Kelly's Archaeological Adventures

Photos

2008-11-29T16:59:00.000-08:00

Picture of said cliff I was talking about

Part where i fell

Looking down and out from a top

Houses with shell that we look for

Shell profile cut

Floating temple

Other scenic pictures

Hill top tombs

What the zooarchaeologist in me photographs for future reference

I told jeff to tell oscar that this is what would happen to him if he continued to pull any shenanigans similar to his knocking over a george foreman and steak stealing extravaganza

2008-11-27T15:30:00.001-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Well I have been pretty MIA lately…but I haven’t gotten any frantic e-mail’s either so I assume no one is over worrying too much about my meanderings in China.

The past week as been pretty standard in terms of work, though in this past week we did discover a new tomb, and a few new sites. This past weekend we picked up Henry- a professor from Michigan and a legend in the field. Now that he is a part of the team, there is a different standard and expectation. We have been working later days, until the sun goes down. It’s hard because it pushes everything into later hours…sometimes I really feel what is expected is very unrealistic and down right unhealthy. Yesterday we had to cover this very large, terraced hill. This would have been okay, if Alice had put all 9 of us on there…but instead she split everyone into 3 groups. One group wasn’t on the hill at all, they were out doing test cores in the fields where we discovered a site. The other two were split and made to cover the two separate mounds of the hill (said mounds were massive by the way). By putting so few people within one area, you lose sight of everyone pretty quickly, which is very unnerving if you fall or get hurt. Despite this, I take my mark and set to follow my transect around the entirety of the hill. At first it is easy. The terraces were well defined and had wide edges. I dug at the cuts with my pick looking for any traces of pottery or shell or bone. As I followed east, the hill became steeper and my terrace ledge more narrow. Eventually I was met with a huge face cut (read: cliff). Alice radiod me to let me know that I would need to clim to the top to get around the face of the cliff and then head back down to my terrace and reclaim my transect. Climbing up was a challenge, but again, this side of the cliff wasn’t too bad. Once I found myself on the other side, things changed. Trying to climb back down was…an…adventure (read:near death experience). The other side of the cliff face was so steep, it might as well have been the cliff face itself…oh mr. hill my my my aren’t we deceptive, pile on some grass and you appear climbeable..but alas you are not. By creeping steadily down the hill, I had a few close calls which merely resulted in me sliding down a few feet…perhaps my innerself was posing it’s objections to where I am this time of year…I should be sledding down snow covered hills, not trapesing down rocky ones. There was one tumble I took which really pushed me to my limits. I tumlbled down, and everything spilled from my backpack…my camera, my compass, my walkie talking, my phone, my water bottle, my glasses…I managed to roll through something with prickers…I laid still…knowing I was okay, just startled…but the sigh of relief for not being hurt quickly turned into rage…I believe my line of thought was “fuck this fuck this fuck this.”

Seriously

Fuck this

I could have broken my kneck and no one would have known. To have asked me to find a way back down that hill and to my transect was not only irresponsible, it was fucking insane. I grabbed my pick and just started hacking away at this stupid hill. I would walk about 10 steps and do it again. Eventually I found myself in someone’s terraced garden. Bamboo and Melon trees, with their green branches shielded the sun away and I finally felt calm again. I sat down and just meditated for a minute. When I looked North, I realized if nothing else, I knew exactly where I was…I could walk off that hill any time I wanted, and be able to tell someone exactly where to come get me. Not only this, I realized that I had made it back to my transect. So I kept going until Alice (field director) finally radio’d me to just head down the hill and back to the village…apparently she had realized how difficult this trek was and how ridiculous it was to have so few people on it.

Today was a lot of flat area, rice paddies, green houses, etc so that was a little less demanding…though at the end of the day I was covering a field with Henry and there was a horse in the middle of the path/transect I was supposed to follow. In general, I don’t like getting close enough to anything non human whose bite could potentially take of a limb. But henry said, oh that horse is nice just walk around him..or her..yeah that’s a her. I saw that the horse was tied up, but there was enough rope to give her a good radius of running space. She did look harmless so I kept walking sure enough…as soon as I was within 2 feet of Mrs Ed she keeled back and started charging for me…I’m sure the look on my face was priceless…I’m pretty sure I dropped a “jesus fucking christ” in front of Henry, though I’ve heard him say much worse. I sprinted away trampling some farmers cabbages wih the horse not far behind…I got far enough away to where her rope coud not reach. That was a close one.

Today I am up for another day of work…we didn’t really do anything for thanksgiving here…they had wine at dinner, but of course I don’t like wine so even that token of celebration didn’t even appeal to me. It was okay though…luckily enough the 60 degree whether leaves me feeling like it isn’t really november and that I’m not actually missing the hoidays. I’m sure I will be overwhelmed in December when christmas cheer hits me out of no where. Perhaps I will start listening to some christmas music.

Thank you to everyone who wished me a happy thanksgiving. I hope everyone is having a great meal!

2008-11-22T04:29:00.002-08:00

Okay this was the entry i wrote the other day...i still can't get pictures up...but once I can..i will

Things are getting better now that I have adjusted to more of a routine here. It’s still pretty draining because the director just has us working straight through without any time off. We haven’t really been hiking the mountains as much though…the land we have been covering is flat so the work itself is not nearly as intensive as it had been those first few days. Today we convered 7 square kilometers. That is a lot…ideally you would want to have everyone walking in straight transects through said square kilometer units, but of course this never happens. You find yourself doing all sorts of zig zagging. Today was a perfect example. In the afternoon, the mission seemed simple enough…stay in your transect, walk East until we hit the free way, which is only 3 and a half kilometers away. First of all, the topography was mainly flat, but had green houses all throughout. Everything would have been fine if the green houses were all oriented east west, but of course they are not. Some are north to south, some are diagnally arranged northwest etc. So you find yourself having to compensate for all the green houses you perimeter and go through. Today’s green houses were particularly challenging because a lot of them were fenced in…so I would be following my compass, doin fine, heading east and then realize that I was completely fenced into an area and had to go out of my way in order to get out. Other obstacles, as I have mentioned in the past are dogs. I would say that on about 5 different occasions today, I had to turn around and find an alternative route because I was chased away by a big scary dog. There is also the issue of canals…once you get to a canal you have to move to where there is a place to cross which also takes you out of your transect. With everyone trying to find their transects in such a mess and over such a huge area, getting lost is inevitable, especially if you are me and you are the only one without a handheld GPS. I think the team spends more time looking for me than looking for sites. That’s an exaggeration, I have gotten a lot better…but one of the first things I did learn to say in chines is “I’m lost” “wo mi lu.”

In the past week we have been more successful in locating the extent of bronze age sites throughout the area. The key thing we look for are bronze age pottery sherds, and a specific kind of shell that would have comprised a shell mound site. We found 2 shell mound sites, but the pottery is still pretty scarce.

A lot of the shells can be found in the village houses…the mudbrick of these houses naturally is taken from the fields and you can see all of the shell in the walls of the houses. You also get pottery in the walls too. We have spent the past few days talking to residents about where they have seen shell and pottery.

Last night we had a Hot Pot dinner. In hot pot dinner, there is basically a stove in the center of the table, and there is a huge boiling pot with broth, vegetables and seasonings. Then you order the things you want boiled in the hot pot. We had two, one meat one, and a vegetarian one for me…though I do say vegetarian loosely…I’m pretty sure it was chicken stock, but they had gone out of their way to set it up that I really didn’t have the heart to say anything about it…but my stomach paid for it later. I had discovered that there are two things that I do really really like here in terms of food. One of them is this twisted kind of tofu. The texture is really good. The other is lotus root. I loveee lotus root. I think its hard to come by in the states, but I was told that some specialty asian markets might have it.

2008-11-20T05:20:00.001-08:00

i have a post written but its not letting me upload pictures.....ggrrr....stay tuned!

I'll say this much though:

Aunt Michele, I got your message saying you could read between the lines and see I wasn’t coming home for christmas….I don’t know what lines you are reading but I’ll be fucking damned if I’m not coming home for christmas! 27 more days…

2008-11-15T04:10:00.000-08:00

I know it must be both disappointing and disconcerting when you go to check my blog and the daily entries for which you are all used to, are missing…or perhaps I severely overestimate the amount of readers I have. The work days here are different than what I had in Egypt…no one really adheres to a schedule and you don’t really get as much individual time…I can’t really just do whatever I want like I could when I was living in Egypt…here I am expected to attend banquets, and meet village chiefs, provincial mayors, and all other collaborators who had a hand in seeing this project through, even though it is not my project and throughout these various gatherings I never have any sense of what is being talked about.

So far a standard day is like this.

We wake up at 7:00 a.m. I share a room with my field director Alice. I had her as a grad student instructor at Michigan and I have known her for a few years now. We get up and make some coffee, which I have now learned to drink without any sugar since it really is not readily used or available around here. We head downstairs for breakfast which is usually a bowl of noodles in a chile oil broth. Everyone elses also has pork and it’s usually a pretty big ordeal to get my noodles plain…you would think in an area that housed the history of Buddhism, the concept of vegetarianism would be somewhat widespread, but it is pretty perplexing and absurd to them. Eventually my noodles get to me and by then everyone else is done with theirs…this is all fine because I’m not a big fan of inhaling something with that much chile sauce first thing in the morning (though across the board everyone has been impressed with how much I can tolerate spicy food here). After we finish breakfast we determine which square kilometers within the survey area we will aim to cover. We load up into the minivan and head out, usually driving about 30 to 40 minutes until we are dropped off in the middle of no where…no matter what the landscape is, we divide the area up and start surveying the ground for any remnants of ancient bronze age sites (looking for pottery sherds and cowrie shell mounds, or a particular kind of brick). A lot of the time we are hiking up huge hills or mountains, or traversing farmland…

It entails a lot of walking and climbing and jumping over canals..or failing to jump over canals if you are me….between noon and one we eventually go and eat lunch somewhere…meals here are communal…a bunch of food is placed on a platform in the center of a table. The platform spins and everyone eats from the dishes on the platform. Coming here I forgot all about the whole chopsticks thing. My experience with chopsticks has been limited to picking up sushi rolls…now I have to pick up anything from non firm tofu, to invidual corn kernals, to rice. I have improved a lot…sometimes if too many people are watching I falter and drop something in the middle of the table…one of the first days here, someone snydely said, “I’m surprised she knows what chopsticks are.” In the villages a lot of the people have never even seen foreigners before…the other day our survey area ended just outside of a school that was letting out. When the children walked out, their red communist scarves adorning their necks, they all grabbed some treats from the street vendors and then surrounded me and stared. They say, “foreigner foreigner, look at the foreigner.”

I usually just smile…my field appearance makes it look like they are living the extravagant life though, let me tell you. I sport my typical field pants which by days end are covered in the red iron rich soil. I wear one of those big floppy straw hats to protect me from the sun (the UV rays are very strong here). They also prevent spiders from getting in my hair when I walk into the webs.

Things have been pretty uneventful so far since we are surveying so far from the Lake Basin.

The Lake Basin is where the Necropolis of the Dian Kingdom was located. The intent is to do a full systematic survey of the extent of the kingdom as a whole, and not just cherry pick where we know sites will be. However, once we find sites, extensive documentation and profiling will need to be done and our director is realizing that we will be pressed for time if we keep surveying these outskirts so distant from the Basin. So we will be switching gears and I will hopefully start feeling like and archaeologist and not some nomadic rice farmer.

Last night we were invited to eat in a village by one of the chinese team member’s brother. We drove into the heart of one of these villages an ate in a typical village courtyard. It was humbling and overwhelming all at the same time. Sanitarily speaking, I doubt anyone I know would ever dream of eating here, but the villagers were just so generous, and the food was actually very good…better than any of the restaurants I’ve been to here. They were nice enough to set up the center platform so that all the vegetarian stuff was in front of me. We toasted a lot…a standard at the Chinese dinner.

Tonight we were expected to go into another village and banquet again (they apparently killed a goat for us). Our director got us out it…the thing is, we don’t usually get home from the field until after 6 and the meals take a very long time…we get back to our rooms and everyone is trying to wrap up notes and send their emails or make their calls before passing out in exhaustion…ok that last one is mainly applicable to me…I got a huge cheer when I stayed up past 10 the past two nights….I usually am out before 9. Which is why you don’t hear from me all too often….China is 13 hours ahead in case you didn’t already know…

I’m doing my best to tough the survey work. It’s pretty involved and those first few days I was still fighting jet lag and…stomach…issues…They also have me assessing the fauna for two other sites from this region. Yesterday I spent the day washing bone and doing my best to identify it without a comparative collection. I had no idea I would be working on fauna while I was here. I know that I will be doing it in India, but truth be told, I haven’t looked at animal bone since my first season in Egypt…I was very nervous…I thought I would forget what everything was (it’s been nearly 2 years!). I go through boughts where I doubt my capabilities and really just feel like a fraud in terms of what I can actually accomplish. There has basically been no research completed on the fauna from this area, and the professor who was supposed to look at this material is actually one of the professors I talked to when I went to Harvard. He has looked at it before since it contains evidence for early domestication of Water Buffalo…I’m not doing a very thorough analysis since the sample size is very small and I have no skeletal material to work with…there are 4 species of deer which I have no way of differentiating…especially seeing as though I didn’t even have to ID deer when I worked in Egypt. Also there is a lot of fish (which makes sense given the fact that these sites are associated with the lake shore) but there is are only 3 known fresh water fish species…there is no other fresh water fish because of the pollution…there is nothing living in the lake period to my knowledge. It is definitely a challenge, but they want me to try and ID all of it and then see if I can establish any sort of stratigraphic detailing of the sites….I need to do some research on the reproductive cycles of the deer and perhaps I can get somewhere with it, but I remain hesitant to really put my name on anything like this when patterns are hard to establish when my sample size is…a box per site. But it is a good way, as I have mentioned, of getting my foot in the door on conducting research on fauna analysis in the area.

Okay that should cover the past few days, and some of the upcoming days. I am safe and my face is no longer reacting from the poison and peticides.

And um…I can’t wait to come home…we are working straight through the next two weekends which is definitely tough…but the permit is up the 11th so less than 4 weeks to finish. I don’t get home until the 18th and I’m trying to see if I can get home earlier…everyone thinks I’m pretty much ridiculous for doing these two seasons back to back (China then India). By the time I recover from jet lag in the states, I will be shipped off to yet another 8 hour time difference. But you all know me…take on the challenges, and then complain about them here ☺

2008-11-13T05:30:00.000-08:00

So i finally got internet to work at here...the wireless at the hotel was a pain to set up because apparently no one in china uses macs....

Things have been

very

very

very

difficult

I absolutely hate the food here....its loaded with salt and oil that just rocks my stomach...I just can't handle it.

My allergies are terrible...I'm sneezing and weezing and post nasal dripping all over the place

And I hate surveying...They place you in the middle of a mountain and tell you to start walking in a certain direction while looking at the ground for bronze age pottery sherds, or any other indicators of a site being below the surface...I have no sense of direction, so more often than not I wind up lost in the middle of a mountain range, or a rice pattie field, or a terrace of tall grass...as I hike through trying to find my way, trying to find any one within the 1 square km they are supposed to be in...I find myself tangled in spider webs and face to face with swollen bodied spiders you hope only to see in national geographic...there are also big dogs roaming many of these fields...how do we deal with them...a bamboo stick and a fucking prayer

none of this really tops my day yesterday when I fell into a canal and smashed my face on some poisonous plant....this of course happened while I was lost and others were looking for me...when i finally found my director, I tried to act like nothing really happened while I was missing (despite the fact that my face was burning and I was completely soaked). I fought back tears when she and our chinese collaborator looked up at me and said, "oh my god what happened to your face?"

It was then that they rushed me back to the hotel....My face was pretty red and puffy and swollen...its gone down, and now just has some scratches...Today was better once they taught me how to use the GPS unit and how to use the satellite maps...now I always know where I am, even if where I am is really unpleasant. The higher altitude for where we are walking and searching for these sites is problematic too...I have a harder time keeping hydrated here than i do in Egypt despite the fact that temps max out at 70 degrees.

I'm trying trying trying to have a better attitude, I just had no idea what survey worked entailed. We cover 8-10 miles a day and while we were supposed to have the weekends off...it is looking like that is not going to happen these first two weeks. Ugh

Fortunately enough for me, it turns out that they have fauna from some surrounding shell mound sites separate from this project that they want me to identify...this means that tomorrow, I will have a lab day instead of surveying. This is also great because it gets my foot in the door for compiling research that hasn't been done yet here.

Lots of downs...but some ups

I don't know about China...when i worked my first season in Egypt and was asked about coming back the next year, I agreed without hesitation....this place... don't know that I would exert the same enthusiasm. It might be that I hate the surveying work though...maybe things would be different if we were in the same spot every day, excavating as opposed to walking the fields and hills of rural China. Also here, no one speaks English except my director, but when the whole team is together she speaks chinese with all of them..so I'm just the odd one out...it's a different experience.

Per usual with my field work, I am super exhausted every day...AND NO ONE DRINKS COFFEE HERE....we packed some of our own (us Americans) and all they ever tell us is how bad it is for us (this while they eat the fattiest fried grossness you can imagine). Our dinner table the other night had fried duck intestines....dont even get me started on the types of entrees I have staring me in the face...literally staring me in the face...chicken and fowl heads.. things of this nature...I get chills whenever I see the meat products...its enough to reaffirm my stance as a vegetarian and even leave me wanting to eliminate more animal products from my diet...I'm sure a lot of the foods they tell me are vegetarian are not...i'm sure they are made with some kind of animal stock, or lard, or grease that animal was fried in which is probably another reason my stomach is never happy.

Okay that is my rant for now...all things considered I am okay...just not the happiest camper...but, I'm sure I will find my niche and things will get better. I have learned a lot, and I'm sure the work will get more exciting as soon as we find more sites...so far we haven't found much in our survey.

Have a good day/night everyone. I will try to stay in touch.

2008-11-08T14:42:00.000-08:00

It is going on 9 p.m. Friday evening here in Kumning. Which means that many of you are just beginning your day and counting down the hours until the weekend. I’m still adjusting to the time change (13 hours forward if you didn’t do the math already). When jet lagged in Egypt a lot of the time I found myself waking up in the middle of the night. Some days I wake up at 6 am and can’t fall asleep, but for the most part I seem to have the whole going to bed when its dark, and waking up when it’s light thing down. However throughout the day I really drag…once 1 p.m. hits I’m fighting my bodys urge to fall asleep and return to the cycle I’ve known the past 6 months. I perk right back up around 8 at night when it seems like it should really be time for morning….but I go through these bouts where I feel that nauseousness you get from pulling an all nighter. I think tomorrow it should be well underway though.

