My family is on a vacation in Turkey. We will be in Istanbul for a week, before heading to the Aegean coastal town of Kucukkuyu. Tonight we celebrated my mother's birthday on the top of the Marmara Pera Hotel at their Mitla restaurant. The dinner was great, but the one piece of important cultural information that I would like to focus on for this entry is the fact that whenever you order a drink in Istanbul, they always bring you fresh fruit and/or nuts. This might seem like a trivial detail, but it means so much more in a broader gastronomical sense, at least to me. The nuts that you eat in Turkey actually come from Turkey. They are lightly roasted, lightly salted, and always fresh. That means lots of crunch and flavor, without the added grease and salt so common of our nut tins. I have always associated hazelnuts with chocolate and desserts, but here, munching on the plain hazelnuts that hail from the Black Sea Coast is such a delight. The fruit is an even nicer touch. The succulent apricots, cherries, and watermelon slices that are brought out with drinks are gorgeous. I have never understood why in the United States bars never serve free (and healthy!!) snacks with cocktails. If you are lucky, you might get a stale potato chip or pretzel, but not fresh nuts and fruit. I feel like Istanbul is so much more civilized than New York in this respect. (I am recalling an evening at a very "in" bar in which the only food was grilled burgers with guacamole). Or maybe it is the fact that when I enjoyed my cocktail, I was looking out over the Golden Horn at some of the most precious pieces of architecture in history. Until tomorrow. . .