This is our ninth day of work, plus our day of travel and our day of sitting around in Gaziantep, and tomorrow is our first day off. Everybody is very ready for it. My response time to any event has been lengthening gradually, and is now about 5 seconds between someone saying something to me & my thinking of the correct response (about 10 seconds in Turkish).
Yesterday I was helping supervise workers as they clear off the face of an outer city wall, and clean off the top of the wall to find its width. I did okay in Turkish. I learned to say, “Are there stones here? Small stones or large stones?” The workers seemed quite interested in what we were doing, and started looking for the types of stuff I was looking for (pottery, etc.); what they didn’t know is that my looking for stuff was just part of my malingering. So if the whole work team seems to be slacking off, we’ll know whose fault it is.
Today we trekked around the citadel trying to identify the structures excavated by the German team–of course, in the 100 years since that excavation, pits have filled in, stones have been moved, walls have degraded, and everything’s overgrown with grass & weeds. Later, with the help of some workers we started clearing some walls within the general area of the hilani (a specific type of building with a columned portico and large main room), trying to correlate the various depressions in the ground and random scattered stones with the German plan.
The Turkish workers are either very gallant or they think I’m quite weak. Anytime I start working on anything myself, one of them comes and takes over from me. It’s a nice way of supervising without dealing with the language problem, since if I want them to do something, I just start doing it myself and one of them takes over. Various villagers always show up to watch us no matter what we’re doing, and to try and chat with us. Unfortunately my very limited amount of Turkish doesn’t take us far conversationally.
Tomorrow we are going to sleep in and then visit Karatepe. Aaaaa…sleep in…