As I was looking up how many Starbucks there were in the Triad (greater Greensboro area) yesterday, I arbitrarily thought it might be more interesting to see how many of these Seattle-based coffee shoppes had now infested the glorious capital of the Ottoman Empire.
During my last visit to Turkey, my late father Mehmet Gokbudak's native land, I saw a Starbucks in Fenerbahce. It is a section of the city which sits on the Asian part of the Bosphorous. This is the section which is home to the Fenerbahce soccer team, which is the arch-rival of my family's beloved GalataSaray. I do not recall seeing another Starbucks around town, but as it turns out there are quite a large number of them.
Without going into a sermon on globalization or the dangers of cultural imperialism (you can see the documentary "Black Gold" for that), I will simply ask those of you frequent this blog_ all 6 or 7 of you_ to answer this by taking your own guess here as I pose the question as multiple choice trivia question:
The question again is "How many Starbucks are in the greater Istanbul area?"
a) 37
b) 42
c) 49
d) 63
The answer is provided in the comment section below.
http://www.starbucks.com (though I personally prefer the Green Bean when I'm in Greensboro, and Mill Mountain Coffee when I'm in my howetown of Roanoke, Va., and in Istanbul, I prefer to drink Turkish Coffee which Starbucks doesn't make!)
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1 comment:
The answer is "C." There are indeed 49 Starbucks coffee shops in Istanbul according to Starbucks.com
They even have some in the European suburbs of Bakirkoy and Florya, both of which are quite far from the heart of the city_Taksim Square/Beyoglu.
I don't know if this is impressive or very disturbing. Perhaps, it is a little bit of both.
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