We were down in Newport on Friday checking out the Meeting House one last time before next weekend. We learned that the building has sections of the oldest wall plaster in the country dating from the late 17th century. Plans are nearing completion…
Waiting in line to look at sun spots outside the science library at brown.
We went and picked some rhubarb stalks from the garden the other day. Hayley chopped them up and boiled them down with a little sugar. Then she made little pastry shells and after the rhubarb had congealed a bit she poured it in and popped them in the oven. They were delicious!
We’ve been enjoying fresh tomatoes from our garden as well, although the onions we planted before we left for Turkey don’t seemto be doing as well. The garden has plenty of basil and kholrabi and we’ve scouted outage few delicious but sadly neglected apple trees in the neighbourhood.
Willis and I are finally back in the States after a great digging season and a long series of flights back through Turkey and Germany. We left Tepe in the evening and took a taxi to the airport. We then flew to Ankara (the one and a half hour flight was a huge contrast to the hours and hours we spent on the bus coming overland at the beginning of the summer). We then spent the night in the Ankara airport and boarded our flight to Munich.
We had already decided that we’d spend our seven hour lay over in the city for the sake of fresh air, stretching our legs, and seeing a new place, and it was well worth it. We had a long rambling walk through the English Garden and stopped for beer and lunch before heading back to the airport. After another 8 hours and crossing the Atlantic we were finally home.
On our last day off we took a trip to Urfa with other members of our team. We went down the night before and a lovely dinner overlooking the Balıklıgöl (fish-lake). The lake is filled with sacred carp, the story is that Abraham was about to be burned on a pyre when god turned the fire itself to water and the coals into fish. Now the area is a pilgrimage site and amazingly beautiful. As this the end of Ramadan the park was filled with families celebrating the Iftar or breaking of the daily fast. After dinner we went rug shopping in the bazaar and then retired for the night.
The next morning we had a delicious breakfast prepared by our Chef who lives in Urfa. Then we went back into the bazaar to wander around and shop. Hayley and I left a bit early and headed back towards the park. We found a beautiful café overlooking another lake with a fountain and sat under huge trees and drank tea, the others joined us later and we ordered lunch. After lunch we high-tailed it back to our Chef’s house and went off to catch a bus back to Diyarbakir and eventually home.
We’re still trying to figure out how to get our Urfa shopping home:
In one week we’ll be boarding a plane in Diyarbakir for Ankara and starting our trip home. The day we leave is the first day of bayram (the holiday marking the end of Ramadan) so it’s going to be a little crazy but I’m hoping the airport is quiet (like Christmas Eve). If we can we might celebrate a bit of the holiday with the Ayvats in Ankara before catching a 6am flight the next morning to Munich.
We’ve got seven and a half hours in Munich before our plane home so a trip into town is likely. We’ll visit a nice Brauhaus and have lunch and maybe wander the English garden before making our way back to the airport on the train. It’ll be strange to be somewhere green, wet, and cool for a change.
Hayley went off to visit Hasankeyf with the rest of the team today while I stayed home and recovered from a week long illness. So I thought it’d be a good time to recap our trip to Mardin last week.
We drove down to the monastery outside Mardin in the evening and had dinner with the monks. The Bishop was still on the way back from Diyarbakir (after visiting our site earlier) so we headed into Mardin proper for a bit of nightlife on a roof-top cafe for the evening. It was amazingly beautiful to be up high and see the citadel and the Syrian plain dotted with little villages with their lights flickering on and off as the electricity was cut and restored. Later we returned to the monestary and the Bishop had returned so we sat with him in the courtyard you see above and drank tea and chatted, and then retired to his private balcony also looking over the plain and ate watermelon stared at the stars and talked more. Finally around midnight we said goodnight and found our beds where were set up on the upper level around the courtyard. The night was phenominally cool and absolutely quite with no mosquitos (quite a relief).
Waking in the morning was spectacular, staring up at a perfectly blue sky with the saffron colored monastery walls and towers bordering the view, above which sat the bluffs of the Tur-Abdin mountain range. We were roused out of our beds by the bell for morning services which we attended, and then had breakfast. We sat around and talked for a quite a while afterwards with the Bishop about all manner of things, quite a bit of linguistics, arabic, syriac, turkish, kurdish and akkadian were all flowing over more and more tea and coffee in the cool courtyard. We said goodbye and took a final photograph with the Bishop (in red) and headed back to Mardin for a quick jaunt around the city and then back home.
In Mardin we took a brief visit to the Museum, which is quite nice. Although they recently had a theft which has caused them to remove some quite significant pieces from display. We followed that with a nice lunch on another roof top terrace hidden from any fasting passers-by. The trip back home was a mix of horrible roads, stopping the car to dance in fields, wading in fresh green springs, and waiting in queues for constructions vehicles to stop blocking the road, but eventually we made it back to the compound in time for dinner.
