Thursday, July 15, 2010

Turkish weddings

Merhaba!

So this post is out of date for sure, but I was waiting for pictures from this event. I still only have one low-quality picture, but if I find any more, I'll add them later!

A few weeks ago, we were invited to a wedding in town. The bride is a relative of Nejla's. Weddings are a HUGE event here! Going to any average-size town, you're sure to find at least one bridal shop with completely over-the-top dresses; the types of dresses little girls DREAM of wearing: saturated in sequins with layers and layers of puffy organza. There are also wedding shows on TV in the afternoons - similar to TLC's "A wedding story" or other types of shows I guess. On the show, there are several couples who actually are wed on the set of the show. Crazy!

In our town, because it is small, the entire town was invited to the wedding, basically. Festivities went on all day long: during the day there was a processional of sorts, where the bride is driven to her new husband's family's home with all her things. This requires multiple cars, so the cars line up down the road from her family's house to his family's house, carrying all her clothes, etc., honking their horns super loudly. Even today, in rural areas, often times men stay in their parents' homes and the wife moves in with his whole family. I think there was probably a religious ceremony at the mosque (maybe?) but we were invited to the public ceremony at the town hall. The bride's dress was CRAZY - she looked just like Nia Vardalos in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." The groom looked equally crazy - his tuxedo jacket, on the part where the satin stripes usually are, he had a row of rhinestones. I believe there may have also been something pink involved. I've noticed that in the small towns we've been to, typically the color pink or purple is used to make things look fancier or prettier. So even some formal menswear can have touches of pink or purple - but not like a tie or dress shirt - that would be way too subtle! Definitely have to have some pink stripes on your tux jacket!

The first part of the wedding was the ring ceremony and the giving of gifts. The ring ceremony, having watched it on TV multiple times now and witnessed it, still confuses me. Each ring is tied to one end of a red ribbon, the rings are put on the bride and groom by the person marrying them, they do not put them on each other, and then the ribbon is cut. It seems like if they would do anything would the ribbon, it would be tied? After the ring ceremony, the couple stands in the front of the room and all the men in the room go through a line, giving the couple money. The bills are pinned onto the groom's tuxedo, so afterwards the man was barely visible underneath all the bills! He looked like a strange Christmas tree. Here's a shot of the bride and groom and the money-pinning line:



Shortly after the ceremony was dancing. There was a men's group dance where all the men were in a circle (again, similar to My Big Fat Greek Wedding!) with arms around each other's shoulders, moving back and forth around the circle. There was another dance done in two lines facing each other where, from what we all could tell, you basically just have a "partner" of the same sex standing across from you, and you do some sort of foot shuffle and hold your arms up, snapping your fingers to the music. Some of the men had very fancy footwork going on! Women were allowed to take part in this dance, but only little girls actually did. Our bus driver (a HILARIOUS DANCER) dragged all of us onto the dance floor, as did Nuri and Nejla's husband. There were several older women in the front of the room, and when we left the dance floor, the women were trying to get us back up there to keep dancing! We figured all the locals were probably getting a good laugh.

Outside the social hall, there was basically a small street fair. There were food vendors selling Turkish pizza and other snacks as well as children's toys. The food provided at the ceremony was several plates of assorted cookies for each table and boxes of sour cherry (visne) juice! We got a good laugh out of that. Here's a picture of a few of us at our table with our juice boxes:




It was a really fun experience. Everyone there seemed to be really enjoying themselves. It was also cool to recognize a good number of people in the room from the market.

Uh oh! Bus is here, time to go!

Salaam alaikum,
Sarah

Friday, July 9, 2010

Summiting Mt. Doom



Merhaba!
In an effort to not be TOO far behind on my blogging, here's a little bit about my week in Sivrihisar (not last week, but week before, that's how behind I am!). We traveled 4 hours by bus down windy mountain roads to this location to look at metamorphic and igneous rocks. We saw two granites, and mountains made out of marble. Because the marble was weathered though, it wasn't shiny or smooth or counter-top quality in appearance - it was lack-luster in a literal sense. It was easy to distinguish though based on the lack of vegetation growing on it. Because there was so little vegetation, it was easy to get great views from the ridges on which we were mapping, whereas at our local mapping spot you can't really see much through the trees. This is good for locating outcrops and finding yourself on a map, but it means lot of extra sun protection needed! One of the guys in our group is from the southwest and he made the comment that in our 4 hour drive it felt as if we'd gone from Italy to New Mexico.