The 20 plus hours of traveling and walking around various airports was surreal but in retrospect passed by relatively quickly. This includes the 2 extra hours I had to spend filing paperwork for the luggage that never arrived. It was a painstaking process as I was absolutely exhausted and beyond frustrated trying to talk to a woman who did not know any english and fill out a form that was covered in chinese characters. Meanwhile they would not let my field director, Alice, come and help translate…which of course is understandable because of air port security…but at the same time it really took a lot for me to try and shrug it off as something small I could do nothing about…there was a brief moment when I thought I was just going to start sobbing like an over exhausted child. I am proud to say that despite everything I did not shed a single tear. I was happy that I had packed extra clothes in my carry on in case something like this did happen. Since my plane didn’t arrive until after midnight, after everything was done, I didn’t get back to the flat in Kunming until after 3 a.m.

Right now I am in downtown Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province. There are not very many tourists here so I definitely stand out. It is a pretty lively place with a population of about 4 million, but lacks the chaos and crowding of places like Beijing and my former home away from home, Cairo. The character of Kunming changes depending on the time of day. When I got in at 3 am, everything was dark and empty. The cab dropped us off in an alley. As the rain poured down, I stared at the ground dreading the idea of spending the next 6 weeks in a place that was shady in its demeanor and that left me feeling uneasy and unsettled. However, the next day, the sun exposed the upbeat and friendly atmosphere that hung from the awnings of Kunming’s quaint boutiques and restaurants. In the day, Kunming is a bustling place with street vendors selling hot pots, produce, and roasted peanuts. People weave in and out of each other’s way, on foot, on car, on scooter…it is a very strange hub of small shops, with everything you could ever need pretty close at hand….hiking/outdoor stores, salons, bars, theaters, restaurants, café’s…but all still without any sort of western or consumerist feel to it because every place is very mom and pop. Kunming is also interesting in terms of its racial diversity. Very few people here are actually Chinese, they are usually a mix of some sort. They speak of their minority clans and their minority lineages. Nonetheless I still stand out…Alice said that the fact that I wear matching clothes will make me stand out more than anything. Everyone else maintains a pretty loud and wild style…a lot of bright colors and mismatching of pattern. Kunming nightlife is probably my favorite…the whole city is painted with bright flourescent lights and glows unlike anything I’ve ever seen. If you saw this in America, it would look tacky and tasteless, but here it just seems so appropriate. It conveys a sense of free spiritedness that I find pretty unique, but I also haven’t seen places like Vegas lit up back in the states.

It didn’t take long for my luggage to arrive. It turns out that I was supposed to get my luggage in Beijing and go through customs there, recheck it and have it sent to Kunming. However this was not what I was told when I was in Detroit…there I was told that I would not see my luggage again or have to do anything until I reached my final destination at Kunming Air Port. Lesson learned. This will hold true on the way back too….I will go through customs in Newark and not in Detroit- which is a nice thing because that means I can just walk straight out of the airport when I land in Detroit.

My misfortunes did not end with the missing luggage. The next day I went to purchase an international phone (probably about time I got one) and some cards with minutes on it to use for the rest of my time here. My jet lag left me pretty unattentive and unaware of my surroundings and it didn’t take long for my stuff to get stolen. It was a sad realization of a good amount of money lost- but again I kept my spirits up knowing it was just a phone and it could have been worse…it could have my been my purse with my passport or something like that. I was still super bummed though because I was planning on calling jeff when I got home.

To remedey the phone situation for now though, I downloaded Skype and paid for unlimited use of it which only costs 13 dollars a month. I can call any landline or mobile in the US. So that is nice.

Today, we hike through the Western Hills.

It is a mountain range in Southern Kunming which holds various ancient buddhist temples. We hiked through the mountains, combining some site seeing with work as we looked down on where the site we will be surveying is. At one of the temples tehre was a statue of a Turtle. Alice turned to Matt and I and said that it is supposed to be good luck to touch the head of the turtle. The three of us looked down at it- each person kind of holding back but projecting the urge to touch the head despite the superstition behind it….I then blurted out…”I’m touchin it!....With everything happening to me so far I need some good luck.”

Our hike covered a good 10 km which is good practice since survey work will have us covering 12 km a day.

Those are kind of the happenings as they stand now. Monday we have to meet with customs and let them look through our computers. Then we have a subsequent banquent and meeting with the Chinese officials to go over some of the rules and things to be aware of while working here. Tuesday we pack up and leave the flat and head to the rural outskirts of Kunming. Our hotel is supposed to have wireless like I mentioned, and I am really hoping that it does so that I can remain in contact. If not it is going to be really difficult especially since we will be working straight through the first two weekends.

It is really different being a part of a project that is just beginning. It really allows for you to learn in a different way- exposes you to how things happen and what can go wrong before the shovels come out. I’m excited to learn more.

I Don't Even Know What Day it is

2008-11-07T06:12:00.000-08:00

Bare with me as I try and adjust to some sort of routine.

At the main flat here in Kunming we connect using the ethernet, but only one person can connect at a time and my loyal mac has been particularly fussy about connecting. I think I have finally figured out how to successfully sign on, but there's still limited access to when I can sign on since 2 other people are here and use the internet as well.

When we leave for the field on Tuesday, our hotel apparently has wireless and so I should be able to post regularly like all other trips....if not I will be left to the mercy of internet cafes...which likely means I will abstain from posting unfortunately.

I got my luggage back last night...so that was a success...however I was greeted with more bad luck today when i finally chose to purchase an international phone to use when I'm in the field (you just switch out different regional sim cards and load it with minutes)...this experience taught me an important lesson that I will remember forever....never make yourself responsible for anything valuable while still delusional from jet lag....of course after buying the phone and the minutes, my oh-so-out-of-it self managed to lose sight of the bag my phone was in and it was stolen. Sigh...never even made it home to charge it and use it.

the day gets even better (sarcasm) but I will write more about that later on when I'm not hogging the internet.

Never a dull moment for the most tired girl on the other side of the world.

A New Scene

2008-11-06T00:19:00.001-08:00

I have officially arrived safely in Kunming. It has been an adventure already...of which I will be sure to detail in full a bit later. As for now...operation recover lost luggage is in full effect. After said operation has been completed with the utmost success (for the love of God it better end that way) then I will return as the the verbose narrator of my stay here in Kunming, China. Check back in soon!

Final Countdown TAKE TWO

2008-05-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

Well here it is, the home stretch. In the late hours a driver will meet me at my apartment and take me to the airport where I will board my flight headed back home. The past few days have been really great. Richard came back on Saturday and he took me out to dinner Monday evening to celebrate my season's end. He told me that everyone thought I was a great asset to the dig team and that the field directors really respected the work I had done. This came as a great relief since towards the end I really thought I was being taken for granted and after standing up for myself, I thought I may have burned a bridge or two. While this was not something that bothered me personally, because I thought my objections were completely justified, I was concerned at how my actions could reflect on Richard and everything he has done to get me here. Sometimes it's difficult when you know that what you do or say can have consequences for people other than yourself, but I make zero exceptions when I feel I am being disrespected. Luckily, Richard agreed when I explained everything to him and let me know that my work and my directness were appreciated by all. We talked about a lot of other things as well, grad school, some of the next steps to take for the summer etc. i am going to have to spend some time in Ann Arbor studying skeletal material for India. India has some species that I haven't dealt with before like water buffalo and around 4-5 different species of deer. I wont have a comparative collection to utilize while in the field so I need to master diagnostic features as much as possible. Shouldn't be a problem though, I'm looking forward to getting to work with bone again and to preparing for a trip somewhere new. The best part about my dinner with Richard though was the food. We ate at an Indian restaurant in the Mena House hotel and it was spectacular...It's called the Mogul Room. We got a few vegetarian dishes and split them. I don't remember the names of everything but we had vegetable biryani, dhal, chickpea dumplings, and an eggplant dish. It made my stomach very very happy.

Tuesday I took a well deserved day off. I've put in many hours of over time, on top of the 60 hours already expected of us, and not to mention...there really isn't much else for me to do....except database entry, and don't even get me started on why i refused to do that anymore. So I took the day off. I went to the pool and read for a bit. It was overcast so it was actually really nice for reading outside. Lately the sun has been very intense and sitting outside just makes me irritable. A calmer warmth is one of the things I am looking forward to when it comes to spring time in Michigan, though I'm sure nothing will seem warm compared to this. Today it is going to be over 100...what a parting gift! Realizing that I have not bought a single thing out here, I decided to mosey around some of the local bazars. Unfortunately for everyone, since my career entails a lot of travel, i can't possibly do the gift thing every time I leave. But I think you all agree that that is perfectly acceptable. I decided that since I got gifts from Egypt last year, and that I will probably pick up stuff from India, that there was really no reason to shop around Egypt this year. I have a really hard time shopping here because even the things that are not completely tacky and awful, you just don't really have an idea of the quality. But, if I saw something that I thought someone absolutely needed to have I picked it up...buuuttt this really only applied to me :) There were 2 things I saw that I absolutely had to have...a scarf (just one this season! but it is gorgeous!), and an Egyptian style long sleeve shirt. They were pretty good finds and that satisfied my shopping for this season.

Last night I also went out to dinner with my flatmates as a part of my final farewell. We went to the seafood restaurant that I raved about last year. Excellent grilled calamari mmmmmmm. I was very excited for it, though I was a little apprehensive about seafood so close to me having to get on a plane....well correction, a little apprehensive about seafood in Egypt so close to me having to get on a plane. In shallah everything is fine. After we finished a lovely rooftop dinner, we went to the store and Marina (lithics specialist and roommate) bought me an ice cream she owed me. On the second to last day of me working in the lab on lithics, she gave me a gorgeous projectile point (arrowhead, worked on both sides) to draw. Projectile points are very difficult to illustrate because of the level of detail and how small they are. When drawing a stone tool artifact you have to detail both sides, profile, and cross section. You need to show every scare from which a flake was removed during the manufacturing process, and you have to show the direction that the waves go so that it is obvious where it was being struck and what direction flakes were being removed to give it its shape. Understanding the process behind how the tools were made is important when drawing interpretive conclusions about specialization. (Okay this gets boring perhaps but there is a funny story everntually) One line of evidence for increased social complexity and organization under a hierarchical administrative authority is the level of specialization. Specialization can apply to any number of things from crafts, to food, to construction, art, stone tools, anything. There are many different implications for coming across highly specialized stone tools. In this case, the most intricately worked items are coming from raw material that is outside of Egypt, probably in the Sinai. Tools that are made with local material are very basic and quickly made, used, and discarded, you can tell by how worked it is, whether or not there is retouching etc. Tools made from imported material however, are usually completely exhausted. One way to kind of put all of this together is that in areas where there is finer raw material, there may be some sort of industrial production area that makes tools for trade. These would be of much higher quality and would be more expensive than the local tools and so individuals would want to get as much use out of them as possible to carry out their needs. When they either lack access to the imported tools, or simply can use something else, thats when they may just make something quick on site, and discard it after a single use. Another thing to consider when you get this level of specialization is the fact that, with population size at this time, the fact that people can allocate their time and energy to specialized labor, this case being stone tool production, means that provisioning of food and other necessary resources is probably at hand.

okay that was tangent- the point is, before you could ever get to these eventual interpretations you would need to know the process behind how tools are made, and this is why drawing is a very useful skill. Drawing gives you an idea for how it was made and how it was used. Again, you have to make sure you are capturing those details and so long story short, drawing can take a really long time, especially for someone who has only been doing this for a week and a half. The projectile point prove to be an even bigger pain in the ass since I needed a mangifying glass to see all of the waves and retouch. Marina had given me the projectile point to draw at around 12:15. I hold it under the lamp, put my magnifying glass to it, rotate it around and pick up my pencil. She interrupts my intense concentration to say, "Hey Kelly! You finish that before lunch and I get you an ice cream." I respond with, "Ohhh thanks a lot evil serb (her nickname)." My face drops to sadness and I whine some more.."That's so mean, you say that knowing full well that it is impossible for me to finish this before lunch." She does her evil serbian laugh knowing that yes, it was probably impossible for me to finish this before 1:00 when we would leave for lunch. Like i said, I need to draw all the details, I need to draw both sides of it, the profile, and the cross section. I put the whole thing out of mind and just begin working away. The most important thing to me is to do this well because I get to keep the drawing for my portfolio and if I ever wanted to get a job doing illustration, which at this point I was told is actually a likely possibility if I wanted it, my employer would want to see a fine finished product, not a rushed one aimed to satisfy a sugar craving. As time goes on and i realize how much I am getting done, i start getting pretty excited at the idea that i may MAY just finish it in time. With ten minutes to spare, I throw down my pencil..

"Bitch, you own me an ice cream."

"YOU FINISHED? Let me see this........" silence silence silence "Kelly this is brilliant...you can't even tell the difference between mine and yours."

Me, modest and humble as ever: "That's right, Boom Shakalaka"

For that reason, i got to end last night with a delicious ice cream care of my seberbian habibi. It was great

And now here I am....8 am and unsure with what to do really...I wont leave until close to midnigth so I have a fulll day. I may go to the pool since it is supposed to be so hot, but we will see.

I am definitely looking forward to coming home, but I actually feel like I have made a whole new family out here as well and I am really grateful for that. It was actually one of the things I was looking forward to the most this season...establishing the closeness and the lasting friendships that I didn't really have the opportunity to last year...at first I didn't feel like it was working, an that I wasn't fitting in, but in the end I would say everything was a success and I am very happy.

Now it's time to return to the love and the family I have always known, and a country that knows how to leave a girl alone when she walks down the street~!

So that's it!

Halas!

I get in 4:00 pm on Thursday. Probably be home between 6 or 7 after customs and traffic (i know i picked the worst time to fly in!). Then I need to stay up until at least 10:00 pm to try and regulate my sleep schedule. Ohh it's going to be an exhausting next couple of hours, but I am very much welcoming them with open arms!

2008-05-11T03:28:00.000-07:00

Happy Mommy Day to my dearest Aunties

I love you both and will see you soon.

4 more days!

2008-05-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

So I have received more than a few messages regarding my lack of posting....in all honesty, it had not even occurred to me that it had been that long since my last post. This last week just raced by and before I know it I am going to be home, back in my own bed. Friday evening is upon me and it is only 5 more days until I will take a taxi to the airport and board a flight to Amsterdam, and then a flight to Detroit. I can hardly believe it....I'm not sure how many of the 5 remaining days I will spend working. I will definitely take Wednesday off, and perhaps Tuesday depending on how I feel I guess. I'm going to finish up some work in the lab on the lithics, even though i really am under no obligation to do so, but I don't mind.

Another major reason i haven't posted is because...well, I would like to post more images but they just take forever....so I wind up getting really frustrated and giving up on making an entry all together. No pictures, no amazing stories, so...bored audience i suppose. This was my last "weekend" in Cairo. Yesterday we went to the pool after getting off of work at 1:00. We got dinner and then as a group of us were walking back to our flat we saw that there was a wedding party being held in the streets just outside our complex. We went over to watch and listen to the music. It was such a vibrant and positive outpouring of energy and enjoyment. Boys were waving large flames, children were running around with orange sodas, and women gathered in a circle and danced, wiggling in ways that even made ME blush, so I was quite surprised to see that amongst a culture that advocates modesty as one of the highest virtues. The women kept waving over at us to come join but we mostly smiled and stoodby just taking it all in. I shouldn't say "we." If you know anything about me, you should know that I can't turn down a dance party ever. I smiled and contemplated for about 2 seconds before dropping my purse to the floor and running in. The put me in the center and I danced with another older woman, I think she was the bride's mother. I danced for about two songs, they made me stay in the middle the entire time...finally i managed to squeeze out. It was a great time and I felt so humbled that they offered to share it with me but at the same time i did not want to distract from the attention of the wedding by being the foreigner stealing the spot light. I wish things like that didn't even occur to me...not that I wish I was oblivious to things that constituted colonial behavior, but that things could be as simple as two cultures combining without that kind of undertone. Perhaps I am reading into it too much. One of my friends took pictures which also put me off...even though I would have loved to have a snapshot of that memory to look upon and share with others, at the same time I would never risk making those around me feel as though I assumed I had such a right to photograph something so sacred to their culture, even if it was out in public on the streets of Giza. I would never want to risk them mistaking my intentions in capturing the moment...I would never want to risk coming across as someone who felt urged to photograph the ceremony out of alien curiosity, or as if they were meant for me to look at...

After we left, most of my flatmates went to sleep while I stayed up talking to Kirk online. Then i went to bed and today we went back to the pool.

Tomorrow its back to the lab for some more work. Richard also arrives back tomorrow so it will be nice to see him again even if only briefly.

Yeah so that's about it. Sorry for not posting!

2008-05-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

Well I have not really written much..but no one has really said much to me either so...I suppose all is fine.

I had to move AGAIN

But it's okay. I'm sharing a room with Camilla and Marina and i adore them both. they are my habibi's. They are the girls I lived with originally before Farrah and the baby came. The three of us get along really well and we all have similar rhythms so it's a really good living situation...at least when it comes to our room...however as for the overall apartment, not as hunky dory.

I have held off from really complaining about some of the people I have really grown intolerable of here, for two reasons. One, I never know who could wind up reading this, and I don't really need to wind up having that kind of information circulating... even if it is completely true and justified. Second...it's enough to have to experience some of the bullshit the first time through...this is not a situation where talking about it makes me feel any better...it just gets me more worked up and frustrated and left counting down the days until I leave. Which is now only 10 more days. I get into detroit on the 15th, which is fun because I also leave here on the 15th...despite the fact that I will be traveling for 24 hours, I still get home on the same day! It's like traveling back in time. Also...since my flight leaves from here at 4 am, and I have to get to the airport at 1 am, so will probably leave my flat around 11:30...I just go ahead and say I'm leaving the 14th. I also don't plan on doing any form of work on the 14th...and maybe not even the 13th.

I'm trying to upload some of my sketches I have done in the lithics labs (per usual the internet is not cooperating). Again Marina told me today how impressed she was with them. It makes me very excited.

load pictures load!

Hmm what else...

I have total beach bum/dreadlock hair. I wash it a little more often now that I don't work on site, but still not every day.

I finished reading Deception Point the other day. It's a Dan Brown book that I can't believe I read, but even more than that I can't believe I enjoyed reading it. Of course it was cheesey and implausible at some parts, but it definitely held my attention and I finished it in only a few days. That means i've finished 5 or 6 books while out here, I've lost count now. It's amazing what you can do when you have no television. I have started a new book called Stones from the River and it is exquisite so far. I can't imagine it unraveling and if it does I will be most disappointed...however if the rest of it is anything like these first 100 pages I think this will be a new favorite.

Okay pictures didn't load, I waited a bit. Mumkin bokorah in shallah. (maybe tomorrow if god wills it).

2008-04-30T21:00:00.001-07:00

This morning I woke up especially early so that I could sit and wait forever for all of this to upload...

okay that's a lie...I woke up and could not fall back asleep.

