Working in Turkey: First Week

The first week of work has come and gone and I have gotten my first little bit of time off to reflect. This first week I ended up only working about 48 hours with about twenty hours of travel. Tiring to say the least. I'll try to post some pictures when I can. The hotel amenities are very nice and only a mere hour away from work. So with twelve hours shifts and two hours of round trip commutes I am sure this will get old real quick. Fortunately when more people show up we will be able to work four days and have three days of versus working five days and have two days off.

I'll start with the weather on what I will now refer to as the hill. The hill is a cold and currently snow covered. The first day was great, the weather was sunny and it was about 9-10C so pretty warm comparatively speaking. The following days were not so kind. The temperatures did not exceed 3C and went as low as 5C. Of course non of this excludes wind chill. The hill itself is a melting pot of Americans, Turkish, and military from both sides. The hill is a mini bunker to say the least and is kind of cool. The location is not set up completely which to me is interesting. I am fortunate in the fact that I get to see the site come up and do new exciting things that I would not get to see because the location is new. I'm learning all kinds of interesting and finding people who's company I enjoy and can relate to.

Now for the local environment. The town which is some how smoggier then Los Angeles. It is out of control. For those of you who have never been to Europe or any other third world country I can't begin to explain the local driving. Some of it is brilliant some of it is not. I'll start with the most important thing that people should remember if you ever travel out of US/Canada PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY. So the way people cross the street is they run to the center median (the center dbl/single line) and stand there as cars/truck/buses zip by them before finally crossing the rest of the way. Taking photographs doesn't seem to really be a standard around here. Normally in the US you see people take pictures of everything with there smart phones. So taking photo's of the town is something I will most likely do from afar or brave the stares. The big mall in town has a metal detector and you can't take pictures inside of it much like Bangkok, Thailand. I can assume that is to prevent terrorist from finding key locations for plating bombs.

I find what little cuisine I've had to be tasty thus far. I've really only eaten out of the hotel twice and both times I enjoyed the flavors. The hotel has a more American style cuisine and also some of the local dishes as well. I will of course en-devour to try as much local cuisine as possible. I have found out one thing though the beer sucks. Which I suppose is fine since I don't really drink that much but after this long week I just wanted something smooth and cool I've been told there is only two bars in town and that they are smokey as heck. I will most likely not be visiting these establishments since smoke makes we want to throw up. Bu we shall see.

Finally the internet here stinks. There land lines are extremely slow so I am assuming that their wireless networks are pretty solid. I see cell phone stores everywhere. In the mall alone I counted five stores on the first floor alone and several on each of the four stories.

more to come next week.