I Must Harvest Wheat for the Motherland

The internet has been spotty over the past couple days so I'll try my best to update everyone about what has happened over the past couple days. 

Ramadan started on Saturday and most people in the lab are fasting. The place where we take lunch has shut down for the month so Elfinesh and I have been cooking. She is quite the cook and thanks to her, Fateh and the many Turkish restaurants, I have yet to have a bad meal. 

Elfinesh explained to me her entire Ph.D. project which is very involved but interesting. I won't go into the detail that she did, but it is very interesting. She spend four months this past winter at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. I'm mentioning this because after meeting many Ph.D. students and doctors, I've started looking for what I might do after my adventure at Iowa State. It's never too early to start looking. 

Today was a hard day of work. We spend the morning labeling thousands of envelopes, thousands.  In the afternoon we headed out to the greenhouse to harvest the wheat, hence the title. We picked the seeds off about 350+ plants and stuffed them in the envelopes we had labeled earlier. It was incredibly hot but I couldn't complain because the other workers were fasting and couldn't drink water until about 8:30 tonight. 

I'm forgetting a lot but Baklava is waiting along with the USA vs. Belgium World Cup Game. 

Me, harvesting wheat for the motherland.

Since there is no dryer, I had to turn my room into a drying center while watching the World Cup Game. 

*Edited/Updated 2/7/14 6 p.m. Turkey Time*

I have some stories to add that I couldn't get on here before the game yesterday. So, here they are. 

Probably the biggest thing that happened yesterday was one of the stories I left out. Elfinesh and I joined (I would really like to list names but I can hardly pronounce them let alone spell them in their respective languages) a Ph.D. student from China, a woman from Azerbaijan, a man from Turkmenistan and two gentlemen from Turkey for dinner in the city. We were hosted by Dr. Alexey Morgounov, the head of CIMMYT's International Winter Wheat Improvement Program as well as celebrating Dr. Beyhan Akin's birthday. Note: from now on instead of saying the food was great, fantastic, outstanding, etc., I will only say "it was Turkish." So, dinner was Turkish and Alexey and I talked extensively about America, he is from California, my family and school. He suggested that I should come out into the field with him some time soon so I can observe what he and many of the other people at the table do. It was nice to share a meal with so many distinguished scientists from all over the world. At a table of nine, only two or three where from the same country. It was rather beautiful.