A shorty

this ones going to be short, mainly because not too much has been happening that warrent elaboration. We've been digging. and with my new duties as trench assistant along with ensuring that all the soil sample, flots, and residues get done means that I am actually fairly busy. This week though was a shorter week due to a holiday the greeks had on tuesday (since we employ greek workmen we couldn't dig and thus went to the apotheke in the morning and had the afternoon off). but it was also very hot, and i'm still getting used to organising myself to get everything done well and in a timely fashion. I also switched rooms. My old one was not big enough to store all the sieving equipement that I have to look after so I had to move which is alright in that it's bigger, but not as nice in terms of being closer to the street and to the noise. My first night consisted of getting woken up at around 4:30 when the dog had trapped some animal (I think it was a cat, but it shot out so suddenly that I couldn't really tell) under a table and was barking inssesantly at it until we went out and got it out with some prodding.
And the GReek culture never ceases to amaze me. For example, this random Greek woman at the bustop swatted my hand from my mouth and told me to stop chewing my nails. She managed to get across to me using various hand gestures that she used to chew hers as well but then she either stopped or died. I'm not sure which...
can you imagine that happening in Edmonton?
I should start doing that. randomly going up to people and, say, swatting cigarettes out of their mouths. or throwing their cell phones into the garbage. something like that.

anyhoo,
the third week has seen many people tired and grumpy and covered in dirt and extremely hot, thus I have left lefkandi for the night and with only a couple of other people am eating at a real restaraunt and perhaps going to play some pool. If we can find a pool house that is.
so I must leave and go do that.
All the best.

old greek men are oddly attracted to me... who knew i possessed this power?

seriously. It's weird. maybe it's because i don't mind sitting there drinking reiki while they all talk in greek. Whatever, these guys are nice, and no one has tried to kiss/pet/grab my boob like last year... yet.
Things are still going really well. There is a new trench supervisor coming on monday for whom I'll be an assistant for which means that I will have a lote more to do, since I'll be doing that and, come friday, I'll also be in charge of the sieving since the person doing that will be leaving. More responsibility and more duties are good. I'm learning a lot, definitley, and I'm sure that doing this is a great start for my career. And just the fact that I have so much time to chat with kids from Oxford is great and am learning about how things happen and what I'll be looking forward to when I go to Cambridge.
The site is going along slowly. They have opened up a new region this season so there are a lot of trenches that are in the topsoil phase and are basically scoping out the area (which is also why there had been so little to do in sieving world since no intertesting soil means no sieving). But we are getting down to good stuff and the two trenches that are being carried on from last year are finding interesting layers of flooring and pits and stuff that doesn't sound all that interesting when you relay it, but is actually very neat. None of the finds are really fancy, mainly since we are still in topsoil, but there have been some things like figurines of animals, beads, loom weight and spindle whorls, and of course, some beautiful pottery, plenty of shells and bones as well. The most important and interesting stuff that comes out of the sieves are the chard bits of seeds and pits from food. This not only can be used to study what they ate and the like, but can also be used for carbon dating so it's important that we've been getting good samples. I can now tell the difference between chard barley (both 2nd row and 6th row) and wheat, and pick out thousands of years old grape and olive pits. Now that's a useful skill!
I've been developing some very interesting tan lines, have consumed more oil in what they feed us than what's in Fort Mac, and feel like dirt and sunblock 24/7. But it's great. I'm excited by what I'm doing and I can really see myself doing this for the rest of my life.

I miss you all, and I hope all is well.

I suppose I should blog

Hey all. I suppose that I should blog since keeping in touch when travelling was my main goal with all of this. I have to admit that I've had a less than lackluster attitude about blogging of late, but reading all of yours reminded me how much I adore you all and really want to make the effort. Anyhoo,

So I wish I could say that my trip has been all roses and shiny things, and really, it's not been bad, just average. The dig took awhile to get going, I arrived on Wednesday and we didn't start doing anything on site until Monday, and even then the job that I've been allotted to meant that I have had excessively little work to do for the first few days. Today was the first day where I felt I did anything remotely productive. And when you've left home for a month just a few weeks before leaving again for a year, I suppose I just want it to be worth it. I mean, I've travelled before, many times, and I've never felt so homesick so fast.

I feel guilty about being here, and I feel guilty about feeling guilty that I'm here. Enough whining...
So essentially I'm staying in a little taverna right on the water front of Lefkandi. It's not bad, I share a little room with an american who is nice enough, we get along. The rest of the people on the dig are british, or have at least been to school in England and I have fun trying to understand some of the things they say and the terms they use. Usually just the little things... like washing powder for detergent or sun cream when we would usually say sunblock.
THe excavaton is seperated into two main parts:1) being on site supervising and assisting the supervisors as we watch and direct greek workers who get to do all the fun stuff like pick axing and troweling, etc. 2) being in the apotheke where all the finds are washed, processed, and catalogued, etc. Having been the only person the director of the excavation hadn't met before being alllowed on the dig I have been understandabley relegated to a third, more monotonous task, sieving. we get dirt from the trenches and sieve it. Firts dry and then through a wet siever to try and get things like seeds and pits and the likes that can be analysed for dietary information and carbon dating. I don't actually get to find anything, I just sieve it and hand it off to a lab somewhere. Now the good part about this is that I have a bit of freedom in that the job is so easy anyone can do it so other trench assistants are getting trained to do so and I was able to take their place for a bit. I also am getting swapped to the apotheke tommorrow, which means that really, my position is the most flexible and I am able to see at least a little bit of everything that is being done. Which is good.

And I still get ubsurdly excited at the site of anything remotely interesting coming up. It's like "oooooh, look at that rim/handle/base/sherd with a little bit of paint on it!" or, even more exciting there are bone fragments, or teeth, or shells that can come up. No one else seems all that excited so I try and hide it a little, but I think it's so interesting that there's this jawbone or a stone with a hole in it that was used thousands of years ago (right now we're digging at around 800 BCE). It re-assures me that even if I'm feeling tired or grumpy, digging up some little thing like that can still brighten my day and make me nerd-ulously adrenalised - it must mean that I have chosen to go in a good direction.

really hot... funny tan lines... ummm... that's good for now I think... enjoy, my computer access in minimal so I won't post often, but if you email me your mailing adresses I can try and send some post. Do it quick though, or else it will never reach you.

oh, and I'd post a picture, but I'm not that high tech so you'll just have to wait.