5/15/07

I am on my lunch break right now, it is 6:49 am in Michigan. I should finish my 2nd weeks worth of identifications today, which means i am ahead of schedule...but, if any of the 4 remaining crates are loaded with fish, it could easily slow down my progress. Lets hope I stay on track.

I woke up in the middle of the night and I was super super warm. There isn't air conditioning at the Villa, at least not in the rooms, and my room is on the top floor. Needless to say, it gets a little stuffy in here. At the end of the month though the Villa closes and we will move into the large appartments they have here. The large apartments are thankfully air conditioned. The weather has not been that bad at all, compared to the first few 99 degree days while I was here. Now I find myself wondering if I need a jacket if the high is going to be 82...it's pretty bizarre. Lately it has been around 94, which really hasn't been that bad, though i've been assured it will get worse. Unfortunately, 94 is still dangerous in terms of dehydration and since it doesn't seem as bad to me, i haven't been downing the 5-7 bottles i was originally, so i need to get back to that. My skin gets super oily here and it's probably the worst it has ever been in terms of my acne..but i think it's more of just how my skin feels rather than how it looks. It doesn't really look like it's bad, as you can probably deduce from the pictures. but it just feels gritty and dirty and oily all the time. It really is an obnoxious feeling..no matter how much you clean and scrub it just feels like the dirt is embedded in your every pore. The nice thing though is that I don't really wear any make up to clog it all even more.

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Today Richard asked me if I had received graduate school information that my honors advisor said she would send me. It turns out that everything that she had sent me, I had already researched and pulled up on my own a long time ago. After explaining to Richard that I had already read them before she gave them to me, I added..."I don't think anyone here realizes how neurotic I am about this stuff..." to which he said,"Oh I'm starting to get an idea." It was pretty funny. Any time we start to talk about graduate school and professional archaeology he always says that he doesn't want to pressure me to do it and that everything is up to me entirely....again I don't think he realizes who he's talking to. ha!

Also today I was going to the bathroom outside of the lab and i saw a big ole gecko staring at me. I was going to go back and take a picture, but i didn't want to scare him.

I think from now on I am going to write my blog entries during my lunch break since I really should be doing more work in the evening. We'll see how it goes though.Today for lunch they served this onion soup that I reallly reallly like. It isn't like french onion soup though. The broth isn't brown, it's yellow, and it doesn't taste like it's loaded with salt, although it probably is. There was also a vegetable stew with peas, carrots, and potatoes in a tomato-base sauce. It is actually pretty bland tasting on it's own, but with hot sauce, it is good. There was fried chicked but I didn't eat it. there have been cases of bird flu here and they egyptian government said everyone had to kill all of their chickens as a result. That did not happen though, you can tell by the age of all the chickens you see in the villages. While I'm sure the chicken here is imported, and I know that there haven't been any cases of getting bird flew through the consumption of chicken, I still avoid large quantities of it.

Every day at ten they serve second breakfast at the site. They serve falafel or foul sandwhiches. I ate the falafel the first few days but then I was told that if I knew where it came form I wouldn't eat it anymore....(apparently it is made near the camel and horse stables)...if it's a matter of absolutely needing those calories, a possibility perhaps when it gets even hotter out, then I will eat it...until then, steering clear of those as well. They also serve coffee and tea around the clock on the site, which I enjoy, of course. Haha however, by coffee they mean Nescafe....it gets the job done I suppose, but it isn't as good as the real deal. The first day here my professor warned me about drinking from the cups they provide though...he said the water they use is filthy and it's a good way to get really sick because they don't clean them very well. So he got me a cup and disinfected it, along with one for himself, and now we hide them every day so that they don't take them and impose their own cleaning methods.

Alright well that's it for now. The work day so far is going very well, it is really helping to improve my confidence about the material. It is a weird mix of teaching myself stuff I never learned and learning even more things from Richard. Excitttttting!

Have a good day everyone, remember I will be back in the states a month from today!