fieldwork begins

In the last two days we did two different exercises to get us used to fieldwork in a different culture. The first day, I and a partner (along with everyone else in groups of two) were given two eggs apiece that we were instructed to trade with locals for something worth more. It was an interesting icebreaker, though some people wondered what we were doing carrying around eggs until we explained what the exercise was about. One woman at a bike rental shop laughed at us and said she wished she could help us, but didn't want to trade anything for the eggs. My partner and I met a restaurant owner, however, that was very interested in talking to us and gave us a ver nice bottle of red wine for our eggs. He was 24 years old but had operated his own restaurant for the last seven years along the beach in Marsalforn, a tourist town on the north coast of Gozo.
Later in the day we had dinner on the roof of our guesthouse as we do almost every night and discussed the stories we'd learned from people while trading our eggs. Some people brought back very interesting trinkets from fruits and vegetables to a piece of art made by a small child.
Yesterday we focused on using observation to create a holistic picture of a single place. We focused on Dwerja, the first marine protected area in Gozo, an area where the Azure Window, a spectacular geological formation, and its proximity to a tower built by the Knights of Malta bring in many tourists every day. Some of us mingled with tourists and vendors near the Window and observed and interviewed them about their experience at the site. Others went to a nearby town to get local impressions of the area. And I, along with two colleagues, went to the tower itself where we rotated between watching informational videos in the museum basement, observing the area from the watch tower, and talking to Mario, the very informative docent of the tower who knows everything there is to know about the park and makes chain mail costumes while he waits for tourists to come in and look around.
Today it's off to work on our own projects, which for me is going to result in a trip to the local library and some planning for an excursion to a nearby bakery to explore the changing role of the bakery and bread making in Maltese society over time.
Overall things are going well and the group seems to be working very well together; it's interesting to meet people from all over the U.S. and Europe who have similar interests. The setting is starting to become familiar and everything seems to be off to a good start.