But here is the Luxor Temple Photo Album:

Since I started at Luxor Temple, and since I took less pictures there, I will begin writing about it first as well. In a way this follows the tradition of Ancient Egyptian festival processions, but not exactly. Festival celebrations like the annual autumn Opet Festival would begin at Karnak Temple. This festival in particular consisted of priests carrying in their shoulders, the statue of Amon, along a 2 km avenue framed by two rows of sphinxes. This avenue connected Karnak and Luxor Temple. The festival, which acted as a political tool symbolizing the divine birth of the King, as well as granting public access to the gods who normally resided in the temples where only preists could interact, make offerings, and provide daily ritual services such as cleaning in the sacred bath, would begin by land at Karnak Temple. The statue would be carried through Luxor Temple and would return by boat along the Nile back to Karnak. So, even though I’m beginning at Luxor, I’m ending at Karnak just the same. Anyway…I know what you’re thinking…picture time: Most info is either from memory of a class I took with Janet Richards, or from my guide book, of which I was completely lost in throughout my picture taking. It is Jill Kamil’s Guide to Luxor

Here are the rows of sphinxes I was just talking about. For some reason Kirk thought these pictures were really cool out of all of them.

The avenue is visible now only in fragments and does not proceed from Karnak to Luxor in the mordern day. However, as apart of a new tourist ploy, apparently they are going to remove all of the sphinxes, some of which are above ground and visible, others which are not, and create a huge tourist pathway. In fact, the excavation project the the crew is currently working on is salvage archaeology of the sphinxes.

Here is a view of Luxor Temple from the front, so this is the perspective the crowd and priests would have held as the statue or bark of Amon was carried toward Luxor. Of course the temple back then was much more elaborate in decoration and color, showcasing the immense wealth of the king and his dedication of such wealth to the eyes of the gods.

The massive stone walls you see are called pylons. Pylons became important temple components, with outter inscriptions usually consisting of military successes and the strength and power of the pharaoh over enemines. Smiting scenes were common. Specifically depicted in the front most Pylons at Luxor Temple are battle scenes under the reign of Ramses II against the Hittites. These scenes were important to communicating the King’s power over chaos.

Pylons are also large scale gateway constructions which resemble the heiroglyph for horizon, tying together the religious space to the sun and where it is born every day. The temple itself was oriented East to West symbolically linking everything to the activity of the sun.

That tall phallic structure to the left is called an obelisk, Its flat sides at the top, similar to the flat outter casing of pyramids, were stone imitations of sun rays. Though they look plain now, they would have been spectacularly decorated, cased in gold and made of exotic material like pink granite. There was one on the west side as well...but the French stole it! Well I don't know if they stole it...but they have it I think.

Both the Pylon and Obelisk is of Ramses II, a pharaoh whom I REGRETTFULLY do not know very much about even though his name is one of the most well known. The 2 seated and for 4 standing statues out front are also all of Ramses II.

Isn't he dreamy?

Here are additional reliefs on the exterior statues related to Ramses II.

Though Ramses did not begin the constructions at Luxor temple, he was known for being a magnificent builder and made some of the most significant alterations to the temple. His addition also included the large open court. The court added by Ramses II (19th Dynasty New Kingdom) is open with collumns surrounding it. Within the court are also various statues

Additions to temples from the previous architetural decisions by earlier reigning pharaohs, always went in front. Because the most sacred components of the temple, the shrines and sactuaries of the gods, were at the back, temples always extended forward when altered.

Below are more scenes from within, again most related to festival activity, offerings to the gods so that order on earth is maintained, divine birth and legtimization of the king etc.

This is me tucked into a shrine just on the other side of the first pylon. The original granite shrine was built by Hatepshut and restored by Ramses II. The shrines were dedicated to Amon, Khonsu and Mut.

I turned to my right and saw this on the ground. Its an omen.

Here are the shrines without me!

The following is actually a Mosque, the Mosque of Abu el Hagag, that was added right to the temple which, according to Kamil, was built because muslims believed that the tomb of a saint was here:

From the Court of Ramses the II come the Great Collonade, area with the two rows of collumns, and Hypostyle Hall which contains 32 collumns organized into four rows. The Great Collonade and Hypostyle hall were built by Amenhotep III. Movement into the temple increases in darkness as more and more Papyrus collumns fill the space evoking notions of a watery chaos that rose from the mound during creation (ehh I think it’s something like this). Everything about egyptian religious ideology seems to deal with opposition, particularly this notion of chaos versus order. As has been explained to me, temples are meant to be microcosms of the universe with the interior reflecting the means of maintaining order and the exterior, aspects of repelling chaos. The entire temple increases in darkness the further you go in, and also increases in elevation to represent the primordial mound of creation in Egyptian mythology.

Great Collonade:

From the Hypostyle Hall

Again, you can see the walls are decorated with a variety of reliefs, but also here, some of the reliefs were painted over and the area was converted into a Roman Shrine later.

Here are some additional images that I either am too lazy to look up information for, or I really didn’t have that much information about them, but I thought they looked cool.

Like I said, I have a newfound inspiration to finally learn to read heiroglyphs despite the fact that I am hellbent on not getting overly invested in Egypt as my path of study. But how kickass would it be if I just knew what all of this meant off the top of my head? Haha sorry I’m not that impressive…yet!

2008-04-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

Lots to write about...well kind of...I suppose there is a lot I could discuss though I'm not sure how interesting it all is.

I started working in the lab yesterday with the lithics specialist. She went over some basic typologies with me and showed me what kind of things to look for when recording and drawing stone tools. After that I would do Stage one of analysis, which is basically sorting the lithics by retrieval method, wet seive, dry, seive, or heavy fraction, then labeling, counting, and weighing them. It's a job that does not really require that you know anything but lithics, but it has me looking at material all day and any time I have questions I just pop over to Marina and ask. At one point I came across something really cool and brought it over to her. She asked me what I thought it was and I explained how I thought it was a butcher knife. She started to tell me that it was a regular knife and how to tell the difference between the two, only to interrupt her own thought and say that it was a butcher knife! So i was correct, and very excited. While I did stage one, Marina would do stage 2, which is entire database worth of fine details which you do need to be a little more experienced with lithics in order to complete. After an hour though she said that I was sorting through my material too fast and that she needed to give me something else to do. Naturally, it feels really good to complete my jobs at a pace that is above what is expected of me. This whole time I thought that Marina was doing this huge favor for me letting me sit in and learn under her (don't get me wrong, this is still very much the case). However as it turns out. the part of the job that I am doing saves her a lot of time and she told me that I'm the one doing her the favor and that my help is going to mean finishing everything this season. Again, that all feels really good. So what did Marina do to slow me down? She had me start drawing. Archaeological drawing is one of my favorite things to do. I don't consider myself particularly artistic, but everything is so standardized that the things I produce don't look like a mess! Marina told me that all of my drawings were really good, but occasionally I would get, "Kelly, what the hell is that." because I went into too much detail. With lithics it's very important to keep it simple and draw only the parts that can really give you information for how the tool was manufactured and used.

Despite having a successful day at the lab, for whatever reason by the time night came I was very tired, sensitive, irritable, and emotional. Certain aspects of my job and living arrangement have been really stressful, none of which is entirely appropriate to vent about on a public forum, but last night it all just really broke me down to the point where I was fighting back tears, walking away from people and saying that I just needed to leave for a while. I thought I had wound down by the time I returned home only to find that everytime I tried to talk it was the same tear choking voice from earlier. I wasn't even still upset, I just couldn't seem to talk about anything without feeling like I had to cry. My flatmate bought me these things called Happy Hippos that I have been really amused by but had yet to try.

They are hazelnut filled weirdness...but they made me feel tons better. We stayed up talking/ranting/complaining/laughing and finally went to bed.

Today I am going to Abu Sir, a site of 5th and 6th dynasty Sun temples. I can't remember if I went there last year. I believe I did, but it's worth seeing again I'm sure. Then I am going back to the lab in the afternoon. I will post pictures if I take any.Haha I realize that I say things like "oh and I was an emotional mess yesterday" as if its nothing and then change the subject...really I am fine and have no specific explanation for the water works. It's just the lifestyle + me already being a boo hoo sensitive sissy pants. It will be nice to come home and have some privacy again.

2008-04-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures other people have taken towards the end of the season.

This first one is taken at the villa right after lunch. Very often you would find Amelia, Kasia, and I sitting three dazed excavators in a row.

Here are pictures taken as we went through a final tour and discussion of our season at KKT. This involved everyone and was mainly for the people who work in the lab or back in the villa since they do not get to make it down to site very often. As a result you can see how bored some of us look listening to the same thing we have already been discussing day in and day out for the past 6 weeks. If you have problems spotting me, simply look for the girl that looks thugged out in a bandana.

This next photo is from the area of the valley temple where I got to work with Mike and Amelia. It was pretty amazing. This is where we spent a few days taking down a degraded mudbrick wall.

These are pictures of us sitting underneathe a table on site during second breakfast...as time went on more and more people came and we couldn't all fit in the tent so some of us starting sitting outside. You can't see me because I am actually laying down sleeping.

Thats it for today

2008-04-25T00:19:00.001-07:00

I come home in less than 3 weeks! Count down 20 days. I tried thinking about what kind of food I am really craving or missing these days. For the most part I really just miss having a variety of fresh vegetables. The only fresh vegetable we are served here is cucumber. Everything else is boiled to death to kill anything that could make people sick. Things like lettuce are fertilized using human fecal matter…not sure how common this in other places and that no one really talks about it, but since it is known here, people seem to avoid eating it. Though not a vegetable, we are also served fresh tomatoes, which I don’t even like, but I eat only when I am out here…however the other night I stared in disgust at my plate and said, “I am so sick of freakin tomatoes.” It generated a good laugh around the dinner table as I continue to radiate my negative, I-hate-everything attitude…at least everyone seems to find it charming and not obnoxious. Standard response is, “Kelly doesn’t like it..what a surprise.” Yesterday I found myself really craving avocados but I don’t know how in season they will be upon my return to the states. Part of me misses real, good coffee as I have been only drinking instant nescafe the entire time here. However, I have been drinking so much nescafe that really coffee does not appeal to me any form. I’ll have to think about it all a little bit more as I am sure my Aunt Marcia will start asking me what kind of dinner I will want when coming home…or perhaps I am being presumptuous and she has no intentions on feeding me at all and instead wants to lock me away in a dungeon with nothing but more cucumbers, tomatoes, and nescafe.

One thing that I realized I do miss a lot right now is rain. I miss cool, breezy, rainy mornings. The big bubble drops that hit the rooftops and windows with a soothing rhythm. I miss the smell of soaked grass and damp tree bark, and making the choice to sit inside a watch movies all day with cat naps in between. I don’t miss the snow though…the snow can clear out and stay away for my arrival.

I have been working overtime to get through as much excavation paper and computer work as possible so that I can get right into the lab and begin work on lithics. One of the girls that is supposed to be sharing the work load with me, left for 4 days to go to the Red Sea. There really has been an issue with me baring a much larger workload than others, but I know that it doesn’t matter because I get to start doing new interesting things, and they will have to work well into May at the office. I, however, will be exempt from anymore office work once I finish the database, which hopefully wont take me longer than Saturday and Sunday. If it does, then I am going to just start doing data entry in the evenings and going to the lab during the day anyway. That’s what I’m willing to do in order to maximize the amount of time I can spend learning a new trade in this field.

Because of the work I have done and the networking I’ve been able to do I have some exciting prospects in terms of work for the next year as well. I am going to be given the contact information to work at a site called Catalhoyuk in Turkey. A lot of people working here work there every year and said that I should go and that they would recommend me. Catalhoyuk is a very very important archaeological site, the earliest known of the neolithic or stone age. It has a very large international team as well, I think as many as 100 working there at a time. I have worked on fauna from there before and the preservation is excellent. Superb preservation of artifacts is another thing the site is most well known for. It would be an amazing opportunity. In addition to that, Marina, the girl who will be teaching me lithics who also works at Catal, works on the lithics in Greece and I might ask her if she has contact information for there as well. This year Marina is finishing up at the end of May, then going to Greece until July, and then going to Turkey. If accepted I could potentially follow that same iternerary next year, probably even right along with her. Nothing is set yet though and there would be a lot of factors to consider. That much traveling might actually bring me to decide to postpone grad school for another year, or to at least defer any where I may get accepted to. I am most definitely eager to get back into school, but I also have no desire to commit to anything that will hold me back from seeing the world….being able to travel was a major reason as to why I chose this career in the first place…while academia and teaching are things I also want to pursue, I may not be able to travel nearly as much once I am locked down into a program with the constant pressure of having to finish my dissertation (not to mention all other exams and writing for grad school). To even admit that I would think about taking more time off is shock to myself…it’s as though I am standing beside myself listening to a stranger say it…not only am I listening to a stranger say it, but I am tilting my head at them with perpetual confusion, as though they are speaking another language entirely. ‘What do you mean? What is this another year off you speak of?’ It’s difficult to separate myself from this idea that there is this timeline to follow in pursuing a career, a product of the current educational system. I constantly have to remind myself that there is no rush, that there is no real finish line any more, that my course is not linear. This dialogue offers me both comfort and anxiety…comfort because I do have freedom and opportunities, endless ones….anxiety because it is a complete absense of the structure I have come to know and rely on for so long.

How appropriate…that break represents me getting up to boil water. Just as I completed a thought on how life does not need to follow one single linear path, that it is unpredictable, I walk into the other room and have a near death experience. We have a gas stove in the kitchen, one that I have used plenty of times to boil water for my tea and coffee. Today however, I went to use a different burner than the one I normally use. I turned on the gas, lit the match and all you hear is “BOOM.” Before my very eyes a ball of fire appears and catches my shirt. It went out quickly though leaving only a bad smell and burn marks and soot on my clothing. This may have permanently traumatized me from using gas stoves. I swear I am never going to make it out of this country alive…

2008-04-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

I want to first take this time to congratulate my baby brother Kirkling who landed a summer internship working at a Royal Oak radio station. I am most excited for him. Additionally, here is a link to one of his stand up performances at an open mic night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsvo8oc0Xok

I haven't been able to watch it yet because the internet takes too long for it to load, but I've seen him live and I know he is great. I am very proud of him.

Speaking of internet, it only seems to work first thing in the morning so that is part of the reason I have been online less and posting less. Oh Egypt.

Not to mention I am just overloaded with work to do...it really is getting ridiculous and I should be refusing since it is not my responsibility if other people drop the ball on the work they have been assigned...but at the end of the day the work needs to get done...someone has to do it. Hopefully people will realize how much I already have to do and stop asking me to do more...but I doubt it.

It has been over 103 degrees for the past 4 days in a row

Gross :(

oh well half day today and pool day tomorrow

2008-04-22T21:13:00.000-07:00

Richard told me last season that once bowel movements become the topic of conversation over breakfast, it’s time for the season to end and people to ship out….I have to disagree with this. I would have to say that once you find yourself reasoning homicide as a viable solution to your work frustrations, that is when it is time for the season to end and people to ship out.

My patience with this project and the lack of organization, not to mention lack of common sense from the administrative hierarchy, has diminished exponentially. Today I was seconds away from rescheduling my departure for the earliest flight possible. I have been more than humble for the excellent learning experience provided for me, but I draw the line at being taken advantage of...and that is exactly what has been happening. I will omit the details just because, it winds me up too much to think about it more than I already have…but today was probably the most stressful day I have had out here and 105 degrees didn’t make it any better.

Okay that is going to be the extent of my whining...I'm starting to realize why archaeologists are equated with alcoholics...just kidding i am coping in healthy ways...

2008-04-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

Tease picture! To add some color I threw this snap shot from the west bank....of course I will still upload pictures from luxor...I swear. Actually within a few weeks i will be moving back into my old apartment since Farrah and her baby are heading back. Then I will have internet again and will spend too much time online and therefore will post all pictures you have been holding out for..I swear!

We are officially done on site...all areas that I showed you in the last photo are now under sand. We have begun the torturous and boring paperwork part of post excavation. My first responsibility was to go through all of the feature forms from our area an make sure they are complete and that none are missing...in doing so I was given a new nickname. Paperwork Nazi. I chase people down letting them know that they forgot their dimensions, or their photo numbers, or that they didn't include elevations or rough sketches on the back...and this isn't just for new people, this is for all the veterans too. I was working at a table with my area advisors and I told one, Mike, that he had forgotten to include surrounding features in his matrix. He asked me to read the description on the form so that I could refresh his memory on which feature I was referring to. I said, "this mudbrick collapse, having depth .02 meters is dadada." And before he could say anything I interjected with, ".02 meters? A value that low is supposed to be in millimeters yeah?" And he just looked up at me in both disbelief and fear....we all started laughing at how strict to the manual I had been correcting the forms. Both he and Amelia assured me it was a good thing it proved that I was paying attention and that it meant Mike wanted to make sure I worked in his area again next year. That definitely made me feel proud of the work I've put into this. I went through each form...i don't even want to know how many there were, a binder's worth..and put little post its on every one that was missing information. Very anal retentive indeed!

Amelia, my area advisor who is writing the Data Structure Report, leaves on Wednesday so we have to try and get as much possible by then, so I will probably be working some serious overtime. There are other people who are also just left to sort through areas by themselves so I might try and help them as much as possible too. But it shouldn't be too long before I'm back in the lab this season learning the exciting world of flint working and sourcing.

One final note for today is that I got a different cell phone which works with my American sim so my regular number works in case of emergencies if my family wants to call or text. It's expensive for me to use of course, but I'm sure it is at least comforting to know that I can be reached now.

Hope everyone had a good and safe weekend!

2008-04-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

The archaeological community was introduced to non stop dancing Kelly last night. MY legs are acheyingly sore this morning. Owwww. Since it is the end of the excavation season we held a huge party at our apartment last night. It was really great to see everyone together in a more relaxed environment. Upon washing and letting my hair down, a colleague came up to me and said, “Oh my god you look so different…you look like a girl!” Ha, I was not quite sure how to respond to that. But it really just goes to show what happens when you turn up not wearing the same dirty clothes and with a clean face and sandless hair. At first the party was a little quite and everyone just harbored exhaustion behind their eyes…but all it took was the right music selection and everyone was pepped and laughter and good times were shared. And by right music selection, I mean ABBA. Of course my demands for some good eighties jams were well received too…however when I put on the Final Countdown the Swedes bowed their head in shame wondering why Americans only enjoy the worst music to come out of Sweden. We also listened to some Guns and Roses and when a group of people started singing a verse of Paradise City prematurely I shouted that they were all amateurs. The repsonse was, “When were you even born?” When I said 1985 there was a groan at both my baby status and my imappropriate affection for a musical decade I was barely apart of. Some people brought guests to the party who weren’t apart of the team, and I was quite flattered when introductions were going around. Jessica was explaining who everyone was and what their jobs were and she got to me and said, “This is Kelly, she keeps everyone happy.” Haha though I don’t know if that was because my performance as an excavator wasn’t worthy of being mentioned…nah I think it was just to change up descrription from “digger, digger, lab rat, digger, digger, lab rat.”

