Eskişehir bound

These posts are from prior days but I am not just getting the chance to publish them online. 

Today Amer, Fateh and I got up early and headed off to Eskisehir, about 250 km to the east of Ankara. We were all tired but knew we needed to get on the road early. About half way between the two cities, we stopped for breakfast. Amer ordered us a "village breakfast." We were each given small plates while bigger plates with various foods were put between us. The idea is take the bread that is provided to eat the different items such as melted goat cheese, a tomato and meet dish, fried eggs, olives, cherry jam, butter and honey. (A side note on the olives. I usually don't like olives but the ones in Turkey have the pit in them and are very good. Get your stuff together American "olives," if you can even call yourselves by that name.) Again çay was served and again we ate until the food was gone. We were back on the road and after about an hour we arrived at the CIMMYT institute in Eskisehir. We toured the campus that consits of green houses, the guest house where I am staying, the labs and offices and finally the restaurant. We had lunch at the restaurant and I got to meet some of the people I am going to work with. (I know it seems like all I do is eat. That is kind of true but the food here is amazing. Forget the freshman 15, I'm about to embark on the "Intern 20.") 

After lunch I was briefly introduced to the project some people are working on. I was put to work transferring rotting carrots that contain nematodes to petri dishes with a type of filter paper. The nematodes that are alive will swim through the paper and into the water, the dead ones wont. The alive nematodes will then be collected and used for experiments.

One of the best things about a science lab is how universal things are. They were using a filter that is similar to a Buchner funnel and a vacuum flask. (S/O to all of the students who took Organic Chem with Mr. Frese!) 

My luggage still hasn't arrived but El Finnish, (that is how it is pronounced. I'll get the actual spelling and introduce her and the others in a later post along with pictures) Fateh and took a very packed minibus to the city center to go shopping. I turns out that clothes are quite inexpensive in Turkey. I got a pair of jeans, shorts aren't allowed in the lab for obvious reasons, for 52 Turkish Lira, or about 25 USD. We also bought some food at a market for dinner during the week. Fateh loves to cook so this should be a treat. 

I start working tomorrow at 8 a.m. 

P.S. I'll most likely be a day (or two or three) behind in my postings.