<< from the eye up on the pyramid >>

around me people are preparing for the olive oil festival, but with mehmet off attending to guests and his uncle not arrived yet, i am really at a loss to communicate and it is hard to offer to help, harder still to understand what they are saying back. so i am hidden in mehmet's office. i am starting to understand a bit more and yesterday i had written out for me the verbs to be and to have, to come and to go, to give and to take, to find and to want.

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

on the restaurant wall is a painting done on tile. everywhere here there is art done with tile -- checkerboard patterns in the floors here, patterned tile woven into more intricate designs, bands of colour divinding the room. this art though is too intricate to be done with a pattern. it is painted by hand in mintey greens and burgundy reds, and blue. it is a representation of an olive tree, five tiles across by twelve high. the tree starts as a single trunk, blue flowers at its base and red blossoms. moving upwards it quickly breaks into four branches trailing. the branches wrap around each other and up giving the impression of a figure eight. one of the branches terminates low. others fork again, wrapping down as well as up. the feeling of circularity. there are leaves and fruits along each branch, olives done in purpley burgundy. mehmet tells me the difference between green and black olives is their ripeness. that makes these the ripest.

at the top of the picture the branches have forked, finished and reforked to give seven shoots, seven sprigs of leaves. red motifs fill the space up to the top of the topmost tile.

a bus of tourists has just arrived; the staff here carry around trays of glass cups of tea on saucers with sugar cubes. the smell of roasting meat for this afternoon, the indistinct sound of conversation in two languages, neither of them english, and sighting american money.