For the night I had managed to get my hands on a fifth of really really good scotish whiskey that will inevitably ruin my ability to drink other whiskey for the rest of my life…not because it made me sick or anything, but because it was so amazingly delicious I don’t know that I can go back to another brand of lesser quality. But I will also probably never be able to really afford nice whiskey either so I will nurse this stuff as though it is an immortal elixir.

Other silly aspects of the night included seeing how many different languages we could translate the word “Spider Pink”. If you are familiar with the Simpsons you would know what Spider Pink is. You need not go far to find at least 6 or 7 different ways to say it, Italian being the most complicated. I am really hoping that I can retain some of the British slang and common words. The change is just nice. I’ve stopped using the word friend and replaced it with mate, stopped using the word apartment and replaced it with flat, and of course have accepted great phrases like, “I can’t be bothered” and “That is rubbish.” I have also nearly eliminated the word “pants” and replaced it with trousers. To the Brits, pants means underwear…but not just any underwear…it more so means the biggest, grimmest set of granny panties you can imagine. So when I say pants this is immediately what they think of and nearly start laughing to tears. After having done a load of laundry and showing up on site, I was told what a difference it makes to put on some clean clothes. My response was, “Oh yeah this is the first time I’ve changed my pants in a week.” Working the other way, though I’m an American minority, the English call their erasers rubbers, so I find myself giggling at some of the phrases that spin from that especially since erasers are a very important thing to have on site. “Oh my rubber is gettng pretty dirty, does any one have a rubber I can borrow.” Things like this. The use and reuse and borrowing of dirty rubbers. The Brits also don’t quite understand “That’s what she said” humor, so I’ve managed to phase that out despite the fact that it was so ingrained into my speech from college guys. Though from time to time when someone does look at some of the architecture and says, “Oh my god look how massive that thing is,” I do wait for just a second, anticipating someone to chime in with a “that’s what she said,” however I restrain myself from actually saying it out loud.

Before the party yesterday, team Menkenre Vestibule spent the morning going over all plans and paper work trying to find the holes in our work that needed to be completed. With said holes, we also spent the morning frantically running about the site, tape measures and level meters in hand getting the final values needed. Before such scrambling for last minute information though, we had a lovely breakfast at the Mena House resort. An all you can eat buffet of the freshest fruit and most splendid array of breads and pastries. I wish there were no consequences to eating a gluttoness amount of pastries. But for an end of season reward for hard work, I will ignore the truth. Life’s short- shovel in the flakey sweetness.

Here are some photos of the squares that I spent this season working on. Here are my beautiful fieldstone walls, of which I had to measure all of the stones and plan the details of.

Here are pictures from the Valley Temple where I was able to excavate the in situ pottery (see the holes where said digging took place).

The hope is that we will finish up everything needed for the site by next Wednesday. After that I get to crawl in the dark dampness that is the on site lab, lose my tan and work on lithics for the remainder of my time here. And by learn lithics I also partially mean learning how to dance the way they do in Greece from Merina and Mary Ann, both seasoned veterans having worked in Cyprus. Merina is trying to get me on the permit for Catalhoyuk in Turkey for next summer….it’s only the largest and most well known neolithic site, no big deal (it would be an amazing deal…the projects budget is even larger than this one and they are total work Nazis…their lab is open 24 hours a day and every one just works works works, really sounds like my kind of place indeed!)

Okay that will conclude my updates for now…

2008-04-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

Still not done on site

We will have to go back tomorrow, and they may let us finish up loose ends on Saturday.

My area crew even stayed over an hour later on site trying to get as much done as possible.

I am a tired girl.

But I will write more, and post more pictures soon I promise. I would have done it today but don't had the cable for my camera and I didn't go back home between the end of work and dinner because we got back so late.

That's my update for now. Sorry it cannot be more entertaining!

2008-04-15T21:05:00.000-07:00

Sorry no posts.

Today is the last day on site and there is so so so much to do!

Oh and only a month until I'm back home!

2008-04-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

As my alarm sounded at 5:15 this morning, I rolled over and in that moment really considered the strangeness of my lifestyle. I rolled out of bed after having gone to sleep at 9:00 p.m. the night before. I put on the same dirty work clothes that I've been sporting since Saturday and wrapped a bandana around the hair I haven't washed since Thursday night (and oddly enough it's the best my hair has looked in a good while). I gather my gear, and stroll to the Villa for breakfast at 6 am. I have breakfast with about 35 people, though i make sure to get there early so that I'm not waiting in line to boil my water for coffee. At 6:45 we have morning meeting and announcements and then everyone splits up and heads to their respective places of work, the site, the lab, or the office within the villa. For the site we cram more people than can safely fit inside, along with bags full of all the necessary equipment. We make the same 8 minute drive to the site that we make every morning...some mornings the crew is silent, other mornings we are opening windows for air as some of the boys crudely burp up the breakfast mystery meat...a stench which sometimes does make me vomit in my mouth a little. The van that takes us to site has some sort of musical wiring so that whenever the driver hits the breaks the car starts playing "It's a small world after all." And this isn't when he is at a full stop...it is whenever he touches the breaks. The music plays until his foot releases the brake. It is just about the most unnecessary thing I can possibly think of...actually I'm sure I could think of something more useless hypothetically speaking, but that this actually exists is perplexing.

Today it was really really hot outside, with zero breeze. Somehow though, this did not slow me down from being probably the most physically active that i have been on site. The high was about 100, however with only a few days left, the mudbrick wall within the Vestibule of Menkenre's Valley Temple had to come down. The wall was about 2 meters high. We only had to remove the bricks up to a marl plaster facing, so we were removing a portion of the wall that was probably about a meter thick. The condition of the mudbrick leaves it pretty clay-ey and damp. It's not like tearing down stone or anything but it's pretty challenging. And you can't just demolish the thing either, hacking away randomly. Everything in archaeology has to be done in sequence...you remove things in the reverse order in which they were built or created. So starting at the top of the wall you remove each course, or each layer or row/line of brick one by one. The brick specialist wanted some whole bricks to analyze so we also had to excavate a few of those. In the vestibule I work with Mike and Amelia. As we removed the courses looking for good complete bricks to take out, they would accidently chop too far and cut into the next course, meaning the bricks couldn't be used. They complimented me on having not done that on my side so that I had the good bricks to take out. Naturally I felt really good about the fact that I never over dug my courses and could provide some solid bricks for analysis, but really it was probably more of a result of me working a little slower than them and by the time they realized they busted through a course, i was already aware of it and could stop :) By the afternoon we reached the bottom course which was still a good half meter above the floor but by then we really could just hack away until we hit floor. So there I was, 100 degrees, uner the sun beating away at the wall with a hatchet. My hands are covered in blisters, my body was drenched in sweat, and my arms will probably ache with immeasurable pain tomorrow. But for whatever reason I was a complete destructive mode. I've taken down some other features before and gotten pretty bored and unmotivated within a few minutes...but I think it actually the heat and kind of this hard work, suffering mentality that just drove me to keep hammering at it. I just wanted to see that wall gone if it meant that I was going to be sweating my ass off in the desert heat.

Today I also had to do a little video for the project explaining the wall and its relationship to the other features within the vestibule. I thought that I was going to get really nervous and stumble over my explanation and sound really inarticulate, but it actually came out really well. I didn't stammer or stutter once. I think it was because I was wearing sunglasses...yes wearing sun glasses makes all the difference when you're nervous :) The only thing that was super lame about it was that the footage is also going to go for this U of M promotional commercial that they do. Since the University did provide me with a lot of funding for this trip and last year's, I'm pretty much obligated to do it...the deal is they advertise the types of research projects they sponsor for their students...as if they send students to work in Egypt all the time (they don't really). But either way, to really drive home the Michigan-ness, I had to wear the only Michigan apparel that I brought out here which is a long sleeve, navy blue shirt my Uncle Mike got me 2 years ago for Christmas....I tell you what, the last thing I wanted to wear on 100 degree day after I had already been working throughout the morning was that shirt. I put it on, filmed my stuffed, and then had to peel the long sleeve shirt off of my moist skin. My shirt underneath had stripes of liquid Kelly glow. I tell you what, I am one sexy woman.

I've started taking naps during second breakfast. I scarf down a big delicious best-tasting-orange-ever, a bottle of water, and then curl up in the fetal position on the sandy limestone hilltop, right outside of the tent. Mark walked by yesterday and took a picture of it. Archaeologists hard at work! It really makes it seem like we are slaves driven to exhaustion in the most terrible of working conditions. I just find it relaxing.

Tomorrow I plan on bringing my camera and taking pictures from site. In shallah.

Oh yeah, they have okra for dinner tonight. Aunt Marcia I have to agree with you...it is gross.

2008-04-11T21:14:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

Okay I really am being such a blog slacker…it’s easy for me to blame it on not having internet at my apartment…but it’s a little more than that. The only access I have to the internet is at the Villa and I’m only really at the Villa around meal times… it’s not really a big deal to hang out after dinner, chat online, catch up on email and write a blog…but truth me told, I’ve been so addicted to reading that I just find myself really antsy at a computer and without the attention span to write anything lengthy…at least not on a daily basis. But there are some things that I know I can share to readdress the question, why even keep a blog.

Well first there is work. Only one week left on site. As much as I have loved working on site, I’m definitely ready for things to wrap up. Time to switch gears. However, as a way to reward me for all of the massive amounts of recording I’ve done this season, my area advisor let me excavate probably the best feature on site! Today I spent the day working inside the temple of Menkenre and I actually got to excavate a more or less complete pottery vessel. Seriously. Sitting within the remnants of the hypostyle hall, the base of an alabaster collum near my feet…digging out a ceramic jar that would have been used in 2500 BC. It made my season. Of course I'm not allowed to take pictures of the stuff we are recording right now...but here is a picture that would have been similar to what i was dealing with:

Aside from work though, there is of course the fact that I am thrown into an international experience, of which there are many differences I find myself taking notice of. Every morning when I see my Polish roommate, she asks me, “Are you okay?” This throws me off guard every time without fail…I am used to people asking me if I am okay, or me asking other people if they are okay, when something actually seems not okay…when something seems wrong…Europeans ask it instead of asking how are you…sometimes they ask how are you, as well, but mostly I am asked if I am okay or if I am alright…or who knows maybe I just walk around looking like shit all the time and they really do need to ask if I am okay and there is no cultural difference whatsoever…this too could be a possibility.

Peanut Butter. Egyptians and the French do not understand peanut butter. They have it at the villa because so many people do make peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches, but Egyptians find it really funny and it doesn’t even really seem to have an Egyptian name. I tried asking for more when we had run out to the Egyptian house staff, and it was really…a maze of confusion, they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. The kind of peanut butter you can get in Egypt is also strange because it has honey in it…maybe that isn’t so strange but I think it is. But let me tell you who does peanut butter right…the Polish. A few days ago a Polish brand of peanut butter wound up on the mantel…it is the most amazing peanut butter I have ever had in my life. Polish peanut butter and fig jam sandwhiches mmmmmm.

One of the girls who had already left to go back home received an easter package yesterday. Since she was already home she said we could have it. They had those cadburry chocolate eggs in them…not the ones with the cream and carmel in the center, but the little pastel color ones with the candy coating, kind of like big m&ms….i don’t remember liking those so much. If it’s possible for any one to still get their hands on those, I want those when I come home! God I’m high maitenance. This also introduces another item. Apparently we can get packages but they take forever to get here. And unfortunately, since I recently got sick and disappeared from the online world, I forgot to mention that I did get my very first package! A little taste of America collage, with some new music to listen to, a wonderful movie to watch. It was very sweet.

Let's see what else

The version of fruit loops they have here tastes like flowers. Lilacs to be exact. Don’t ask me why…it’s gross.

They have golden raisens here, which I have decided I prefer to the other kind of raisens. I pick them up at the local store around the corner from my apartment. I still like to go into the stores to practice my arabic. I grab various items and ask how to say them and then go through how to pronounce numbers and money. Even if I don’t want to buy anything, I stop into the store to say hi.

“Masa Ihkar Mr. Hassan! Inta Kwais? Just saying hello! Ashoofak bokarah in shallah. Masa lama!:

Good evening Mr. Hassan. Are you good? Just saying hello. I’ll see you tomorrow if God wills it. Bye!

They also have dried dates with almonds in the middle of them. They are quite a treat.

I also learned that hissing isn’t always a bad thing…or at least it’s not always meant as a harassing mechanism. Sometimes it’s just their way of getting your attention. I used to pass by this kiosk on my way to the meridien every day and I would get hissed at by the guy that worked there. Finaally I just went up to him and talked to him. Now, every time I go talk to him, he gives me free candy. Though, for all I know that could mean we are married or something. It’s not really fancy candy or anything, something similar to tootsie rolls. Now especially, I make it a point to say hello to every local I walk by.

Another reason I may have been getting hissed at was because I did not know that it was bad to go outside with wet hair. Apparently having wet hair is a sign that you just had sex. So I was sending quite the message around here every time I would go out with wet hair. Now I just cover my head when my hair is wet…which isn’t very often since I rarely wash it, but you get what I mean.

The other day we weren’t allowed to go into town because there was a protest over the riase in prices on subsidized bread. They were expecting really huge riots, but I didn’t actually hear of anything happening. No one ever goes to town during the week really anyway.

Tomorrow is a half day.

Hamdilelah. Priase be to god.

That’s another funny thing I suppose. To kind of assimilate into the language aspect of the culture you speak a lot about God, even though Egyptians know that you aren’t muslim when you speak to them. And in America I would never say, okay see you tomorrow if god wills it…probably would say, see you tomorrow hopefully.

Okay there’s a more suitable post…mumkin (maybe)…eitherway back to my reading!

2008-04-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

Haha in my last entry I said, "I was considering coming home but.."

what i meant to say was I was considering coming home early

But like i said...staying until the 15th of may.

Still pretty far off but I'm sure I will be home before everyone knows it!

And yes Aunt Marcia..it is your prerogative to nag...and my prerogative to not call home when I am asked to because I don't want to hear said prerogative nagging :)

2008-04-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

Nyquil= a much happier, healthier, less coughy (and with a good night's sleep less coffee too) Kelly.

Apparently there were photo documentation of this munchkin dance

These will probably haunt me for the rest of my academic career. curses!

Auntie M: The book I recommend is called The God of Small Things and I think you in particular will enjoy it. And my plane arrives in detroit May 15th. i was considering coming home but it turns out that once I'm finished with the season excavation work I get my choice in new learning pursuits! It looks like I will get to learn about stone tools!

Today wasn't too exciting. I kept myself pretty contained and spent most of the day hammering away at limestone debris.

That's it.

Time for dinner!

2008-04-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

what

a

day

So what is the perfect way to counter a bad cold? Well...whatever it is...I did the exact OPPOSITE...and by that I mean I worked for 10 hours on a day of a sand storm. Don't ask me by what rational decision we weren't shut down....but we weren't. Instead I swallowed bucketloads of sand as the pyramids disappeared completely from view- now there's a wonder...not how the Great Pyramid was constructed...but how a day of haze and high winds can obscure it completely.

Despite the fact that I had to work through a sand storm, the day was pretty good. I got to do nothing but excavation. Proudly I approached my pottery/ash rich room fill deposit and proclaimed, "Let's Kadum this Bitch." Kadum is arabic for hatchet. And I tore away at it with my Kadum, pick axe, and trowel.

I worked hard and got filthy. Definitely the dirtiest I've ever been after digging away through the storm. My hair was completely beige by lunch.

Today though, i did tarnish my tough and cynical reputation. Now...to stray a bit from modesty...I know I have a certain pool of talents. But there is one talent in particular, that I keep as my hidden gem. I don't do it on command...only when the time is right. And it is a rarity. You may not even know despite the fact that you know me very well. But the truth of the matter is...I can do voices. Obnoxious "did that really just come out of your mouth" voices...alvin and the chipmunk paar voices. This is what we are talking about. In the middle of my dig I stood up and said something, to which my colleague Amanda said, "Oh shut your munkchin little face." And I shouted, "MUNCHKIN LITTLE FACE?" Then I froze, bent my knees, and proceeded to sing "We Represent the Lollipop Guild" in my best munchkin voice along with full scale munchkin dance moves taken straight from the Wizard of Oz. Egyptian and International Crew Abound erupted with laughter, particularly when we took notice to the tourists that had stopped at the fence and seen the entire thing....yes,,,I was the ambassador of professionalism, standing mid excavation singing and dancing like a Munchkin of Oz.

So I went from serious, workaholic cynic...to merry little singer and jigger on site.

I don't really know why...I really was not aware that I had everyone's attention, or that I would attract attention...but I was pretty slap happy since my cough woke me up at 4:30 am and I had been up ever since.

So now everyone knows my secret....I'm silly at heart.

Damn.

But I still Kadum'd the hell out of that bitch...

2008-04-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

Oh 100% was spoken a bit prematurely….I’m sure as much to the dismay of my worried friends and family as my own. How I managed to contract a cold when all I’ve done is been quaratined to my bed is beyond me, though it could just be the subset of symtoms for whatever ailed me beginning last Wednesday…which at this point God only knows, probably just a culmination of many things. It really is not the type of job or place where 60 hour work weeks should be mandated. The ickiness that is me is nothing too serious these days though, standard cold symptoms; a cough, runny/stuffy nose, sore throat from the cough etc. The worst part though is that the cough doesn’t allow for a good night’s sleep. So in effect, I need extra sleep so my cold will go away, but my cold keeps me from getting the extra sleep I need. Oh a vicious cycle indeed.

I know the family wants me to call home and check in, but per Richard’s request, I had to let someone else temporarily use the phone Richard had lent to me while he was back in the states. It’s for John, he does the artifiact sealings and a lot of the server work. They are amidst ironing out some technical issues and Richard needed to be able to speak to John while he was here this week. So I can probably call at the end of the week if it’s really a big deal…but hearing my voice right now you would not be put at ease “hellllooo Kelly the frog here.” I sound pretty funny.

But it’s okay I can be spared the obvious points.

Take it easy
Drink plenty of fluids
Eat well
And Kelly I mean it don’t overdo it

Yes Yes Yes.

And no worries on medication if I need that. I have easier access to medicine here than I do in the states…just in terms of what is readily available. That is not to be confused with quality health care though.

Like I said, this isnt really so bad or so serious, I sound worse than I actually feel. I’m mainly just sleep deprived from the cough…and at least that keeps me drinking water throughout the night, since that is what I do each time I wake up.

Okay, that is your sadsickface update from me. Hope everyone else is enjoying their weekend,

2008-04-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

I officially finished my last square of the season! Yay!

Guess what I get to do until the site closes....