The one area in the mapping area that did appear to be lush with vegetation (relatively) was the highest peak in the area. It looked like Mt. Olympus from the lower slopes because there always seemed to be a crown of fluffy white clouds hovering above it. Here's a shot from below:



My mapping partner, Marcus, and I decided on day 1 that we would get our map finished in time to spend an hour hiking to the top to check it out, which we did manage to do. Being not so poetically-minded, he named it "Mt. Doom" as a reference to Lord of the Rings. It was pretty strenuous, and like any mountainous area, it looked closer than it was for a long time, and when we got to the top it was hard to tell if we were actually at the highest point, but we're pretty sure we made it! Here I am at a point close to the top, protecting myself from every possible ray of sunlight even from other suns in other galaxies:



While in Sivrihisar, we did some cultural sight-seeing after dinner one night. Sivrihisar used to be an dominantly Armenian community several hundred years ago, and we visited an old Armenian church that it being restored. This is the church, pretty standard appearance:



These are some gargoyles that are on the side of the building:




Although the community was dominantly Armenian (therefore, Christian) until relatively recently, there have also been Muslim people living there for a long time - we went inside a 700-year old mosque! It was all wooden and had a very ancient feel to it. The entire floor was covered in very colorful rugs for prayer. There is a balcony of sorts that is curtained off where the women pray so that the men are not distracted by the women while in prayer. Something I thought was pretty neat architecturally were the columns supporting the ceiling indoors. The columns were wooden, but the tops of the columns were marble and had a variety of styles: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. We were told by our guide that when the mosque was built, these pieces had been taken from ruins of ancient Greek temples and buildings in the area and used to top the wooden columns. Just shows how many different groups of people have inhabited this area throughout history!

On the drive back from Sivrihisar we made a seemingly random roadside stop to check out some blueschist rocks. Blueschist is a VERY high pressure metamorphic rock and is VERY beautiful. Blueschist forms in subduction zones where one tectonic plate is dragged underneath another and the underlying plate experiences extremely high pressures. Studies done in this area show that these rocks formed at a depth of about 100 kilometers below the Earth's surface! The craziest part is that they've made it all the way back up to the surface where they're just sitting in this tranquil, wooded glen. Blueschist, because it forms deep in the earth, has a tendency to actually change to a different rock when exposed to surface conditions, so it's not easy to find in an unadulterated state.

That's pretty much all the excitement from week 3! Week 4 post coming soon!

Salaam alaikum,
Sarah

Sunday, July 4, 2010

High Mountain Festival, Mudurnu

Merhaba!

Today all the North American residents of Taskesti, along with our camp mom and friend from down the road, traveled to the booming 5,000 person provincial capitol - Mudurnu for the High Mountain festival. Little did we know that this festival would actually be taking place, in part, on the top of a high mountain! We had lunch on top of the mountain, then drove back into town for some shopping.

Lunch consisted of a huge communal platter of rice, chickpeas, and some sort of meat with thin flatbread. The way you eat this is similar to the way you pick up dog poop if you live in a city - you tear off a piece of the bread, and grab a large pinch of food in the bread.

Here's a picture of me trying not to spill all my rice out and Nejla, our "mom."



After eating lunch we walked around the mountaintop for a while, checking out the stuff the vendors were selling, when we were surrounded by Turkish high-schoolers who all wanted to take pictures with us! I think I had my picture taken upwards of 10times with cute Turkish girls and their siblings! We left the mountaintop and drove down into town. Several of us went to the town museum where they have artifacts and pictures all from Mudurnu over the years. There was an exhibit on the manufacturing of silk, from worm to final product. They were actual live worms and silk moths there! Andrea and I touched the worms - they just felt like normal worms. The museum is in an 1860's courthouse, with a trendy coffee/tea shop on the first floor. We walked up to the town clock tower afterwards. The view from up near the clock tower was great, so we took a group picture!



We also stopped at this really nice, historic home-turned-hotel/restaurant for tea just before leaving.

Apparently a traditional part of the festival is amateur wrestling. We attended a wrestling match, and one of our guys actually participiated! He fought one guy and beat him fairly quickly, although he was quick to say afterwards that when signing up, he was asked "just for fun? or competitive?" and he had made sure to emphasize that he was playing "just for fun!"

Tomorrow morning we leave for Cayirhan until Thursday for more mapping. The road to Cayirhan is pretty much the same road we took to Sivrihisar. The road is fine now, but apparently back in the day when our instructor was working on his PhD thesis in this area, it was pretty scary. He told us this joke on the drive home on Thursday:
A Southern Baptist preacher dies and goes to heaven. He reaches the pearly gates and meets St. Peter. St. Peter welcomes him warmly, saying "Reverend, it's so good to see you here, we're very happy to have you, we'll have your accomodations ready in just a few - Mehmet! Mehmet! We're SO GLAD to see you! We've been waiting YEARS for you! Come on over here! Your room's all ready! Boy, are we glad to see you! We're so excited!" The preacher is getting upset here, wondering why some guy named Mehmet is getting this great treatment, so he asks "Hey, why is this Mehmet getting all this attention? I've spent my whole life serving the church, I've been a preacher for 40 years, I've lived my life as Christ's servant, why am I here waiting while Mehmet gets right in?" St. Peter responds "well Reverend, you did serve us your whole life, and we're grateful, but honestly, your sermons put most of your congregation to sleep every Sunday. Now Mehmet was a Turkish bus driver and drove the route from Ankara to Istanbul and back every night, and each night, for 40 years, 44 people prayed all night long!"

