Starting back with sambuca, it’s a strong anise-flavoured drink which you can definitely smell in the air once it has been poured.  The drink is good on its own or with some cheese on the side.  It’s generally not mixed, but adding ice can remove some of that strong anise taste. 

Moving onto Raki, the unofficial national drink of Turkey, which is another anise-based drink.  Unlike sambuca, it is made usually with grapes or figs, and distilled with anise-seed.  Sambuca is distilled with anise-seed and generally mixed with a pure sugar based alcohol. 

Raki does not have a lot of flaming recipes.  A mix of blue bols and sambuca, lit up, is a very popular European flaming drink.  However, Raki is a very popular drink mixed with water and served on the rocks.  It is very important, as told to me by a cute Turkish girl, to drink it in a tall glass.  I can understand the reasoning and the change of its taste.  When drank from a tall glass with ice, the anise in the drink will crystallize with the ice and diminish the anises potency.  Personally, I enjoy a glass of straight Raki with a piece of cheese on the side.  I can do with either Cheddar or Mozzarella.  Back in college, I took a shot of Raki in with my coffee at the local hookah bar.  I remember doing this at least once a week.  I cannot remember if it was Karim or Moey that introduced me to this lifestyle, but it was very relaxing and a great way to sit around with friends and shoot the shit.  Or work on opsys. Smoking Apple flavoured tobacco while working on a buggy linux kernel… 

Efe Raki – Fresh from Turkey Ottawa, Canada.

The girls had fun explaining their view and I’m here to summarize.  What started with “The woman’s view on penis sizes and how men use it” turned into a conversation about men they want.  This conversation could have turned for the worse (with me crying to my mother), but it was civil.  Apparently, I was not the only one with some sex education; one of the ladies studied human anatomy and psychology for 4 years!  Seems like our discussion focused on what differentiates men from boys.  Men, they take care of their women, making sure to please them, foreplay, and a lot of attention.  Boys, on the other hand, get on and get off.  One observation noted was that getting the girl and keeping the girl are very separate scenarios.  For example, pricks that women do not want in the long run seem get women interested and nice guys try way too hard.  Generally, there is an obvious comparison between boys and pricks, and nice guys and men.  However, for men to keep getting laid, they have learned to adapt.  Be a great guy, pick up and dump.  It is almost the perfect scam, only the SEC will not get involved.  Genuine nice guys, on the other hand, almost never land the right girl.  They seem to get pulled into the trap of a praying mantis, get their head held onto and ripped off when they least expect it.  The girls agreed: while they would love to find a great guy, there is no way to know how they are until it is generally too late.  Moving along to keeping a guy (from the women’s perspective, again), seemed to bring very interesting comments.  Apparently, contrary to physical physiology, women are great runners!  I was told numerous times tonight (and remember reading countless psych papers) that generally, when a women falls for the right guy, she feels so terrified, so much at the thought of losing him, that she’ll sabotage the relationship and try to get out of being hurt.  The male is stuck in his very own catch-22 situation: back off, and the girl may want him, get closer, and the girl will surely push him away.  There is only so much he can do to without going crazy himself.       
Of course, by the time the nice guy does get over his feelings for the woman he lost, she’ll either want him back or he’ll have found his own praying mantis.  The cycle continues.