DIG DIG DIG

Excavattttteeeeee :)

Nothing but digging~! I'm so happy.

Despite such eagerness that I hold in regard to this, and the general excitement I do legitimately carry with my opportunities and experiences here...somehow I have been dubbed, "The Girl Who Hates Everything" by Mark Lehner. Of course this was a comment was made largely in jest and mostly in reference to how picky I am. We were all talking at second breakfast and this conversation ensued.

Me: "Richard even talks to his dog on the phone."
Amanda: "...i talk to my cat on the phone..."
Mark: "Kelly do you like animals?"
Me: "I don't like having to be responsible for them, but yes I like animals"
Mark: "Oh my gosh, Kelly actually likes something....what about people do you like people."
Me: "No."
Mark: "....I'm starting to appreciate this girl more and more every day."

I've also officially finished my third book here. And I highly recommend it. highly highly highly. It is so beautifully written. i cried my eyes out. It is about a family in India and a tragic sequence of events as seen through the eyes of a young twin brother and sister. It draws upon politics and social difference as well. here is a passage, that I think captures the style and some of the ways it just drags at your heart, but doesn't give too much away

Rahel froze. She was desperately sorry for what she had said. She didn’t know where those words had come from. She didn’t know she’d had them in her. But they were out now and wouldn’t go back in. They hung about that red staircase like clerks in a government office. Some stood, some sat and shivered their legs

“Rahel,” Ammu (her mother) said, do you realize what you have just done?”
Frightened eyes and a fountain looked back at Ammu.
“It’s alright, Don’t be scared. Just answer me. Do you?”
“What?” Rahel said in the smallest voice she had.
“Do you know what happens when you hurt people? When you hurt people they begin to love you a little less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

A cold moth with unusuall dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel’s heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goosebumps. Six goosebumps on her careless heart.

The author, Arundhati Roy is a well known political activist and received the booker prize, a prestigious literary prize. It's also a really quick read. Took me all of about 2 days.

Now I'm flipping between starting either The Blessing Stone, or Little Children. it's Slim Pickins in the Villa Library.

Also...my apartment was fumeeddd for bed bugs :( But I didn't have bed bugs...or at least I haven't been bitten. ah well. Dinner is over, time to go shower and sleep. First day back at work and I am quite exhausted. The site is only open for 11 more days though! Eeek!

2008-04-04T21:19:00.000-07:00

Just wanted everyone to know that I am back to feeling absolutely 100% again.

Marcia, your comments are initially sent to my email and then I have to approve them before they show up, so that is why you don't see them post right away.

And to answer your question about fever...I dont know what the fever was because I don't have a thermometer...I only know that my skin has never felt that hot before, and for hours after I had been inside.

I've never had a migrane before but I questioned whether or not I had one. When I mentioned this to my boss, along with my other symptoms that's when she said it sounded like I had sunstroke.

Either way, I did stay in bed for wednesday-friday, and as mentioned, am feeling 100% better now.

If I feel poorly today I will go home immediately, simple as that, so don't worry everyone. I will be ok!

2008-04-04T03:30:00.001-07:00

So let’s recap my sleeping patterns since Wednesday, for those of you REALLY aiming to live vicariously through me.

Wednesday:
1:12 p.m: skipped lunch, walked to apartment, went straight to sleep
4:30 p.m: woke up to a lot of noise, took a bath to ease the discomfort of elevated body
temperature
5:00 p.m: fell back asleep
7:00 p.m: woke up…thought about walking to dinner, realized walking anywhere was not
an option. Drank juice, went back to sleep.
9:00 p.m.: woke up…contemplated whether or not life was worth living if the pain in my
head never stopped…that’s being over dramatic, but damn was I in pain.
9:15 p.m.: miserably fell back asleep, body hot and aching, head throbbing

Thursday:
5:30 am: woke up…talked to flatmates about whether or not I should go to work or stay
home….decided to stay home. Fell back asleep
11:00 am: was kicked out of my bed by the cleaning crew…typed yesterdays blog
12:00 p.m: laid back down, slept
1:00 p.m.: walked to the villa to try and eat lunch…got there and wanted nothing
2:00 p.m: came back to apartment and fell back asleep
7:00 p.m: went to villa to try this whole food thing again…I ate a sandwhich and an apple
8:00 p.m.: went to bed

Friday:
6:30: woke up and took a shower

so there…from 1:15 p.m Wednesday to 6:30 a.m. Friday, I have been awake for maybe 3 hours, and have been sleeping for something like 35 hours? And even now, I feel like I could go right back to sleep. It’s Friday so no one works today…usually on Friday’s I like to lay out by the pool but the idea of being in the sun makes me nauseous. That is not good considering my field of work. After talking over some of my symptoms with the director and others, some think I may have actually had sunstroke/heatstroke. I guess it’s possible but I don’t recall it being particularly hot on Wednesday, maybe 85 or something. All I know is that I’m still tired but I don’t feel a complete inability to function, so I guess that’s an improvement. Also my appetite is coming back. This morning I woke up and made eggs and had some fruit.

The rest of the day will be spent in bed reading. Wish on my behalf that I can go back to work tomorrow :(

2008-04-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

Some of you may or may not have noticed that I have been a little MIA on my blog. Those that did would have also taken notice to the phantom blog entry that was posted.

There are a few reasons to account for my extended vacation from the blog. First like I said, I just moved into a new apartment which doesn’t have the internet so my access time has been reduced. Sure I can drag my laptop to the villa and post, but sometimes the days just fill up and I just don’t feel up to it. Remember that I work 60 hours a week ☹ Also, a lot of people have joined the crew, mainly those who were previously working in Luxor, so now the Villa is pretty jam packed full of people, and when you’re the one huddled in the corner working on your blog while everyone else is cheersing and laughing, it’s a good way to alienate yourself from a group dynamic that is already about as perplexing as it gets…at least to me.

And the last reason I have been MIA. I had noticed myself getting increasinly tired and just run down over the past week, with just some minor cold symptoms- sore throat, runny nose etc. Well finally yesterday sickness rocked me to the core and I couldn’t even make it through the work day. I was unsure I would even make the walk home from the Villa. I had the most violent headache I have ever had in my entire life. I don’t think I will ever understand how that much pain could have been concentrated in an area of the body without having received some serious physical force or impact.. I felt as though I headbutted a safe…like my skull was clamped and being stretched, and slowly cracking open. I had lost my appetite by the time we came back to the Villa for lunch. I went straight back to my apartment to try and sleep. I crashed immediately for about 2 hours. Then shit really hit the fan. My body was radiating heat, my head still throbbed, and all I wanted to do was sleep longer. But Egypt knows no such accomodations and the noise only intensified everything I was feeling…the horn honking, call to prayer, the construction, the dogs barking, someone pounding on the floor or wall right above me…any form of loud, bothersome, unbelieveably inconvenient noise and activity that could have been taking place, was…there might as well have been a fucking train in my room. But the pain I was in and with how lowsy I was feeling I still managed to keep falling asleep and waking up every couple of hours. I would get up only if I had to use the bathroom or grab more water because standing really did seem like something my body just couldn’t handle. At one point my nose started bleeding.

So yes, I slept from 1 in the afternoon straight until 5:30 the next morning. Stood up hoping hoping hoping I could go to work. You do not understand how much I do not want to be missing work. I have one more square to finish and then I get to start digging again…and I get to excavate some really neat things…staying home and missing out on all of this, is enough to make me want to cry. But that’s probably what drove me to feeling so awful yesterday….when I woke up yesterday I knew I wasn’t feeling well but I went to work anyway, and sure enough, after some hours in the field, under the sun and in the heat, I was done in probably much worse than I would have been had I just stayed inside. Though I was feeling better in the morning, I stayed in just in case. My head did not hurt nearly as much, I could still feel the remnants of where the pain was yesterday…almost like a thunderstorm in my head, lightning bringing out flashes of pain which just yesterday persisted for over 12 hours, and which felt like they were never going to fade. I slept in until 11, which is saying a lot since even on my days off I wake up naturally between 6 and 7. I probably would have even slept later, however Thursday is the cleaning day for the apartment (of course it would be…of course it would be the day that I just want to be entirely left alone). So I woke up to a knocking on my bedroom door and was told that they needed to change the sheets…Really? Not only are you about to be in here and make noise while I’m trying to sleep and restore my health, but you are actually going to make me get out of my bed? I would have argued more had I not known that I really needed my bedding changed…yesterday I had gotten into bed straight from work because that’s how sick I was and so there was sand especially down where my feet were. Also, there was blood on my pillow from my nose. I got up to hydrate while they changed my bedding….you would have thought that they would have done my bed first and let me get right back into it…but no they did mine last…I call it the efforts to make kelly have a mental breakdown logic. Perhaps Egypt really wants me out of here…Finallly I get back into bed, wanting to just fall back asleep despite the fact that I’ve pretty much been sleeping the past 23 hours…and they start vacuuming….okay..I understand, it’s your job to clean this place once a week…but really..fuck, it’s Egypt, can’t you just wait until next week to vaccum? if you skip it out of courtesy to the ill it’s not going to make a damn difference…. there is sand and dirt everywhere, please stop stop stop stop. Yeah this really did kind of push me over the edge and I threw a little baby fit and started crying. Just those, “COME ON” tears…those can’t I get a break tears….those white flag I surrender I want off the ride tears. Those, gee I feel really sorry for myself tears. They didn’t last long because I hate crying. God I hate crying. Yesterday when I went to tell my area superviser that I wasn’t going to back out because of how sick I felt, the tears just started welling up…it just makes me feel so ridiculous…but I couldn’t even talk about not being strong enough to finish my work day without it really affecting me emotionally…sure I was also upset because I did feel really sick, but I was even more upset that I had to admit how sick I was out loud, that I had to admit that I didn’t have the energy to finish something I wanted to finish so badly yesterday.

I went down to the villa for lunch...still had no appetite...still feel worse than I thought I was feeling when I decided to walk over. Everyone says I look like death. Time to go back to bed.

2008-04-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Blog,

Whew! Let me tell you about the amazing day I had! I rolled out of bed a little late- around 2:45 a.m., and found myself hurrying to get started with the day. After eating a complete meal of organic berries, tree bark, and green tea, I did some early morning reading, and brushed up on Harold Raymonson's 30-volume essay on the migratory patterns of the Freternectis Beetle during the latter period of the middle kingdom.

It was SO fascinating, and such a quick read!

Intellectually fueled and ready for the day, I decided I'd test out the jet pack I built last night while bored, and rocketed myself over to the dig site.

On the way, I stopped to save two kittens stuck in a tree.

Before lunch, I dug up eight mummies and three new pyramids. After lunch, I stumbled upon an amazing discovery!

It turns out that the popular theory of Oompa Loompas building the pyramids is actually true. We found a buried kingdom of them- all alive, and dancing!

They were very glad to see me. So glad, in fact, that they've crowned me their queen.

Anyway, once the celebration was complete, I returned to Luxor and smoked Hukah for seven hours straight. I don't exactly remember how I got home after that...

Hmm...

Upon returning to the complex, I went on my normal workout, running three laps around the country of Egypt, and swam the Nile. All of it. And let me tell you, that river is polluted! Whew!

Good night!

Frenchie Wilcox

2008-03-29T05:54:00.001-07:00

im moving to a new apartment today

probably no internet

but im back to my own room and this place is supposed to be much nicer and without baby

dont know when i will sign back on

2008-03-28T06:21:00.001-07:00

A decorated photo I took!

As you may or may not know it is officially my Egyptian weekend. Yesterday I only worked a half day. At around 4:30 I met up with my roommate, Rebecca, and one of the site girls, Delphine, to hail a cab and head to zamalek to see the lecture by Barry Kemp. It was very very interesting. It was all about work being done at a population cemetery site at Amarna. Amarna is an amazing site because it was only briefly occupied during the reign of Ahkenaten which was roughtl 15 years. Therefore, the archaeological material can be pinpointed to a specific point in time and with that certain variables can be accounted for which normally cannot be. The cemetery work is representative of the everyday population at Amarna and the study of the human remains from the cemetery have outlined this paradox for the conditions of the community that worked and lived there. There was a documentary done which only has aired in Europe but part of the lecture confronted the ways in which the documentary omitted some important aspects of the research in the editting. However, the professors remarked that overall the documentary was actually pretty well done, just some things were misinterpretted. For example, the skeletal remains show that any individuals experienced trauma and injuries to the spinal chord and other joint breaks and fractures. Many of these kind of injuries would be typical of individuals engaged in construction labor, which makes sense since the city of amarna was completely built up only with the 15 year span of time. The conclusions were that they were engaged in a lot of hard work- but that is to say they were working long hours on large scale construction. This was miscontrued as brutal slave labor under the crack of a whip. More or less they aimed to answer questions and draw out some of the important information not included after the editting process in the documentary. The film is called The Pharoah’s Lost City, but I don’t think it will be coming to the states any time soon.

The questions that came after the lecture were mindboggling….selective hearing is an obnoxious thing. One of the topics discussed is the fact that the cemetery population was short stature (men were 157 cm, women 153 cm) and the relationship of short stature to nutritional deficiency and anemia. One of the questions they are trying to address is whether or not these deficiencies are a representation of poor living conditions at Amarna itself, or if given the fact that these effects would have been a result of malnourishment from adolescence, and therefore happened to the people moved to Amarna. The latter would perhaps account for some of the motivations Ahkenaten had for instituting a new ideological system and moving the capital in Egypt. One person asked how we know that the short heights of the population was a result of nutritional deficiencies as opposed to it just being a non-egyptian race of very short people…I dubbed this the Oompa Loompa hypothesis. Questions generally bordered on this line of ridiculosity.

After the lecture we headed over to a colleague’s place to order food and have some drinks. I myself am a vodka tonic girl, but the brits are gin drinkers. I thought I hated gin, but it turns out I do enjoy gin and tonics as well….of course that is with enough lemon and enough tonic to overpower the pine tree taste. I also ate way too much sushi, but was oh so delighted. Again this was down in Zamalek, the more upscale area of Cairo which caters to the tourists and to those with more money. It’s where the alpha market is and where a lot of the really nice hotels are. I know it may be weird to believe that there is a sushi place in Egypt, but there is! And I made sure this was a trustworthy one.

Our cab ride was pretty fun on the way back, we had a super social driver. I was with my 3 flatmates and they kept commenting on how much arabic I know and how quickly I learned it. I now know more than two of the girs who have been here for 3 or 4 seasons. And im starting to learn some French from Delphine too!

Also arriving last night was Farrah and her baby. I was the first person to wake up this morning and meet said baby. So far he seems like a pretty happy baby and does not cry, just smiles big. Okay I will even admit that he is pretty cute for a baby. But we’ll see how cute and happy he is once the temperature spikes and once we are trying to sleep through the night. I do feel very terrible though, they managed to lose all of Farrah’s luggage which has absolutely everything she needed for her and her baby. They don’t even have a change of clothes. What a way to start the season…

I did decide to not change my flight around. Instead, once I am done with everything for Khentkawes, I am going to take on a new learning project. So far I have my bearings in fauna, and now with excavation and mapping, and afterwards I can look into learning new specializations. Perhaps I will pair up with the lithics or botany specialists, maybe ceramics, or get more intensive training from the professional drawer who is due to come in at the end of April. Oh my god I’m so obsessed with learning it’s gross…

At 11:00 today Mark gave a tour of the Sphinx. In 1979 Mark did a complete 1:100 scale drawing of every stone that makes up the sphinx, as well ast the two temples before it. The sphinx took him over 2 years..it's absolutely insane.

He did his dissertation on the Sphinx and knows more information than I ever thought possible. It was a wonderful opportunity though. A select group of us was able to walk around and get closer than the general public. Though I work near the sphinx everyday and I have taken pictures of it, this was a new experience for even me. Here are some pictures I took of the sphinx and of the valley temples. Some of the images you can see clearly the levy holes in the limestone from where they were quarried.

Towards the end of the tour we were greeted by the first sand storm of the season. It got really bad by the time we were in the car and it was quite the adventure walking home form the villa. Here you can see it beginning, but when it picked up the pyramids vanished completely from view.

What a bummer to have a sand storm on our day off….this means no pool. Also the pressure from all the air and the wind has caused a wicked headache….in bed with a book for me for the rest of the day. Andddd no proof reading of this

2008-03-26T09:01:00.001-07:00

Still not too much more new to report. I have not been feeling great the past few days. Nothing serious or worry provoking, just been really tired. Heh, the only time I seem to pep up is food time.

The internet is up in the small apartment and it is pretty quick so perhaps I will get around to posting more pictures. Here is one I took way back when I was getting super ashy and dirty at the beginning of the season. It doesn’t really capture how dirty I was, as much as it captures how dirty the bathroom mirror is. My hair has a nice sandy highlight to it though.

My hair is actually beginning to take on a dreadlock like form since I only wash it about twice a week…when I take the braids out the hair just kind of stays in sections. Oh well. I’ll come home looking like I was in Jamaica and not Egypt

Today I had to start going back to some of the squares that I completed before. After more cleaning was done to the, there turned out to be more things for me to draw. There is this really long extending mudbrick wall which actually connect through the two squares I have been sketching. This is a pretty neat wall, but it requires close attention because in some areas its really difficult to determine the placement, orientation, and bonding of the bricks. The later it gets in the day, the harder it is too see as well because of the lighting. I was pretty determind to get a lot of it down though.

I’m also going to argue that databasing is a waste of time right now. I noticed today that people are altering the feature logs (the hard copy ones, not the internet ones). This is bad, because I already entered the data, and if I don’t know that changes are made, it wont get entered into the computer. When I work on site, I only work in one of 4 or 5 different areas all working from their own logs and registers…so of course I know when things change in my area, but I have no idea what happens elsewhere. It seems more logical to just enter it all at the end. I understand that its nice to have the information in a database in case anything happens to the paperwork, but we can just make copies and keep them in the folder, replacing sheets in the very end, and then entering it all. I also think this is the best idea because this way, I do not have to work on the computer when I could be working on the site. I get so bummed when I have to stay in. So that’s that.

Tomorrow is Thursday and a half day. Joy. I want to get down to the bookstore and pick up something new, but I do not know if I will or not.

Eh, that’s about it for now.

2008-03-25T06:14:00.000-07:00

Updates from Egypt:

I work

I dig

I draw

It's hot

It's dirty

I'm tired

Wash Rinse Repeat..,,actually don't bother repeating, washing and rinsing is of no use.

2008-03-23T12:37:00.001-07:00

We finally have internet in the small apartment!

Which means I will be online more, and sleeping less. Some of you may benefit from this. I probably will not! But it’s okay…

It also means I’m not glued to my computer when I am at the villa now, which is actually really nice. Tonight for example, Mark Lehner and I had a good hour long conversation about complexity theory. I wished I could contribute more, it was mainly him just talking at me…but I was just a sponge for the information. He has an essay that he is going to give me to read. I am most excited for this….a challenge that comes in perfect timing as I finished Murakami two days ago. I started this other book that was left in the donated book shelf in the Villa. It’s called “The God of Small Things.” It won the booker prize and I’ve read good things about it….and it also wasn’t something down by Dan Brown and wasn’t some generic gumshoe murder mystery like all the others.