No worries though, our driver is THE BEST and the roads are nothing like they apparently used to be.

Time to go pack!

Salaam alaikum,
Sarah

Friday, July 2, 2010

Planetary geology convention in Taskesti

Merhaba!

This past weekend we were visited at the field station by a group of scientists from NASA Ames Research Facility. The group, which included a post-doc at NASA Ames, a professor from University of Illinois - Chicago and her husband and toddler, and an undergraduate field assistant from UIC, was in Taskesti investigating the pH of water from natural hot springs. The project is through NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and is basically looking for habitable extreme environments, such as would exist on Mars or icy satellites of outer planets (Europa, Titan, etc.). Specifically, the group was studying rocks from the Earth's mantle (olivine-rich) that were undergoing serpentinization, a process through which olivine-rich rocks interact with water and produce nitrogen, which is essential for life. This same reaction also produces hydrogen ions, which changes the pH of the water. The project is based on a correlation between pH of the water and microbial growth. The group is collecting water samples at sites on Earth where such rocks are exposed at the surface (it is fairly uncommon for mantle rocks to wind up on the surface) and are undergoing serpentinization, so they came to Taskesti to check out some natural hot springs in the area. The planetary application of the study is to look for these conditions on other bodies. One area on Mars, Nili Fossae, well known for its incised channels, has been a identified as a candidate site for these conditions, due to the detection of olivine by Mars Express (European Space Agency satellite).
Nili Fossae false-color image showing mineralogy:



It was pretty exciting to meet these folks and to have a lecture on planetary geology given by NASA scientists in a remote area of a foreign country. Even more crazy, the husband of the UIC professor, a planetary geologist at Ames, knows my advisor! Funny how things like that happen!

Time to work on my project report, more updates later today!

Salaam alaikum,
Sarah

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Fashion and Islam in Turkey

Merhaba!

Sorry for the lack of blog updates of late, we traveled to Sivrihisar for a few days to do some mapping there (more on that later), but there were several notable cultural experiences over the weekend.

Last Friday was market day in Taskesti, as is every Friday. I was struck by how much impact Islam has on fashion here - it is most noticable at the market. The vendor with the most business is consistently the scarf vendor. The Taskesti women buy scarves the way average Western pre-teens and early teens buy inexpensive jewelry. He has cheap 2 lira scarves, silk scarves for 10-20 lira, and scarves with sequins and beads, which go for around 10 lira. He also sells colorful thread and beads that women sew along the edge of their scarves for some extra adornment. All the women in Taskesti over the age of about 10 cover their heads in public to preserve their modesty. The scarves though, range from very conservative (opaque and black) to crazy (neon colors, disco prints, see-through). Most women do choose to wear bright, colorful prints, and sew dangly beads or other dangly trims to the edges of their scarves. Another vendor - across from the scarf vendor - is the women's clothing vendor. He carries a few long, drab skirts, but he has racks and racks of very Western clothing that could be found in any department store in the US. I was wondering if any of these clothes were ever bought in town, so I started paying more attention to the young girls' clothing. I saw two girls (about 16 I think) shopping; they were both wearing short-sleeved, button-down plaid shirts over long sleeved, high-necked, black shirts. It seems that women here desire variety, color, and trendy clothes, just like Western women. These desires though, are tempered by the demand for female modesty in rural areas, so you see Dillards-style shirts over black turtlenecks and neon, sequined scarves covering every strand of hair.

In contrast, in Sivrihisar, which is a much larger town and closer to Ankara (Turkish capitol), women seem to have much more flexibility in their wardrobe. The old women in town still dressed very conservatively: long drab skirts, long sweaters, drab scarves; and spent all their time in or in front of their homes. We ate dinner in a restaurant in town the three nights we spent there, and each night we saw small groups of young women eating together, no male escorts, no scarves. One woman was actually wearing a lacy shirt that more closely resembled lingerie than street clothes!

Here are some pictures from the market:
Anna and I are drinking cay at the scarf vendor - all the vendors offer market-goers tea while they are examining the wares. It feels nice to have the silk scarves hanging from the awning caressing your cheek as you sip tea, however, you're also very much hoping that none dip into your cup! We're not sure, but we're pretty sure that there's a "you stain it, you buy it (for the three times the normal price)" deal. Note some of the crazy scarves in the picture!



This is a picture of the dry food in the food half of the market. The vendor was really excited to have a picture taken.

This is a picture of the street that goes downtown off the "main" road on market day. Note the parallel-parked tractors!



That's all for the market, more cultural experiences to blog about later!

Salaam alaikum,
Sarah