Talking of storks....

While I was in Istanbul on business early one September, I told my host that I wanted to spend a day birdwatching from the Camlica Hills. This is the vantage point birders use to watch the raptors and storks migrating south over the Bosporus. It's a magical sight, seeing the birds coming high out of the mist over the wonderful skyline on the European side - all mosques and minarets - and flying over our heads on their way into Asia and points south. Eagles and buzzards and falcons and hawks and white storks and black storks: a bonanza of birds.
I had a bonus that day. I was driven there by my host's driver, Mehmet, who sat in the car patiently while I joined the birders at the parapet, a chattering mix of German and Dutch and French and others. At a certain moment, Mehmet came up to me and asked - in Turkish of course - if I would like something to drink. I asked - in Turkish of course - for elma çay (apple tea), which he brought to me ceremoniously on a tray. Later, he came again to ask me if I wanted something for lunch, and again brought my order to me on a tray. The gobs of my fellow-birders were well and truly smacked. It's the only time in my life that I felt as if I were royalty. And, being an ass-hat, I offered no explanation to the lesser mortals around me.
I got my comeuppance later, though, when I called a Lesser Spotted Eagle that turned out to be a melanistic buzzard of some kind. After that, nothing brought to me by my faithful majordomo on a silver platter could have made up for such a pathetic gaffe.