Welp, yay!

Crawled out of bed late and hungry, or dropped awkwardly off the top bunk in my hostel dorm, rather, and climbed the narrow spiraling stairs to the roof for breakfast.  The terrace of Istanbul Hostel is almost absurdly luxurious.  You can see the Sea of Marmara with its distant Greek islands and ridiculously large but colorful shipping barges, the residential hills of the Anatolian side of Istanbul, and all the clean, pink, orange and red buildings of Sultanahmet.  Plus, there are grape vines everywhere, and you get cheeses, olives, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, tea, and watermelon for breakfast.  It’s crazy.

Finally met up with the field camp group- 26 of us packed onto our own bus and drove through the industrial area outside Istanbul, the dry and agricultural area east of that, and into the tree-covered mountains and valleys near our field station in Taskesti.  Sat next to a kid named Hobson on the four hour drive, and learned a ton about the corruption of oil companies in Brazil.  For supper, we stopped with desperately hungry joy at a restaurant where we sat outside at picnic tables and watched kids play on the tiny playground erected amidst fruit trees and lush grass.  And we had the most delicious version of Turkish cheese pizzas- grilled flat bread with greasy garlicky buttery perfect cheese.

The bus arrived at our field station- a one-story government building painted light yellow with a yard fenced in by barbed wire- in the dark, and we were greeted by at least 5 stray dogs.  Nuri, our field director, started off our orientation with a ten-minute description of how to make tea, which seems to involve an unholy amount of crushed tea leaves.  The rest of orientation consisted of repeated pleas and threats about wearing sunscreen, watching for or shouting about falling rocks, and do be careful the third and fourth weeks because we’ll be in sheep pastures which are guarded by giant ferocious dogs that will try to attack you but you should be fine if you just sit down and raise your rock hammers as they charge.  Sweet!

I’m rooming with three other girls- Caitlin, Sharon, and Karen- and everyone is mixing up our names.  I wandered out to our front stoop, and was immediately approached by two tentative teenage girls who took me by the hand and gestured for me to sit down on a carpet laid out on the ground under a streetlight.  An old, spry woman with hollow cheeks and a confident, observant look was sitting on one corner, doing something that looked like knitting.  Five other, mostly older, women joined us to make nine people kneeling, reclining, and squashing onto one pretty small Turkish carpet.  They laughed, gossiped, and seemed to be commenting on the night and the stars.  One of the teenage girls ran to get her torn English-Turkish dictionaries, and they tried asking me questions like, “Is Taskesti beautiful?” “Do you have sisters?  No brothers!?” “Do you have a lover?”  At which point, the girl with the dictionary proudly confided that she didn’t either.  Anyway, I blast myself for not being able to speak more Turkish.  But people were fantastically nice, and they showed me how to peel and crack hazelnuts from the tree over our heads.  I don’t know, the women seemed extremely confident and capable in their manner, maybe more so than a lot of adult American women I know, which isn’t what Americans think about women living in pretty strong Muslim culture.