Here is a photo of where I spend nearly every Friday. It is a nice little vacation Oasis from the dirty. sandy, dusty, grimey dig life. There is a bar that you can swim right up to and even the pyramids rest nicely in the background. I was at the pool from 10:45 tp 4:00 yesterday. It was beautiful! The day spent at the pool means I'm almost done with my 4th book, Little Children. It has been a very entertaining read, and I'm really taking my time with the last 20 pages, because I am sad that it is almost done...but then i get to start a new one. I currently have my eye on a novel titled The Blessing Stone. If anyone has heard of it, let me know.

Thursday night was pretty adventurous. I had suggested a seafood dinner to boost omega 3s and brainpower for this last stretch of work this week. A group of us went and the calamari, per usual was superb! . Thursday night plans were also made for around 15-20 of us to go to the Cairo Jazz Bar. I mentioned this place as a possible desination for my birthday but we wound up going somewhere else. Point being, no one had gone to the Jazz Bar yet this season. However, most of the group were splitting up before hand and not everyone wanted to eat at Cristo’s so the plan was just, who ever wanted to go to the jazz bar, we had a reservation for 20 at 9:30. Of the people who went to Cristos, only me and Merina were interested in trecking out to the Jazz Bar. Merina is my old flat mate and the girl who is going to teach me the ropes when it comes to identifying lithics (stone tools). She is probably my favorite person here. We call each other Habibi, which is arabic for friend…but it is also kind of an inside joke. When we had gone out a few weeks ago, we were sharing a cab and all arabic/egyptian music consists of someone lamenting “Haaabbbiiiibiii” against the sitar. The late hour, the exhaustion, and possible the gin made us a little giggly, and much to our cultural insensitivity we would start cracking up any time “Habbbiibbiiii” came wining out of the radio…and that has been our nickname for one another ever since. Anyway, so my Habibi, Marina and I, wanted to go to the jazz bar but having never been there before we didn’t know how to get there. Mark got us a cab and told the driver where to take us. Thirty minutes later we get into town and beging our adventurous hunt for the Jazz Club. After round abouts a plenty we finally find it. At the door they ask if we have a reservation and we say yes, it is either under James or Dan- as we assumed it was either our mates James or Dan who made the reservation. There was no reservation made, but since it was just the two of us, they let us in anyway. We assumed at least some others would be inside but we were the only ones. After a bit, our friend Jason, the filmographer on site, showed up with two other of his friends whom I had never met before, but whom knew Marina from other field projects. No one else ever showed up to the jazz bar, so it was just us five. Contrary to its title, however, there was no live jazz music Thursday. Apparently Thursday was Rock and Roll night and they had a band that did shitty covers of the Doors. They did some other songs too though. I danced my heart out to Take on Me, but was thoroughly disgusted when the lead singer had to jump an octave down in order to hit the high note at the end. Totally not worth it. Unimpressed and perplexed as to where everyone else was, we decided to leave this overly priced and not nearly entertaining enough venue. Instead we went to a local Egyptian bar…and I don’t mean just some other drinking joint aimed to cater to tourists…this was filled entirely with Egyptian men…Merina and I were the only women there. Instead of peanuts or chips, they bring out a little dish with fava beans/chick peas. It was mildly strange, but they were salty enough that I guess it accomplished the same thing nuts and chips do when throwing back a beer. Merina, Jason, and their two friends Scott and Tas, and I stayed there for a while had a pretty good time. We left at around 1 am (I was dead tired to say the least). When I got home, my other flatmates came in shortly after me and explained that the reservation apparently got cancelled or didn’t go through because it was made online, and so the rest of the group was too large to get in since the club was full, so they went elsewhere. It was kind of disappointing because I was looking forward to getting to hang out with everyone since last weekend I was in bed, ill. Merina and I also didn’t have phones so no one could get a hold of us to let us know about the change in plans. I suggested for next week that we just have a party at one of the apartments…this way no one has to make the roundtrip cab ride into town and plans don’t go awry. We’ll see if that happens…if not I’m pretty sure that I will just stay in…it’s too much of a hassal going into town and I always find myself just counting down the minutes until someone else decides they’re just as sick of being out as I am. It’s not that I have a terrible time, I just don’t like having to go out so far away from home and not being able to just leave whenever I want to. Like I said, the cab ride is about a half hour.

Friday morning I slept in until about 8:30 and then got up and wrote my weekly report for the site. Then I spent the day at the pool and it was lovely of course.

Then it was back to work today. I finished the third excavation for what was either another pottery emplacement, or it could be just a very large posthole. It was pretty shallow so it didn’t take me very long but there is just so much work involved to excavate one feature. So for this particular feature in particular this is what I have to do”

-Go to feature log
-Sign out a feature number for the cut and the fill (basically the outline and what is inside)
-Take a picture before excavating which requires setting up the camera, a board with feature number, square/location number, date, my initials, brief description, and which direction im facing when I take the picture, I had to set a north pointing arrow in the picture as well as a stick for scale
-Excavate
-With the material excavated, I need to sign out bag numbers to put the deposit it, we don’t throw it away. I need at least one bag number for a flotation sample, then one for a wet seive sample, and then bag numbers for any other items within the fill such as charcoal, ceramics, exotic stone, or objects such as beads. For each bag I need to put in a label with all of the same info I wrote for the photo. I write it on the label and on the bag.
-After I excavate I take levels to see how high the feature is above sea level.
-I do a drawing of the feature
-I fill out a feature form for the both the cut and the fill
-Clean it up
-Take another photograph post excavation

Tedious Tedious Tedious, and I am probably still oversimplifying to an extent.

I also started tearing up a floor surface today from within the Menkenre Valley Temple. It was a good stress reliever.

Only 4 more days left on site! There’s so much to do! Guh.

And ew it’s going to be 91 tomorrow. The weather lately hasn’t been so bad, but a bit windy.

Okay that’s it for now. Have a happy weekend everyone. I think my plane home is in 33 days or something like that, so it’s fastly approaching!