Turkish Tea and Coffee
I usually prefer drinking tea over coffee. I liked the tea served in pretty little tulip shaped cups in Turkey so I drank a lot of tea. It was just great to have something warm after walking around in the cold, and it was relatively healthy because I don't usually add sugar to my tea. Although I don't know if I would be able to taste the difference, turkish tea or çay is prepared in a special way. The tea is prepared using 2 stacked kettles, the bottom kettle steaming the loose tea leaves in hot water in the top kettle. You end up with very strong tea, that can be diluted by adding appropriate amounts of water. According to my Turkish friend, tea prepared this way doesn't have the bitterness of directly boiling the tea. We even saw electric versions these kettles! And the tea was cheap. We paid half a Turkish lira for a glass on the Bosphorus ferry.
Turkish coffee (Türk kahvesi) is just way too strong for me. The second photo was taken when we took a short break in a coffeeshop in the middle of the Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı) in Istanbul. You get a tiny cup of coffee, with grounds at the bottom of the cup, so you have to carefully sip the top, making sure you don't drink the grounds too. This was our only experience trying Turkish coffee, because after that we chose to drink tea every time.
