In which I discover the sleeping habits of Turkish hunters

Well, I have landed in Turkey! I made it to the site all right, with a nine hour layover in Charlotte, NC (never, ever have a nine hour layover in Charlotte, NC, it was horrible. Their auto-flush toilets were broken, so you had to get there right after they had cleaned the bathroom or there were no toilets available. Argh!), another eight hours in London, where I changed from Gatwick to Heathrow and got to see the Boy for a couple of hours, three more hours in Amsterdam, and the final five hours in Istanbul. So tired! But I did manage to stay up, and slept pretty damn well that night. So it wasn’t until the next night that I realized that my lovely lightweight camping mattress was in fact so lightweight as to be nonexistent, and thus completely useless. I immediately asked the site manager to get me another on his next shopping trip, but after three days he admitted he hadn’t been able to find any. I suspect he didn’t look very hard, but that is what you get when you ask someone else to do your shopping—it’s never as important to them as it is to you! He did say there is a camping store near the Mevlana, and offered to draw me a map, because it’s apparently hard to find, but didn’t do it in time for Friday, our day off. So I wandered around for a bit, and finally managed to ask the folks at our friendly local carpet shop, Caravan, where it was. They had no idea, but did send me to a hunting store. It was…fabulous! This tiny little closet of a store, not more than 25 square feet, completely filled to the brim with guns. Big ones, little ones, rifles, handguns, probably hundreds of kinds. The place was literally 95% filled with guns! Turkish hunters don’t mess around with decoys or blinds or camo or any of that nonsense (although I suppose they get all the camo they need from their army stint), they just shoot the hell out of their targets. So, I timidly entered the store and fumblingly asked, in my extremely limited pigeon Turkish, ‘I want a mattress- ’ and then made the universal motion for inflating a beach ball. The little old man laughed at me and then sent his assistant (a tiny shop like that has an assistant! How much must they make?) up a ladder to this nook over the door. At first I was pretty hopefully, because all those gun-toting hunters must need to sleep somewhere, right? And it does make sense to sell it at a hunting supply store, right? So as I watched hopefully, the assistant pulled of a small stack of…inflatable pool mattresses. Little plastic packages with a woman in a bikini, in a variety of brightly flowered or rainbow striped patterns. Marvelous. Obviously, there was some call for these, as he had several and he knew exactly what I meant, but… I got one, and thus far it has been more comfortable than the camping one (although only barely, those things are not made to be wide enough for anyone to actually sleep on). But my favorite part is the mental image of all those manly, camo-clad, army trained Turkish hunters, weighed down with a wide variety of guns and knives, sleeping on little rainbow striped pool mattresses!

As usual came down with the plague that’s going around. Three days running for the toilet, but I’ve gone most of the day without, so yay! This afternoon I was so hungry (the worst part of it was, I was still hungry, the food just didn’t agree with me, so the scent of food didn’t make me sick and not want to eat) that I ate a Cliff bar and it tasted incredible. Like manna from heaven! And I know the damn things generally taste like dust, so it’s just the contrast with three days of bread that did it. No unfortunate repercussions thus far, so I may be truly on the mend. I quite like Turkey, and I know that most of the country is not an archaeological site and thus has slightly better sanitation, but I have come to associate it with immediately getting sick!


We’ve added some new characters to the site this year (and by that I mean that they are characters, not that I think of them as fictional people!). I’m working on finding fake names for everyone, on the off chance that anyone ends up reading this who knows them (unlikely, I know, but six degrees and all that!), but I’ll write up a cast of characters at some point, along with back gossip. Having to tailor my blogging for a museum site aimed at middle schoolers has somewhat limited my ability to actually talk about what goes on. I’ve been dying here! Sex, lies and all sorts of other carry on.

This year it has been cool in the evenings and hot but not appalling during the day, and I’m hoping this trend will continue. I’m in a tent this year, and learning that even in the shade, it gets too hot in there to go for a kip during afternoon tea, which was a bitch when sick, but whatever, I suppose I’ll learn to manage. This 7am to 7pm schedule takes it out of you, and I’ve been missing my afternoon nap! I foresee early bedtimes ahead. Kind of a bummer, as I love sitting around chatting with people in the evenings, but on the other hand, it means less exposure to the evil mosquitoes of death! I brought 98% DEET with me this year in anticipation, but so far have not had to use it.