Note the guard dog giving Bill the evil eye for getting too close to the herd.
This morning we got to sit with an Imam, the Muslim equivalent of a priest, and have a Q &A with no restrictions on our Qs. Very interesting and enlightening, but too much for this update. Of course we sat on the floor in the mosque and we women were wearing our headscarves/shawls.
A hike through our town of Mustafapasha on Friday gave us a glimpse of everyday life where we saw the leavings of grape skins being shoveled on a wagon while others lay drying in the street -- meanwhile a huge pile of grapes stacked on the roof told us that grape pressing was a constantly ongoing process.
Lunch at a local home where they prepared a delicious meal of beans, bulgur wheat and a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and parsley was followed by a Q&A about daily life in small town Turkey and a tour of their home. What a treat! We even got to see the cooking pit built into the floor where a fire under a ceramic pot cooked our beans:
And now, because we have been so behind in our 'trip reports,' we are thinking it no longer makes sense to narrate the trip chronologically and have organized our adventures by category or theme to catch you up on the whole Turkish experience.