Tea on a boat costs ten lira and buys you the entire skyline.
On the most honest cup in the city.
The man with the tray walks the deck like he's done it ten thousand times because he has. Two cubes of sugar, set on the saucer beside the glass. You pay in coins. He moves on.
Çay in Turkey is brewed in a çaydanlık, a stacked pot of pots: water below, concentrate above. What you get is the concentrate cut to taste by the water you'd otherwise be boiling for nothing. The glass is the shape of a tulip on purpose — narrow at the waist so the heat doesn't escape, wide at the lip so your fingers can hold it without burning. [^1]
The wind from the Marmara takes the steam sideways before you can sip it. To the right, Topkapı. To the left, Üsküdar's minarets going pink in the last sun. You are paying ten lira for the tea and nothing at all for the rest, and it is unclear which is the better deal.
The boat docks. The man collects the empty glasses on his way out. He has, by my count, served forty cups in twenty minutes and has not once not been smiling.
[^1]: Refuse the tea, and a Turk will, politely, assume you are unwell.
- Find it
- Any of the Şehir Hatları ferries — Eminönü to Üsküdar is the shortest, and the prettiest at sunset.
- Order
- Çay. The man will appear. He always does.
- Pay
- Ten lira, exact change preferred.
- When
- Late afternoon, eastbound, the lower deck.