Even last night, pre-internetness I had a very difficult time sleeping. It was very hot and for whatever reason my eyes were wide open. You would think that yesterday would have put me into a coma for how much my body went through. Alas, this was not the case and I did not feel very alert this morning.

Today the winds held off until later, so there was some amount of productivity on site. Temperature reached 103. Miserable. It is slowly supposed to start climbing down from now on with mid week returning right back to 77. Almost sounds like Michigan.

Today I was also given a new assignment. Right now I am in the process of drawing a section of a limestone wall. When drawing my squares, I more or less was drawing everything that occurred within a 5X5 meter square, and from a bird’s eye view (heh this is getting repetitious no?). A section drawing is basically drawing just one thing, at an even larger scale, from profile. So I have started working on a plan of this limestone wall so that we have on record how the wall was coursed. This involves basically drawing the face of the wall and how every stone was arranged. Before I was just drawing the top stones of the wall….now I am detailing all of the internal brickwork (or masonry work rather). This should take me a while as the wall is at least 6 meters long, and so far about 2 and a half meters in height. This is without additional clearing of back fill though. Once more sand is removed I might be dealing with something more like 4 meters. The location of this job is particularly obnoxious given the current weather conditions. You wouldn’t think it though…You would that that me crouched in the corner of two contiguous walls would be safe guarded from the wind and sand…that the walls would protect me. However the thing is, and this may be hard to describe…where the walls end at the top, that’s basically the surface of the rest of the site…The walls I’m working on lead to rooms that drop to a lower level. So basically where I’m sitting…every time the wind blows, it sweeps the sand from above and dumps it right on top of me. When driving home from site today, I could feel a layer of sand over my teeth…It was difficult to move the inside of my lips over there since my mouth was so dry.

What I wouldn’t give to be able to run my fingers through my hair…even fresh out of the shower I can’t do it…it seems I just can never wash all of the sand out. In addition to that it is just so dry. When I try, my hand gets stuck about an inch from my forehead. I feel like the way I wear my hair is both very archaeologist as well as very 1992. Haha, I think it looks cute, but I can’t help but think that I’m one of those girls walking around thinking that it’s okay to stay stuck in a decade that is not my own…maybe I’m just trying to bring it back…its retro! I wear it in a single braided ponytail with a headband. Hey so did Lara Croft right?? And then when it’s time to change it up, remove braid and instant wavy hair! Not that I ever actually do that…I can’t bear to leave my hair down to get even more tassled and tangled by the wind.

Tomorrow I will continue with my wall, and my data entry. It is only supposed to be 98. Only heh. And it’s Monday…which is almost midweek for us. Only 4 more days until the “weekend.” Only one day off this week…Thursday night I think I am going to go see this lecture by Barry Kemp at the SCA. It should be great!

2008-03-22T11:05:00.003-07:00

I have a fun game for you all to play from now on…

It’s called:

Guess what the tone of Kelly’s Blog is going to be

It’s really quite simple…before you go ahead and link up to my blog, check what the weather was like in Cairo during my waking and working hours…

Now don’t just look at the temperature…because I can tolerate the heat, but take particular notice to the wind speed, and while you’re at it, be my guest and check out the humidity too…I’m about sick of all the idiots out there who say, “Oh but it’s a dry heat…”

Dry heat my ass. Look at this photo of Giza and Cairo

Notice the community encroaching on the desert plateau. The desert and the pyramids are a sandy island surrounded by endless buildings, roads, and Cairo traffic. I assure you there are people and vegetation abundant throughout cairo and it is plenty humid…no it’s not the amazon or anything, but it’s not so simple as being “dry heat.” The sun is so intense you actually feel as though you should be moving away from a flame. When you pass by a window it feels like a furnance is filtering its hot breath straight at you….

Walking throughout the site today, I seriously would not have been surprised to see a fierce fire hissing dragon fighting off some arthurian knights no less than five feet away from me…I mean two things by this…one, it was so hot that I felt it possible that the only thing that could really account for it is a creature that exhales fire….two, it was so hot that I seriously could have hallucinated such a creature into existence.

What’s worse, is that the pollution is so terrible in Cairo, that all of the smog just traps the heat in even more. So again…dry heat my ass.

But this is all besides the point….No matter what I knew coming into this that I would be dealing with hot weather., Today it was 99 and tomorrow it is going to be 100, however even those are a bit outrageous for mid March in Egypt.

But the heat isn’t even the problem…sure it’s not very comfortable, but it’s the wind that is unbearable. Trying to walk uphill to the tent, against the blowing wind and sand had my pulse in a frenzy by the time I got to the top, and I’m someone in great shape. The wind made getting any work done nearly impossible…at one point, the wind was so strong it ripped my beautiful feature forms from my folder and they went flying across the desert plateau….everyone dropped what they were doing to help me fetch them before they scattered into obscurity….luckily, I retrieved them all…but even that did not supress the rage in my heart that I harbored for this wind. I wanted to give mother nature a good ole punch in the ovary…Actually I just wanted to punch anything. Throughout the day, Egyptian desert ants were constantly crawling over me…in my hair, up my arms, down my shirt…I would flick them off and the wind would whip them right back at me. I would pick them up between my fingers wanting to crush their little exoskeletons so badly…inverebrate pieces of shit…but I would just throw them off, despite the fact that such efforts were futile.

They shut the site down at 1:00, a half hour before lunch even starts simply because nothing could get done with the strong winds. We were all put on duty back in the Villa. I am the offical data entry person, the work of which I have yet to even begin, so that is actually going to take up the rest of my afternoons for the next few weeks. I started today though, and its fairly easy…basically just taking information from the feature logs and the bag registers and entering them into the online database….the problem with doing it today was that I was already aching with irritability from the morning. I was exhausted…Peter described me was walking in with the slouched shoulders of a defeated soldier. As I entered the bathroom to wash my hands, I saw again that I manged to have goggles of clean skin where my glasses had been, the rest of me dusty, silty, sandy. Dirt clinged the peach fuzz between my eyebrows granting me a look that would have given Frida Kahlo a run for her money. On top of this…having proclaimed much too soon my immunity to mosquitos, I managed to get around 30 bites, all between my ankles and mid calves. Itchy, sweaty, dirty, exhausted, and now I have to plug and chug numbers into a computer, over a wireless signal whistling “I think I can I think I can I think I can..” Every entry takes forever to upload…and I sit…watching the bar inch along thinking…”yep…today I hate Egypt and wish I was somwhere else.”

I did database stuff until I thought I would tear my own skin off in irritable frustration. I peaced out a half out early…I knew exactly where I needed to go. True I walked down to the Meridien, but not to jump in the pool…but to walk straight into the gym there and jump on the treadmill. 5 miles in 21 minutes (told you I’m still in good shape)…of course this is not really the same as it would have been running on real ground…but you still get a sense for the magnitude of frustration I had to get out…and all because of dealing with a day of utter discomfort.

Leaving I finally felt calm. On my way there I really thought I would snap…start screaming profanities at the hissers and the honkers…walking home I found my way back to the smile that I normally offer the locals on my walks to and fro.

Then as I unlocked the gate to my apartment, I remembered that tomorrow is Easter and got pissed all over again.

Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be worse…whispers of khamaseen hang as heavy as the heat slung from the sun. Khamaseen is arabic for fifty…fifty days that make up the sandstorm season.

Will we see it?

A sand storm?

Time will tell….

2008-03-21T00:32:00.000-07:00

The internet still wont let me load mutlitple images at a time but so i can add some color to the blackness that is my blog, here are some from my collection. The Big Ones for which you will be more properly introduced with time (with any hope)

Luxor Temple

Karnak Temple

Hatepshuts Mortuary Temple

Temple at Dier el Medina

Rameseum

Surprisingly enough, I woke up earlier this morning than I did yesterday morning despite the fact that I stayed up much later last night than I had the night before last…I suppose a lot of it comes down to how you spend your day. Since yesterday was relatively relaxing, compared to the work day I had Wednesday, I had more energy to maintain myself into a later hour, yet no need to compensate for it in the morning. Instead when this morning came, at around 5:50, my internal clock pulled me from my sleep…which is just as well because I was dreaming that I was mapping and taking elevations anyway…yeah it’s gotten to that point, where I work so much that I dream about it too.

So I woke up at 5:50 this morning and attempted to tip toe from my room as quietly as possible, out to the balcony to watch the sunrise and do some reading and writing. However, I managed to trip over my cell phone cord which sent my phone flying across the room where it gracefully met the door with a thud. It was probably the most amount of noise I could have made given the set up of the room and the layout of objects that I could have potentially knocked over…of course when tripping over the cord, I myself could have fallen to the floor and that would have made all kinds of noise, so perhaps not the most amount of noise that could have been made. Either way, point is, I think I woke my roommate up. But I didn’t feel that bad because she didn’t go to bed last night until after 3, and she woke me up when she came in…I’m usually someone that can turn over and fall right back asleep so it doesn’t really matter to me if something stirs my sleep, in fact my own bladder will probably do it at some point throughout the night as it usually does. Hopefully she is the same way. If not, well…it’s not my fault she’s jet lagged and not synched with everyone else.

My stomach wasn’t feeling tip top this morning so I waited to make some coffee (heh read: Nescafe). I don’t think it was a bacterial thing but I had some yogurt anyway, which is supposed to help with that kind of thing. I think its actually from consuming close my weight in baba ghanouge yesterday. For those not in the know, baba ghanouge is roasted eggplant which is similar to hummus in terms of consistency and spreadability. It is probably one of my favorite things to eat, especially out here. It’s amazingly tasty and dirt cheap. It’s not really that bad for you or anything, though with everything moderation is key. It was a lot of oil in it so I think that just may have given me a little tummy ache this morning. I seriously had like a bowl full of it last night…

Yesterday morning by comparison, I did not wake up until 7:00. I made myself some breakfast, did some reading and some writing and at around noon I crashed my favorite five star hotel pool.

Here I took a snapshot of my ridiculously tan hands and dirty archaeologist fingernails. I guess in the photo the contrast isn't nearly as strong even though I'm wearing a light pink shirt.

I remember my dad always had tan hands too….and a really tan left arm from hanging his elbow out of the window when he would drive. Haha I just thought, oh man my hands cold rival the dark olive tone of my dad’s…and then I thought, yes well especially now since his hands haven’t seen sunlight in 8 years…oh that’s not funny, but it is…and it’s the honest path my brain took. Sometimes things like that have to be funny.

While at the pool, I swam and continued to cruise through my Murakami, only 160 pages left! While reading and winding through the labyrinth that is this novel, it struck me that I had a craving to smoke some hookah, so after a bit, I walked home, showered and got ready to go to one of my favorite restaurants here, Felfella! I wrote about this place with much excitement last year. I walked in at about 4:00 and the place was pretty dead, I was the only person there. I wondered how strange it was going to be for this little foreign girl to go in and order a water pipe to smoke on her own. So long as they are paid, nothing should really seem too strange, they should be happy to accommodate anyone with money. I walked in the restaurant, grabbed a menu and waited at the table of my choice, one under a nice arrangement of trees and near a garden. When the waiter came and took my order, he did question me three times about the things I wanted. “You sure?” “That’s it?” I pretended to be a pro and interjected with any arabic I could throughout the order. As I anticipated, all of the men in the restaurant were looking at me and I just, again, pretended like this was a normal activity of mine,…hookah smoking, with a book and some baba ghanouge and fresh bread. It’s not as though I wasn’t a regular here, last years… at least for dining. But of course they probably didn’t remember that. They brought out my hookah and lit it up for me. Egyptian hookah is much much stronger than it is in the states…determined not to make a fool of myself, I had to stagger my first inhale and exhale to avoid the coughing that immediately wanted to rip from my lungs and out of my mouth. I learned to take smaller hits. That’s not the only way it was stronger though. My original envisioning of the afternoon had me sitting outside under the shade, smoking, relaxing and reading my book…however this did not happen, this could not happen. I would try and read and just keep reading the same paragraph over and over again….like my thought process reached the density equivelent of jell-o. I still kept trying to read either way, tried to look comfortable and in my own world independent of the stares and whispers of the baffled workers- and with the buzz of the hookah I created and maintained that world pretty successfully.

After a bit the manager came out and introduced himself and started asking me about where I was from and how I was enjoying Egypt. I explained to him that I worked here and that I lived in the Villa down the street with Dr. Mark and the other doctors working at Giza. The manager then offered me a Turkish Coffee which I could not refuse since I had never tried one. It was okay, whatever they use in it has a mild licorice taste and I’m not a big fan of licorice. The pick up of the caffeine countered the weigh down of the hookah and so I was feeling back to normal and decided to head home,

After I spent some time at the Villa getting my fill of wireless, some of the girls that I work with on site walked in and we had small talk…I mentioned what I spent the day doing and one of the girls commented on how jealous she was that I went out and smoked hookah, and seemed even impressed that I went out and did these things all on my own instead of just sitting on the internet all day at the villa. That being said, everyone decided that they wanted to go hit up Felfella for some drinks and hookah smoking themselves. Naturally because I was sitting right there, I got asked if I wanted to go despite the fact that I had already been there. Again, in an effort to not socially isolate myself, I went along with them.

When we got to Felfella the manager was excited to see me back with with my entourage (it was me, amanda, and amelia (the girls I have been working with on site), and delphine (girl working on water systems research) and claire(maryann’s assistant). He greeted me with a handshake and showed us to a great table…suddenly I’m a celebrity at felfella with the wait staff all coming up, calling me by name, and musing at the fact that I was already back. I wasn’t hungry since I had just been there earlier, so I got another Turkish coffee, lettting them know not to make it as sweet this time.

The evening stretched on. I did get a certain satisfaction knowing that I had established some personal connections with the people at the restaurant! Afterall, this place is awesome, and to be on a first name basis with everyone there when I have only been there a day is likewise, awesome. Egyptian restaurants can be rather slow about giving you your bill…perhaps they hope you will order more if you stay longer. I looked across for the manager and gave the international sign for “check please.” (Richard taught me this, you pretend like you are signing a receipt in the air..perhaps everyone knows this it IS the international sign for check, and if you didn’t know before, well you do now!). Haha however when I did this, the manager shakes his head at me, to let me know that he wont give us our check yet. He walks over and I accuse him of holding us hostage. He asks why we must go, the night is young. I say we are tired. Finally we get our bill, pay, and then as we are walking out he hands me a small flower. Very Egyptian…much like the guy who gave me a stuffed camel on my birthday. I don’t really think anything of it (besides…oh man free hookah the rest of the season! Actually that’s not even an issue…hookah in the states costs anywhere from 8-15 dollars depending on where you are…here it is less than a dollar). I get back to the Villa and hop back online since earlier I left abruptly to satisfy for myself once and for all my regards for this going out with everyone business…Fidgetting like I do, I kept twisting the flower around. There was a rolled piece of paper along the short stem which I didn’t think anything of when the flower was given to me, and truth be told I still wasn’t thinking anything of it except I saw a dead bug and I was going to take the paper and use it to pick up the bug and throw it away. When I opened it up, there was the managers name and phone number. Ha! I thought it was hilarious. Flattering sure, but really quite amusing. He looked way too professionally dressed for a restaurant manager/owner. Definitely the face of the operation but never getting his hands dirty in the kitchen. He wore a well tailored suit of charcoal and a pale yellow tie and his hair was slicked back. If he were auditioning for a movie, he would be your typecast carsalesmen with a sneaky agenda. But in reality he seemed genuinely nice…wont be getting any phone calls from me or anything haha, but as I said, I consider it a pretty big bonus to know the big people at my favorite restaurant here.

The rest of my day for today includes….pool lounging, Murakami reading, and email corrosponding. Unless anything exciting comes up, I will abstain from extensive blogging since its everyone elses weekend and since now half of my days work will be made of computer databasing which is never interesting to write about.

Naturally my thoughts will be family heavy on Easter as I am sure everyone else will be thinking of me too and wishing I was closer to home, both to make sure I am okay, and just for that added sense of comfort that everyone around us is safe and okay. But think of it this way…I really haven’t been home for Easter most years…in high school easter was during spring break so I was gone junior and senior year, and in college, Easter was so close to exams that I really just couldn’t come home. At least this year on Easter I wont have to balance the pressure of exams and research papers and instead I will be doing the job that I love, free to think about the people that I love and miss without having to put away those thoughts in order to be productive in a study setting.

2008-03-20T01:38:00.000-07:00

Hurray for Holiday Weekends! No I don’t get Easter off, but today is a Muslim holiday and since the site wont have any of the inspectors or security there, we can’t work either. So I get an actual weekend this week! Yesterday on site I threw my first archaeological fit. I’ve been working on this 5x5 meter drawing for the past 3 days now and it is just a lot of detailed stone and pottery debris…also I have to keep adjusting my measurement squares because of the variation in elevation. Normally, you can just use 4 measuring tapes and outline the 5x5 and measure points inward from the tape (this is called offset measuring). However, because I have walls and collapse and just a whole lot of other things going on, I can’t measure from the original outline of the square without the slopes throwing me off…so I have to keep moving inward and setting up smaller units to offset from. Either way…we are talking 30 hours that I have spent drawing this plan, and yesterday, unbeknownst to me, it was already 4:45 and time to start packing up…when I was told what time it was, my reaction was:

“I CANNOT BELIEVE I AM NOT DONE WITH THIS STUPID SQUARE YET!”
Then I threw down my board and chucked my pencil across the site….

I did it moreso for comedic value, I didn’t really snap or anything, and everyone did laugh, but I did feel a single tear of legitimate frustration well up behind my sunglasses. I know this is only my second square ever, and people probably don’t expect me to speed through it, I’m a beginner afterall…but when people around you are stressing about how much needs to get done, and you feel like as the newbie, you aren’t pulling your weight, it definitely has its effect. However earlier when I was standing with my board, plotting points and consistently changing from pencil to eraser to pencil again, Mark walked by and said, “You look like you’ve been doing this for years.” That helps..at least I’m not a neon sign of incompetance to the people in charge. Everyone does reassure me that, things get done when they get done..apparently I am an obvious mass of tension about my work and it reads loud and clear that I am dissatisfied with how long it takes me…but no one wanted to take on the square that I am doing because of the the detail and contouring, so I am at least going to tell myself that it would have taken anyone a while to do…no I am not even going to tell myself that, it doesn’t make me feel any better.

