1st day in Emine's village

Again noting that I had no idea how much of Turkey is very, very rural. Emine's village is 40 minutes from a city of 6 million people and many worlds away. Its similar to the village in the east except somewhat more modern and the land is much lusher. More modern in this case means a bathroom in the house with a 'normal' western toilet, (--I won't go into the toilet thing as I wrote about it extensively on the last trip) a washer, electricity and running water but no shower or heat, other than space heaters and a woodstove. The first thing I noticed was that all the women were working hard; whitewashing walls, chopping wood with little knives, pushing wheelbarrows full of stuff and all the men were zipping around on motorbikes and tractors and sitting in the tea house chatting--of course, I'm a bit biased on these things.
Mina adored her cousin, Hatice Sena, 16 months, who busily toddled around the whole time, calling Mina 'aya' and giving her kisses on the head. She was really too cute.
Emine's husband works at the school so we visited and I was requested by the English class to answer questions--finally I can accurately answer some questions. I'm perfecting the smiling blankly like I understand thing.
All the neighbor ladies came over to bake their bread in emine's oven--unfortunately I didn't get a photo--the oven is a huge wood burning stone oven about 4 feet wide and the bread was amazing. Big rough round loaves of dense whole wheat but lighter than our whole wheat--they grow and grind the wheat locally and it is so much tastier than ours.
Mina got dressed up in her cousins outfit of burgundy velvet with gold patterns, it also had a little hat with a burgundy veil sewn with coins that Mina refused to wear under any circumstances--she obviously had no idea how cute it was. The outfit was part of some ceremony involving henna that usually takes place when the baby is 6 months. Then she pushed a little wooden walker thing around the yard--since we are not particularly eager for her to walk, at all actually, the walker got stashed away after a few rounds.
We ended the day with a walk around the fields. K lived in this village for a few years as a teen so the walk was accompanied by stories of how he picked tobacco in this field and grapes in that one, no documentary video today unfortunately. We met with a fig tree full of figs and emine fearlessly climbed above my head to pick figs. She is just great.