The Unforgettable Meal: Going Out in Grand Fashion

So it's finally here. The last night here in Turkey. It has been an amazing trip filled with great memories. The underground city in Cappadocia, marbling class, cooking class ("cooking show" is probably a more appropriate title), making turkey sandwiches in Turkey, and fasting for Rammadan have just been a few of the memories that I'll never forget. Last night, another one of those unforgettable memories was created.

After coming back from the Black Sea, Matt, Carlos, Chelsey, Justin, Xander, and I decided to go to the restaurant, Meze, for dinner. Meze isn't just another restaurant though; it's the #1 ranked place to eat by TripAdvisor!!! I was pumped to say the least. We left the apartments around 8:30 pm and took the tram from Sultanahmet all the way to Kabatas, the last stop on the tram. Once we got off, we used Carlos' map on hi iPhone as our guide. However, after about 20 minutes we realized we weren't really sure what we were doing. So Matt started going up to random people and asking them "nerede?" and pointing to his phone which had the restaurant's address (a lot of people ignored us and walked away for some reason. Maybe we thought we were trying to sell something. hmmm....). After about an hour or so of walking around Taxim, at 10 pm we finally arrived! It was a really small place but it was packed. We each ordered an entree such as sea bass, sword fish casserole, lamb sirloin, and beef steak strips. Since the restaurant is called Meze, I decided to order some mezes to share with the whole group. A meze, from what I understand, is basically small appetizer dishes of vegetables and/or seafood. It's supposedly best served with alcohol but of course we didn't drink any. I ordered some ceviche, hummus, yogurt, and some green vegetable that tasted like spinach. Everything was delicious and we were very happy. They even gave us two desserts on the house. We were all happy until we saw the bill. Apparently, I had accidentally ordered 9 orders of mezes (I was actually wondering why the portions of the mezes were so big). We also found out that water was not free. Unfortunately, we found that out after many refills. This led to a considerably large bill. Despite this, I thought the food was amazing, the service was good, and it was worthy of the #1 ranking from TripAdvisor. All of these events up to this point definitely made for a memorable dinner. What promoted this dinner into an unforgettable night was the fact that we missed the last tram of the night. We finished eating around 11:50 pm and we found out the last tram leaves at midnight (I was actually the one who suggested to everyone that we should figure when the last tram leaves...When I'm the loudest voice of reason for a group, problems usually arise. Sure enough it did!) We ended up walking quite a ways (about an hour) to get back to the apartment. I was dead tired when we got back but it was totally worth it. Overall, it was an unforgettable end to an unforgettable trip.