I am kind of hitting that first pivot in my time abroad. It hardly seems that I have already been gone a month (allbeit February was a short month, but it was only short by a day this year). I cannot believe how fast the time has gone, but similarly, there is still so much time to go. This pending that I stay out here until the 15th of May, which I am pretty sure I wont wind up doing. It does depend though, I think depsite the fact that the original plan was to close the site on April 9th (when booking my ticket I told we were closing at the end of April and to arrange to stay 2 weeks past the end)- now it seems like they are going to try and request that we stay open until at least the 15th of April, or probably as late as they can….that gets really tricky with permits and payment etc. But even 6 extra days is 60 extra hours on site so staying until the 15th, especially with the pressure of the close approaching deadline, we would probably get a ton completed. I don’t really know because I have not really worked on sites before, but I imagine it’s much like anything else where a majority of the work just really comes together at the end. The heat could also be a problem though….every morning the past few weeks I’ve been trying to bite my tongue when it came to complaining about how bitter cold and windy the early hours were, knowing full well that I would be missing those cool mornings within a few weeks time…Right now, when I leave my apartment I am wearing pants, long sleeve shirt, short sleeve shirt over it, jacket or sweatshirt, and a vest, and a scarf….I pout about having to take my shoes off because my feet get so cold (and really I leave them on for as long as possible and just don’t walk over the mudbrick walls which are more or less becoming powder before our very eyes…plus Mark never takes his shoes off…). I huddle and hunch over my drawing and wait for the sun to move over the site. As it has been, around 9 oclock the vest comes off, and then right after second breakfast, 10:40, my jacket, and at about 11:15 my sleeves get pushed up and the heat is in full force.

Well summer she is fast approaching and there is no longer the gradual delayering of clothing. True at 5:45 am I am still cold enough on the walk from my apartment to the villa that I still pile on the layers, but it only takes about 20 minutes to a half hour on site before everything is coming off. Yesteday, before 8:00 am I was rockin the cargo pants and a short sleeve shirt with no windy morning to speak of…going off of the other girls on site, I guess short sleeve shirts are becoming more and more “acceptable” at least we haven’t been advised that we are deing disrespectful or anything…so until that happens I guess I will take advantage. Even now, we are talking t-shirts though, so the sleeves still cover all of my shoulders and about midway to my elbows. I cycle between a green Dondero Student Senate shirt and those white fruit of the loom undershirts. Naturally the white ones get pretty dirty pretty fast, but it was just easiest to throw a pack of them in my suitcase than to pick and choose between my other t-shirts.

Anyway, the days are getting hotter, and they are getting hotter earlier. Yesterday I stood up after kneeling for a long time and there were two wet spots behind my knees. Hello sweaty Kelly! I feel bad for my Auntie M who is driven mad with discomfort in the extreme heat…because as much as my family doesn’t think about it now, there will come a time when they have to at least visit me on site for a little while…when I am running my own dig, and have more frequent flyer miles racked up than I know what to do with, you guys are coming and experiencing this too! I don’t care if you like home, and never really aspired to travel across the world, everyone’s family comes and sees it at some point…and I know my dad would come visit me on site in a heartbeat and that he would be VERY ANGRY if no one came to see me when he couldn’t…so one day you will have to at least experience this with me for a week…which is why, Auntie M I feel most bad for you because you hate the heat so much! But you will just have to come early in the season when its still cool. And Aunt Marcia…you just get a lot of valium and Xanax to make it through the flight over water :) I’ll make sure you both get first class seats…haha oh this is laughable, the broke archaeologist making promises with money she does not have…

My roommate did get in a few nights ago. She’s from texas and she does the GIS work (computerized mapping…something I am actually interested in as well). I’m not sure how old she is, but she is older than me and older than the roommate I had last year. It’s weird to adjust to having a roommate after I have not had one this whole time…suddenly I need to be conscious of turning on lights when I enter and leave the room, I need to make less noise when I am looking for all of the things that I am constantly losing….
I was relieved to find out from my roommate that she only washes her hair once a week while out here…so I’m not the only dirtball abstaining. I guess that’s the thing about the drinking water here….it is actually safe to drink, but because of all the chlorine you would never want to drink it from the tap. When you walk out of the shower you smell like a swimming pool.

Lets see what else.

While I was in Luxor I had e-mailed a professor from UCLA that I as interested in talking to and potentially working with. I had not heard back from her, so I was uncertain whether she was in the field, whether she overlooked my e-mail thinking it was spam, or just forgot to respond simply because she’s busy. Either way, I asked Richard, who knows her really well, she got her PhD from Michigan, to e-mail her on my behalf. He sent me a copy of the e-mail and it was really positive, so hopefully I am one step closer to an acceptance letter from there. Now that my geographic interests are broadening I might start considering more seriously some other programs that I was not before really looking into. Michgan and UCLA will definitely be my top two, with me not really counting on Michigan since I am from their undergrad pool. I don’t know though…I’m kind of feeling if for whatever reason I don’t get into my top 2 or 3 that I apply to, that I wont settle for another program, I will just take another year off, keep working in the field and getting more experience, and then reapplying…lots of time to figure it out, we’ll see. Hopefully the response from the professor at UCLA is just as positive as the introduction Richard gave.

Wow I wrote a lot today…that’s what happens when you wake up at 7 am, and there aren’t any other real distractions around you.

I don’t have any big plans for my 2 days off. It’s weird…normally I am used to keeping to myself and therefore not really being aware of the fact that I don’t fit into the groups that form around me…but here I thought I was definitely making more of an effort to be social, but in retrospect I guess that is only relative to how I usually am and perhaps I am still quite reserved…It seems that I have managed to not really fit into any group dynamic that has come together here, which is probably a result of many things like age, experience, job, etc…though probably a little bit of my own doing as well. There are all the older academics who have been working on this project for years and years. They all basically hide out on their own, or tend to administrative things, sponsors or international teams, report writing and whatnot. Most of them are lab specialists this season who have assistants as well who work in the labs. The people who work in the labs, I don’t really know as well, because they spend all day in the labs and not on site, and they aren't the same people that were here last year when I was. And then the people who work on site, have been working together for some time now and already know one other...though there is one brand new girl from the states, but she has been excavating for years, so she kind of relates to them more than I do by way of knowing what she's doing, I guess? Where is this going... The other day, at some point I had overheard some of the lab crew and some of the site crew talking about going out for some drinks for Wednesday night since we had Thursday off. However no one ever mentioned it to me or invited me to go…and it struck me as odd, because I couldn’t really think of why I wouldn’t get invited to go, but at the same time I didn’t really want to go anyway….I suppose I was just surprised because I thought I had been coming across as someone interested in the social outings…but then again, why would I be coming across that way, if the truth was I wasn’t interested?? Does this make sense? Perhaps it makes more sense this way…when I’m on site with other crew members I am laughing and joking and we are all exchanging stories, so it is very much a dialogue and interaction that I am actively participating in….so I would just assume that I would be incorporated into situations where this could take place outside of work…but then the more I thought about it, the more I realized I do really just maintain my indepedence outside of working hours…I walk to and from the villa for breakfast and dinner by myself, I don’t really wait on anyone else at my apartment, I go to the Meridian most days after work and before dinner to unwind, and if I’m not catching up on the internet, I have a book in front of me. So I guess maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that through my own crafted schedule, I am overlooked when plans are made…and I certainly shouldn’t mope about it, because I prefer to be reading and lost in my introvertedness…haha but part of me feels like I am that odd little hermit…but if that’s what everyone thinks and that’s how I am written off as, then oh well, they are missing out…because I am also a very entertaining hermit. They did wind up asking me if I wanted to go just before they were leaving, and I probably would have if I wasn’t all the way at the Villa and in my pajamas.

Okay, that will end my epic for today...that should do you all for a bit in terms of updates on my end. I'm healthy physically, mentally, emotionally etc. Though I am starting to feel intellectually unchallenged...I wonder what kind of thing I can start doing to challenge myself more. I guess I could start that whole GRE studying thing....

2008-03-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

I had a dizzying sleep last night…I kept feeling like my body was growing heavier and heavier and that I was sinking into my matress…apparently someone slipped some lsd in my dinner last night…Also, every time I woke up my neck and back would ache, probably from the hours I spend hunched over measuring and drawing…

In general I find that I have very vivid dreams while I am out here. Not really sure why. The other morning I was definitely bummed that I had to wake up and abandon my dream where I was playing Paint it Black on guitar hero… but it was a frustrating dream too because while I was super excited to play guitar hero, the buttons were different and I was stumbling over a song that I normally do okay in! wow the things manifest themselves in your subsconcious….

Today it wasn’t nearly as windy on site as it has been, so I could definitely feel the heat more. Most of the site crew stayed at the Villa in the afternoon to catch up on paper work. My personal paperwork, for my plans is done as much as it can be done for right now. I am probably going to have to stay in tomorrow though to start entering logs into the database. A lot of times it seems that everyone likes having paper work as an excuse to stay at the villa in the afternoons…I personally love being in the field and get disappointed if no one else wants to go back. Today only Mark, me, and the inspector went back to site. I continued planning my second square which is super super detailed so it is taking me a while to get through. I hope I finish it tomorrow.

I’ve come to realize that there is yet another sacrifice I need to make while living here…and it’s kind of gross, and perhaps I should just keep it to myself. The sun and the wind are bad enough on my hair, but it’s the water that is really tearing it apart. The water here has so so much chlorine(among other things I’m sure). I really just cannot wash it in the water everyday. Normally I am one to have really oily hair but you would never know it the looks of me now. My hair is like straw. As someone who plays in the dirt and sand all day, the prospects of not washing it on a daily basis do not thrill me, but neither does having to come home and chop off all of my damaged hair. I’m going to try and avoid washing it every day, and just keep it covered in my bandanas to avoid getting as much sand and dirt in it as possible… however that never seems to accomplish month and my hair always winds up looking much lighter in color by mid day. It’s my inner blonde dying to be rereleased.

In other unsanitary commentary, I’m going to take this time to talk about some girl things, so boys who “wah wah hate it when girls talk about their periods wah wah” avert your eyes. I’m due to start my period any day now and given the bathroom accomodations on site…add this to the list of things that currently don’t thrill me. Last time I was here, I could go seek out my own private spot to use the bathroom, or use the the built one they had next to the store room. I usually opted to find my own clean spot and claim it….it was easy to hide from any potential viewers within the field of mastabas. However at KKT, there is no such hiding place…it is open flat land which means I am forced to use one of the two out houses constructed on site. Why are these outhouses more digusting than the others? Well let me tell you…it is because I have to share them with about 50 Egyptian men who all seem like they need to meet some deuce dropping quota…forget the fact that I have to constantly be waiting for the grunting man to finish ahead of me…more or less there is shit everywhere. I don’t even want to think about what could possibly be richocheting back at me when I’m forced to squat over the hole in the floor. Girls should not have to aim in a hole that is only 3 inches in diameter…it defies logic. For whatever reason also, I’m the only, person, besides the Egyptian men, who ever has to use the bathroom…everyone else just holds it or doesn’t have to go because they don’t drink nearly as much water. I drink more water than anyone else on site and I know for a fact that if you aren’t peeing every 4 hours, you aren’t drinking enough. So for me, there’s no holding it, and having to go and use these horrible bathrooms is just reality…unfortunately I’m the only one that seems to endure it on site. Seriously I don’t think any one else has used the bathroom once. But the bottom line is that I’m just going to feel ten times even more gross when my period hits…there aren’t even waste baskets in these outhouses…

This entry is pretty gross I probably shouldn’t even post it!

I also found out today that the fertilizer used here contains human fecal matter…that’s pretty rancid. I eat a lot of the fruits and vegetables here and never get sick, so my stomach is pretty much tolerant of it, and I can’t just not eat them…people on projects get things like scurvy that way. It is really gross though.

Oh well…let this be your lesson for sure…archaeology is certainly has its down falls. But..I’m still here, and still have no intentions of giving it up any time soon. For a while I was actually unsure about whether or not I would ever want to run my own project…I can only imagine how stressful it can be, but a lot of the times I can’t help but think that I would just be good at it…and there aren’t a lot of things that I take on and say “I know I would kick ass doing this”…usually I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing and just wind up surprising myself and randomly doing okay or not ruining something…but running a project is something that I think I could do….but we will see. Running a project a lot of times means you are tending to far more administrative things and therefore can’t be in the field nearly as much. It is all a lot to consider and someone still has to go get their PhD first….

2008-03-17T11:19:00.001-07:00

Never underestimate the glory that is putting on a fresh clean pair of socks….it seriously is one of the most pleasurable parts of my day after standing in the sand without shoes. Sliding those crisp, sand free socks onto my toes…it is something I take great joy in...however today, every new bundle of “clean” socks I opened poofed a sand cloud at me..ugh, I know I live in the desert, and that this should be of no surprise…but it’s just when you think you are getting adjusted that you want to scream about these little things…WHY MUST EVERYTHING I OWN BE SHROUDED IN SAND?

Today I finished planning one square and began another. As I have described, this is a super long process since I have to measure the dimensions of everything! So in my squares that I have been working on, I have been drawing some limstone walls…so I have had to measure every stone and draw it proportionally. It takes a long time but I think I am getting quicker at it…everyone else only just now informed me of this wonderful tool known as a planning frame, which basically allows you to lay a large grid frame over your feature so that you can draw things by eye quicker….we’ll see how helpful it is tomorrow, but I’m surprised everyone waited so long to tell me about it since we really need to be getting work done as quickly as possible.

Because we have so much still to get done before April 9th (when excavations end) the hours seems to be flying by…race against the clock. Oh and the paper work OH GOD THE PAPER WORK…it just keeps accumulating and accumulating. It may be the case that I have less and less time to write since my attention will be needed elsewhere, but we will see.

In other news: I get a roommate tomorrow. Its not the baby…yet…that fucker comes the 27th. Last time my experience with my roommate was pretty great, but I had one from the start…now I’ve gotten really into my nightly routine, reading and falling asleep early. We’ll see how it goes.

Okay, I am super tired and the internet is really frustrating me.

Night.

2008-03-15T21:41:00.001-07:00

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.

2008-03-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Happy St. Patricks Day

Today was great.

But I am swamped with work...and really too disgustingly dirty for words. I'm going to start assuming that you don't check my blog on the weekends and that Monday you just catch up....so..I will just write this later tonight and post it tomorrow!

Cheers!

2008-03-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

I’m pretty sure that across every time zone it is no longer my birthday…which is sad, but only 364 more days until the next one. It was kind of weird not hearing any of the voices from my family but I did get a plethora of emails and messages which ranks a close second. My mom doesn’t have a phone but I did try to call her neighbor to get a hold of her. Aside from probably wanting to talk to me on my birthday I also realized that she really hadn’t heard anything from me since I left so she might want to at least know that I am safe. I left a message on her neighbor’s voicemail so hopefullly she gts it. Despite the fact that we did go out and have a nice time last night, it certainly is not the same celebrating your birthday with people who barely know you. They don’t really make a big deal about you or anything, and well…let’s face it it’s always nice to have a day when you are a big deal. But I am used to being swamped with home work and midterms around my birthday so it was nice to be absolved from that stress.

Without fail, I wake up every morning at around 4:58, exactly 2 minutes before my alarm is set to go off. Man internal clocks are weird. Today I only managed to sleep in until 6:00. Just like last Friday though, I opened my eyes and immediately felt tired aniticipating the fact that I go right back to work tomorrow. I tell myself it’s a short week though to try and keep my energy up.

Once I finished feeling grumpy about the fact that I will be tomorrow 24 hours later, I got up and cleaned my room. Even though we have people that clean the rooms, and I’m sure we pay them very well and they are actually quite grateful for the job, I still can’t help but cringe at the seemingly colonial tone to it all. Stemming from that, I finally asked one of the area supervisers on site why some of the Egyptians ask me so many questions and tell me everything before they are going to do it as if I know any better than they do about what is going on (especially since they have been through a season of field school out here). He said it all harks back to colonialism…the sheer fact that I am an American implies to them that I am in charge. Naturally its one thing if they need assistance with something that requires two people, or if they think I may have some sort of opinion, but they will check in with me before signing out new feature numbers and things of that nature. Finally I let them know that I’m not someone they have to check in with or answer to…it didn’t really make much of a difference though. Oh well.

I did spend the day out by the pool. It was quite the arrangement trying to put on sunscreen. Elbows down got spf 30 while elbow to shoulders got SPF 15 in an effort to somewhat even out the color of my arms. It worked a little bit. But I still look like a doll with mismatched limbs. My hands are super tan, and my arms just get lighter and lighter as you go up, my torso and chest are pretty much pale and my face is pretty bronzed...but that could be just dirt still lodged in my pores.

By about 3:15 I was pretty exhausted so I walked back to the villa. I was hissed at by some people on my way home and that made my grumpy. Here it is 90 degrees out, I’m fully covered, aiming to be as respectful and modest as possible, intending full well to be polite if anyone talks to me, and yet I’m still hissed at in disapproval. At least it was a short walk. Last night when I was walking home from the villa after going out, I was also harassed by a group of men, however then I was being followed by security guards so I felt safe…but sometimes you just can’t win…I had my head scarf and everything, but I’m still the foreigner trying to live in a culture whose perspectives on Americans and westerners will always be mixed.

So many ups and downs, fortunately more ups than downs.

Well i should probably get some rest, more work starts tomorrow, and its supposed to be a hot one...grr..night

Thursday March 13th

2008-03-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

Thank you so far, as well as in advance for all birthday wishes. Except for you Auntie M...who said that you remember where you were 22 years ago today...which I am sure you do remember that because you would have been celebrating my first birthday...but I think you were referring to TWENTY THREE years ago when you were dealing with the wrath that was my mother in her near 24 hours of labor. Sorry to bust your bubble...and make you feel older, but I am 23 and not 22! But hey, I might as well just start lying about it now anyway.

Being in a time zone which is 6 hours ahead of home, -and 9 or 10 hours ahead of another not so important individual :) - only means that I really get to enjoy special treatment for that much longer!

So far my day has been pretty solid. The weather is perfect! I am loving my work, but enjoying my half day off…I am going out tonight to celebrate my birthday and until then I get to curl up in bed and get lost in my book.

Today I finished everything- all sampling all sketching in cross section and in profile- all measuring, elevation recordings everything!- for the feature I have been working on. Yay!

as I already mentioned, today was additionally awesome because we only worked a half day. Ending at one thirty instead of five really makes all the difference. Further, knowing that I have tomorrow off just gives me all sorts of energy. Next week will be amazing too because Thursday is a muslim holiday and since the guards and many other people required to be on site while we work are muslim, we get the day off. So next week I get Thursday and Friday off!

Plus I have even more exciting news!

Yes more!

