartment. Why go to KING OF FALAFEL, then? Because it’s adorable. KING OF FALAFEL is run by the King and Queen of Falafel, both of whom are constantly bemused, if a little frustrated, by the task of creating and selling falafel sandwiches. Every step – adding the garlic sauce, frying the chickpea balls, wandering to the back of the stand to look for something they don’t actually need, scratching their head between their hairline and the cool fez the King of Falafel wears, prompts a fair amount of consternation. Yet the finished product is high quality. High enough, anyway, to make up for the occasional 30 minute wait for a food that should take 2 minutes to prepare from scratch. The last time I was there they made me free tea – an act that, while appreciated, added another 5 minutes to my wait, to apologize for their slowness. Or at least I think that’s what happened – the Queen doesn’t seem to have cottoned to my not being a German speaker.