Leaving Turkey was really hard. This last month has been a truly amazing experience filled with great memories and valuable life lessons. I hated leaving my new friends and look forward to seeing many of them when I return to St. Olaf in September. But to tide me over until then, I have extraordinary stories and the many many photos I took in Turkey. I have stories about hiking massive mountains, climbing on top of ancient aqueducts, exploring ancient tombs, swimming in pirate coves, late nights on the beach…just to name a few. Compared to these, the memory that I want to talk about here may seem small but in retrospect it was important for my personal growth and me.
My unit partner (shout out to JuliAnne; you were an amazing unit buddy) and I got really lucky to spend our month working in a really interesting little unit (shout out to Hobbiton; you were very good to us). We uncovered new walls (one jenky Byzantine wall connecting two Roman walls, a couple of walls that we don’t what the deal is with), an early Baptistry, evidence of metal working…again just to name a few. One memorable find for me was a coin. At the beginning of the month I was terrified that I would miss something, that among all of the dirt and debris I would be unable to distinguish what was important from what was unimportant. And that fear, at first, made me maybe a little to cautious in my excavating. This fear was reinforced when one of my teammates found a coin that was pretty degraded. At first it was hard for me to distinguish the differences that made it a coin versus another rounded piece of schist. It was and looked rusted and dirty and unrecognizable. Here was something so significant and I didn’t feel like I was seeing what everyone else was seeing. But throughout the month I learned to be more observant, to pick out the small details that made something important, to trust my gut when something seemed different and to ask questions about those differences (so many questions, I probably bugged Howe with about 50 per day). When I found a coin for myself, I recognized it immediately for what it was. I learned to recognize minute details, like the way something moves when your trowel passes over it, which helped me identify artifacts and important materials. My experience recognizing that coin immediately taught me that I should be less unsure about myself and my abilities. I know that it is totally cliché and that I referenced it my last blog post but this experience really helped to reinforce this for me. Confidence in myself is definitely a valuable life lesson that my month in Turkey helped me practice and improve upon.
Being a college student abroad also reinforced the idea that sometimes you just gotta roll with things. You are not always going to know what is going on (really really you aren’t) but you can’t let that mess up your life. We experienced a lot of language and cultural barriers on the trip and did not always feel like we knew what was happening. I remember a lot of times where there was just a lot of fast conversations in Turkish where I was left extremely confused. Yes, we have google translate and were able to communicate some with the Turkish students but you can only get so far with translation apps. A lot is lost in translation. I think that this trip taught me to work on being more ok with uncertainty and that sometimes you just gotta go with the flow.
Anyway, retrospective over. Thanks for the amazing memories everyone!
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