Another great weekend out of Ankara was exactly what I needed to remind me of just how fortunate I am to be living abroad. We drank lots of cay and walked around the market. I had my first experience with a hamam (Turkish bath) that left me in tears I was laughing so hard. As I lay there (after an argument with the hamam lady so that she would let me keep my bathing suit on) I couldn't help but giggle at this old tradition and how unsanitary it felt. They scrub you down until there is but one very thin layer of skin left and then dump buckets of water to rinse you off. Keep in mind that this is simply done in a community room and that the lady scrubbing was wearing very little at all. I've been told that in the old days, Turkish women would use the hamam as a place to scout out potential wives for their sons. I was thinking about this while losing layer upon layer of skin and what it would've been like to know that everyone was watching you.
The next day we hired a driver to take us to a tiny village not far from Safranbolu. Here we had just enough time to be welcomed into an old Ottoman style house where I was pinched and groped by an elderly Turkish lady. I tried to say a few things to her in my broken Turkish and she just thought that it was amazing. She was very sweet and we ended up enjoying some cay and baclava in her house. The whole weekend was quite the experience and I am looking forward to doing more weekends away this year.
