Saturday began with Mark giving both site people and lab people a tour of Khentkawes. Despite the fact that I have been given a tour of KKT about 3 or 4 times now, there was still a lot of new things I learned both in relation to KKT and Giza and Old Kingdom settlements in general. It blows my mind that there continues to be so much we don’t know yet and so much uncertainty there is underlying the things we think we know…but I suppose I can fully appreciate being apart of a discipline where we are constantly asking questions, and constantly re-evaluating answers. Sometimes I really do stuggle with this profession and an anxiety that I’m not contributing as much as I could to this world and the changes I hope to see and be apart of….but at the end of the day I am enhancing my ability to problem solve, and I am doing so within the context of human behavior and activity, stretching beyond the things that are happening around me now…you can’t learn to read until you know the alphabet, and you can’t full understand how to solve issues relavent to the world today until you know where and why and how they began their course in history…maybe that is a justification that I don’t have to make, and no one out there really ever thinks. “Oh geez that Kelly..what a waste of a mind…she could be doing important things, instead she studies dead stuff.” Anyway…the more I listened on our site tour, and the more I thought about how we amass information and understanding, just again made me feel so content about the direction I am heading and the work I am involved with.

That being said, work flew by today. We didn’t actually start excavating that wall though. The site tour was 2 hours and then second breakfast was an hour after that, so by 11:00 we decided it would be better to wait until tomorrow. I did start planning my square today though. I’ve drawn about 3 meters of a stone wall, which did take me about, 4 hours. Like I detailed before, you have to draw every single stone that makes up the wall to scale, so I had to measure the dimensions of everystone in the wall and plot it on the grid paper. I never even checked my watch, I was so into it haha. So…I have my days when the work just really makes me irritated, but then I have days where I have to be dragged out of the field…what gives? Well I did figure that out today…and it should be of no surprise, but it is kind of sad haha. If I have to do work with other people I get irritated..but if I can sit and do something by myself, I’ll work until the sun goes down…I don’t know how I came to be so antisocial, I always thought I was good at the whole teamwork thing…”plays well with others….” Apparently not though! I was especially in heaven after lunch…not everyone goes back to the site after lunch, some people stay in and do paper work or database stuff…and actually now that we are making more progress I will probably have to start doing more ad more database stuff in the afternoons as well…but also in the afternoons, all of the egyptian workers, the ones constantly removing the sand that buries our site, go home. So today it was just Peter and I on site. It was so quiet and nice and after 2 the temperature goes down. And that was how I spent my afternoon….3 pencils, 2 pens criss crossed throughout my hair, in my square, measuring stones and drawing them. Haha I am really proud of my drawing so far….

Back at my apartment I talked for a while with one of my flatmates too which was good, so I’m not 100% antisocial! Then dinner was nice because half of the people went out because the Japanese team leaves tomorrow. Basically all the field and program managers and directors went out to dinner with them so dinner at the villa was actually just us diggers and lab rats enjoying a quiet evening…usually there’s not enough room for everyone to sit at the table but tonight there was…it was pleasant.

There was probably more I was going to say, but I can’t really think of it now. Oh! Today one of the Egyptian students brought me a birthday present. It was a little stuffed camel. It’s really cute. I think he has a crush on me but he doesn’t know english. We had to have Noha translate between us…it was all very cute.

Sometimes the laguage barrier can be really frustrating, but other times it hardly seems to make any difference at all….last night I went to leave the Villa and thought that if I just got out of there lickety split that the guards wouldn’t follow me home…it’s nice and all that they look after us, but sometimes having the guards follow you just attracts more attention than if they weren’t there…anyway…I was speed walking and sure enough behind me one of the guards was striding to catch up…when I looked back he smiled at me and my intentions to sneak out…thinking this would be funny, I started walking even faster. Naturally he aimed to match my pace until we were racing down the street to my apartment. Keep in mind these guards aren’t just inconspicuous men…these are full military attire with huge guns, guards…by the time we finished our little race, we were both just errupting with laughter…and that was all we could do was laugh…we would try to find some common words, maybe an english one he would know, or an arabic one I would know…but there were none that we shared that could apply to the situation, so we shrugged our shoulders and just laughed about it. Then I said what I could, “Shukran, masalama, ashufak burkra in shalla”

Thank you, peace be with you, I will see you tomorrow, if God wills it.