Guess who is not filling out feature forms for quite a bit?? If you guessed me, then you get a gold star! Contrary to my original understanding- that once I got a taste of digging I would be put right back on paperwork duty- I actually get to excavate more starting Saturday! I will be excavating a thick thick mudbrick wall, removing the top meters in order to more clearly see the coursing underneathe. Keeping in mind that the feature that I just dealt with was a small 1.5 x 1.5 square section took me a week to complete, this wall should really take up a good chunk of time and I will learn much much from it. And what about after that? Finally back to the feature forms? NOPE! I get to plan my own 10x10 meter square…I get to determine and assign my own feature numbers and make up more forms that need to be done, and suggest whether or not some areas of it need to be excavated (though that does not necessarily mean I will be listened to, afterall I’m not a superviser or anything). This should take me a really long time to do since I will have to sketch everything at a 1:20 scale. Basicallly what you do is you take a square, with grid pegs at each corner, all 4 of the pegs 10 meters apart. You take 4 measuring tapes, stretching them out to every grid peg so that you have an outline of the square, measured in meters. From the tapes you can measure everything from within the square and plot it on graph paper. So for example if I am standing between two grid pegs, 10 meters apart, and there is a mudbrick wall within the square….I can find where the wall starts, look at the tape and see where it is relative in the square. So if I look down and the wall begins 4.5 meters from the peg on the south east corner of the square, I would stop at 4.5 meters, and then from there, measure how far away the wall is from the measuring tape ( say it is 2 meters from the tape). I would then plot a point on my grid paper at 4.5 meters (x axis say), and 2 meters y axis. And then, since it’s a wall, I woul measure another point at 4.5 meters to show how thick it is. In a 1:20 scale plan, each centimeter square on the grid equals 20 meters. For my section excavation drawing from today I drew it 1:10 so each centimeter square was 10 meters.

Following this trend, a 1:100 scale is each cetimeter square being 100 meters. So here is a portion of a 1:100 sketch I did at the very beginning. This is just one done in my notebook that I keep and write in everyday. The official sketches go on fancy mylar paper

Oh and here is an example of a feature form!

As you can imagine, measuring all of these points takes a while, especially if you have a lot of features. You have to measure everything that looks different essentially…every wall, every floor space, every patch of debris, any change in sediment, so if one area is crushed limestone, and then it meets a patch of silty ash, or alluvial mud…you have to recreate what you see exactly on the ground and record it to scale, noting slopes and edges and everything you can think of…imagine it this way…I need to draw this assuming that no one may never get to see the square again…because in archaeology you are doing basically doing one of two things. One, you are either documenting everything because as more time goes on, the remains will continue to weather and errode and disappear. Even at this site, we are talking about some features which were meters high in the 1930s and are now only centimeters high. Two, if you excavate any part of it, you are going to destroy it yourself..hacking it into pieces so that you can see something underneathe, or so that you can ship off portions to a specialist like what I did with my past feature. Again, its all very tedious and time consuming, but I am looking forward to it.

In non work news:

Tonight I am going out to dinner with some of the girls, and then out to an Egyptian jazz bar for some cocktails. I am QUITE intrigued to see what an Egyptian jazz bar is like…but alcohol and live music always seems to generate some good times, and here it may even conjure up a fun story.

That’s going to wrap it up for today. So no worries, everything is good…I’m not isolated and lonely on my birthday, and tomorrow I am going to be at Le Meridien sittin by the pool! No reason to be feelin sorry for me at all ☺

Wedneday March 12th

2008-03-12T10:18:00.001-07:00

Another fairly standard day though some exciting stuff.

First off I finished digging my feature! I actually dug a bit further than I needed to (read: was supposed to) but it was okay...the cross section gave me some really great layering to look at. Now I just need to finish up some sketches of it and it's all done! I wound up bagging 330 liters of ash and silt :( Today I wasn't nearly as dirty though it did look like I was sporting a mustache.

I did find a reaaaallly nice limestone bowl fragment in my deposit...it really was an exciting find!

Tomorrow we only work a half day, and I don't really know what I plan to do for tomorrow night...maybe I will head to the pool for the afternoon and just relax and read. I also do not have any big plans for Friday. Working out in the field really takes so much more energy and effort than the lab so again, I'm basically left feeling that I want nothing to do with shopping or going into town or anything like that.

Today I managed to get my hands on a book richard wrote a long time ago and never looked into having it published. Its about 300 pages and is all about his experiences in the field. I might read that after I'm done with the wind up bird.

I am having an allergic reaction to something...red bumps on my legs and knees...boooo. Perhaps from working for days in a giant desert litter box.

My tan lines are wicked awful right now as well....despite the fact that I wear sun screen, you can still see the various different sleeve lengths of my shirts outlined on my arms. Still, the back of my neck is the darkest part of me from me staring down at the ground all day long. Henry Wright from U of M used to say you can always tell when someone is an archaeologist because they are constantly staring at the ground.

Looking at the ground you see a lot of things on the Giza Plateau. One thing you see a lot of are scareb beetles...which is funny because they are these huge ass bug beetles that normally people would be freaked out by...but I think because scarebs are so common in the heiroglyphs and you see little molds and statues of them all over gift shops, you just associate them with being cute...and so when these big beatles crawl near me I don't even flinch...in fact I kind of want one as a pet.

I think that's it for now....I am going to go sketch and read. Good night!

2008-03-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Let’s see lets see. Once again I am writing this entry at about 9:00 pm from my apartment (which is still without internet grrrr) which means I wont post this until around 6 amish…which is still the middle of the night for you all so I suppose it matters not.

So this is me reflecting on Tuesday. Monday night I did not sleep very well so I was pretty tired throughout most of today. It seems impossible to dress comfortably for the weather here….like I said the sun makes all the difference…well mid seventies has been quite cool on site especially because it has been so windy…so when the weather said it was going to be 77 I layered up….except I failed to notce that there would not be a cloud in the sky….I wound up being really warm, but it was easy enough to delayer. However, my body could not seem to stay hydrated. Between the dry heat and the wind I just felt like all energy was draining from me. I kept drinking bottle after bottle of water, but trying not to chug it all at once since it will just go straight through your system if you do that. By noon I had drank around 6 bottles and still would feel faint when I stood up. People have been saying that I look tired, but that it’s a content tired...I dug out more and more of my feature today. I should finish it by tomorrow…I know have bagged over 250 liters of ashy deposits to be analyzed. My entire upper body is pretty sore from just carving away to the bottom of this room…which I was thinking didn’t have a bottom for a while! But I have reached the limstone floor throughout most of it now and like I said, should be done with it tomorrow (Wednesday).

I managed to get even dirtier today than I did yesterday! When I came to site I looked at the bags that I had filled and saw that the pyramid dogs had peed on them…you could see the yellow pooled into the folds of the bags…that’s when I looked at the rest of my square that I have bee excavating and realized that dogs, among other animals I’m sure, probably peed in there too…keep in mind that I sit in this thing all day long, digging and digging and digging. I tried not to think about it beyond that and when I was talking to Amelia later she said the real thing you need to worry about is areas where rats are a problem….rat piss can give you all sorts of nasty diseases. Mental note made.

At lunch I got back to the villa and took off my sunglasses only the see that I was a raccoon! Not from tan lines or anything, but simply because the circles around my eyes were the only clean parts of my face. A dust bunny as my Aunt Marcia so cutely struggled to post :) Sorry I published every post you made Marcia...but i thought it was really funny that you tried so many times!

Not just my face, but all over my arms and into every cranny and crease of my fingers…my hair looked about two shades lighter from all of the dust. So…imagine how thrilled I was when I come back to the villa only to find out the water isn’t working…the same was true for the apartments. Luckily the water was working at the hotel, which I have a membership at so that I can use the pool and spa facilities whenever I want…so I just went over there and took a shower…it really had to be done there was no way I could go without showering….our water was turned back on later.

That was about it in terms of work….7 am -1:30 pm straight up digging. After lunch I didn’t go back to site because no one else was going, they were all going to do paper work. I didn’t want to be by myself for the rest of the afternoon so I just helped with paperwork. It was boring but at least I didn’t have to worry about being in the sun any longer.

Other quirky things worth noting I suppose are…at first I was nervous again about being too heavily influenced by british accents and slang…sometimes they really have their own language…they never say pants, always trousers, it cracks me up…but when we were at the pool the other day, a guy came up to me and new that I was from midwestern US just from me talking…it was good to know I am still nasally as ever, but it was annoying because he really felt like he was welcome to converse with me further…which he was not. Additionally comical were the looks I was given when I would mention how close I am with my “ants” instead of my “awnts”….

Also, in Luxor, I learned that Europeans use their silverware differently than Americans do. Americans cut up their food with a fork and knife, and then switch the hand they hold their fork with and eat that way. Europeans always have a knife in one hand and a fork in the other and keep them in the same hands the entire time…it really did seem like such a hassel to cut and switch…so I started eating like everyone else around me…I like it better…but sometimes I still switch fork hands out of habit. This sounds confusing now that I’ve written it out because now imthinking about it too much, but its really noticeable when you’re the only one at the table not eating this way…even Richard eats his food like a European since he lived in Europe for so long.

Me the lone silly American…wearin my “pants”, with my illogical utensil habits, nasally accent, non metric system, and degrees farenheit.

Also my boogers are black.

I have no shame haha.

2008-03-10T09:51:00.000-07:00

Ella the Girl of the Cinders

Remember how I thought that I would be spending most of this week filling out feature forms? And then excitingly enough Mark let me excavate a feature? Well, me the naïve and inexperienced archaeologist that I am, had no idea what it took to excavate a feature…and actually I’ve wound up excavating two since there was a feature within a feature. The first feature I excavated was the fill of a small kiln or oven. It turns out that I actually had to excavate half of the room that the kiln was in as well. It turns out that the deposit is so rich with ash and cooking material that they want to sample the entire thing! The largest bags we have are 10 liters and so far I have filled about 6 or 7 bags, and I’m not even half way done. Aside from digging out the deposits that fill the room, which as you can imagine is time consuming in itself…I’m using hammers, trowels, and other huge heavy tools and pounding away at compacted mud, silt, and hard as hell limestone bedrock…if you didn’t know I was an archaeologist you might think that I was doing some sort of slave labor. I antipate my arms to be pretty sore tomorrow. But this is not theonly thing that takes up time…So I have filled about 7 bags as I said, and have probably at least 10 more to go…everytime I fill a bag I need to do the following

Write on the bag the following material
Site: GPMP 2008
Area: KKT
Square: 101.Y28, 101.Y29
Date: 10.iii.08
Feature Number: 21879
Bag Number: 2008-0001
Sample: Flotation
Excavator: KLW

I then have to fill out a bag registration slot and write out all of the information again, next to a new bag number. Additionally I write a description of the feature I am sampling.

After this I turn the page where there are bag number labels. The labels contain blanks with all of the same information written on the bag. I rewrite the information on the label, cut out the label, put the label in the bag so this bag has 2 identical information labels, and then I fill up the bag, then staple it.

Repeat

Dig dig dig, sample sample sample

Today I did this for about 5 hours.

The first hour of the day I spent trying to make sense of the information from 2005 to find the architectural features that were assigned numbers but do not have feature forms….as I have said, we are missing a lot of forms because so much time was devoted to mapping…well the chaos that was this morning was becasuse for 2 of the squares we have features assigned, but no maps with them labeled…at least for everything else we could find the features they were talking about….all I had to go by was the 2005 feature log which would say the square the feature was in, and a one sentence description…and by one sentence description I mean this:

21943: “EW MB wall that abutts wall 29887”

so where do I find this wall, especially since I probably don’t know where 29887 is either?

It was quite the puzzle but I think I figured out most of it. Definitly time consuming though

I also helped Peter take about 120 elevation measures using the level. Its basically binoculars, on a tripod…you level it out by adusting these nobs until a little pain in the ass bubble moves to the center, to tell you that you are looking straigh out on a flat plane. And then some stands with a huge measurement stick from various points within the site. You have to search for it in the eye hole of the level, which sounds simple enough to do but its actually really hard to see and really hard to find. And then you write down the measurement. At first I was terrible at this because I could never seem to find the measuring stick whenever someone had to move…you usually have to refocus everything after you turn it. But I figured out how to use this triangle that sits above the eye piece in order to find it quickly. Peter said that I was really fast at taking levels at that usually it takes people a few days before they get the hang of it. So yay, I’m doing something right.

Still not sure I’m excavating correctly or anything but no one is yelling at me yet. Yesterday Mark asked me how I enjoy excavating and I said that I loved it. He seemed shocked (he is happiest when mapping I think) and said that if I did a good job they would find more stuff for me to dig. Yay!

So since I spent 5 hours digging and chopping and brushing up silt, by day’s end I looked quite filthy. Of course I had no idea what I looked like but everyone would look at me and laugh and call me things like chimney sweeper or Cinderella. Ah well. I tried taking a picture but you can’t really see how dirty I am.

Tomorrow shall be filled with more of the same fun stuff so let me know if this is getting boring to read.

2008-03-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

I did remember an additional reason why it benefits me to write in a blog...this way I don't find myself telling the same story over and over again every time I get an IM. I just redirect people to the blog.

I have also started getting specific picture requests! I attempted to take a picture from my balcony this morning of the pyramids at dusk...but there was an overcast today, and actually it was so foggy that you could barely even see the outline of the pyramids. Maybe tomorrow.

We had a drastic change in weather the past few days, going from 90 degree heat, to overcast I mentioned with todays high not getting to much above 75ish. The sun really makes all the difference here. Even a breeze smearing the tiniest stretch of cloud across the sun seems to make you feel 5-10 degrees cooler. However this change from hot to cold over all could mean an approaching sandstorm. I will keep you posted.

This morning at work, i spent the hours between 7 am and second breakfast helping Amelia measure feature points for her 1:20 map of square 201. A 27 (not that that means anything to you). Afterwards, I asked her questions about brickwork and construction coursing and bonding so that I could be sure that I was recording everything as accurately as possible. Everything I've come to know so far is based on what I've read from the London Manual of Field Archaeology. I had been documenting everything correctly, but Amelia really helped me understand what I was seeing and what other information I could deduce from it, so I was pretty satisfied with that. She has been really helpful, so I was additionally happy that I could return the favor this morning by helping her measure feature points and take elevation estimates.

After second breakfast I got to do more digging! The feature I excavated yesterday was actually cut within another feature. After sampling the first one yesterday, we decided to cross section the outside cut and excavate and sample half of it. Man digging is so awesome. I can't wait to be on a project where a majority of the time we are digging up features and not just writing about them. It actually makes me really excited to look into contract archaeology in the states. Contract archaeology is kind of sub category outside of academia but you get to dig plenty!

I am relieved to say the least, that I really wound up enjoying the field work...I now just understand how chaotic projects can get and how crappy things are when there is a complete lack of organization...so many kinks have been worked out since last week though. It also helps to see the actual site continue to be unbackfilled...we just uncovered the stone houses from the Hassan excavations in the 30s and when you are standing on this expanding city scape and actually seeing the structures and the ruins, you can justify feature form filling a little bit more.

I do miss my animal bones though.

2008-03-08T20:12:00.000-08:00

My first sentence must be devoted to congratulating a Miss Megan Goldenberg for getting accepted to her top choice grad school. I send you many hugs and kisses from afar.

Heh. I know I seem to blame everything on the lack of internet access, but also…just because I am in another country, doesn’t mean that I am on vacation, or that my workload isn’t the equivelent of a full time job back at home…I say this because no one else sits down and writes in a blog every day after work…they especially don’t write about work after getting off of work. I think last time when I came to Egypt, I never really looked at it as living abroad…I think given that I was only here for 5 weeks, and spare time was mainly devoted to tourist like activities, it certainly felt more like an extended vacation. Being in the field was a new endeavor and by the time I adjusted to it, it was time to return home. But it is different now…I am already adjusted, I am someone who helps others adjust…this is my home for right now. I don’t feel like a foriegner any more when I walk down the streets…I know enough arabic to greet all the familiar faces, I always know where I am going, how to get there…I don’t feel like a stranger to this country and that brings me to feeling really weird about keeping a blog this time around…I feel like it would be the same as me writing from Royal Oak everyday for the Egyptians to read…or me writing from Ann Arbor everyday for my family in Royal Oak to read. I guess that kind of brings me to the realization of what “home” means to me…I know a lot of people say home and start talking about family and warmth and blah blah blah…not that I don’t love my family or anything, but for me..I think home is where you feel comfortable on your own…home is where you don’t feel like a stranger...and I think it is a balance between your capacity to be independent and the extent to which you are involved in a community- whether its your actual city, your family, your colleagues, your friends. Meh maybe this isn’t really anything original or insightful….but again I don’t see you writing a blog for my peace of mind!

Aside from that rant (actually that was a fucking tangent…) I was originally going to say that we still don’t have internet in the small apartment, and therefore I think I will be one day behind in all my posts…like now its just after 9 pm…I didn’t want to sit at the villa on my computer really late, so I came back here after dinner and started blogging from microsoft word…which means that I wont post it until I go back to the villa some time tomorrow…hopefully first thing in the morning, but who knows with the wonky internet out here.

ANYWAY

So about today!

Today was a beautiful beautiful day ☺ Yours truly got to excavate her first feature! Now if you don’t retain detail…you might be saying, well…I thought she was going to be excavating this whole time, why is that a big deal…well I’m currently a learner…so I get to watch a lot, and follow up with all the detailed paper work on site…in general though, this season there is not a whole lot of digging going on. They more or less really botched things up last season and we are going through and fixing it….which is definitely an excellent experience, though when they first explained it, I was rather bummed that I would not get to dig as much as I really wanted to…as I have stated my workload as more or less been feature forms feature forms feature forms….today, as I sit in my square recording the dimensions of bricks in the exposed walls Mark Lehner says…”I don’t know…this feature is pretty peculiar…might want to see what’s going on underneathe…how about that Kelly, you think you might want to dig this up…” This being Mark Lehner and everything, perhaps it would have behooved me to play it cool…but I did no such thing….like a dog eager for a road trip, my eagerness was not contained…This was the first thing that was to be excavated on the site…no one has done any excavating yet, we have all been recording recording recording…so for ME to be asked to dig it, was nothing short of amaaaazzzing. Mark showed me some tricks of the trade for how to set up the grid so that I could do my drawings at 1:20 on the single feature sheets. A 1:20 site map, without being able to show you how big the grids are, just means super up close we’ll say. So I cleaned it with a brush, measured it, I mapped it, I photographed it, I took elevation measurements (where the feature sits above sea level), I made a sample bag for flotation, and then I excavated it!!! Sorry I can’t really tell you was “it” was….but it was pretty neat.

On a standard season (techinically this is supposed to be a study season where the crew is more focused on reporting, publishing) I would be able to constantly do this…unfortunately who knows how many other things I will actually get to dig….but, I will be doing a lot of excavation in India and it does look like I have the option of coming back here again next season, with them paying for me to come out here…at least covering the flight cost.

Another reason why I’m not so all about blogging these days is because I have been reading like a fiend…I only brought two books with me here and I’m already finished with one and well over 100 pages into the other…there’s an enligh bookstore downtown, perhaps I will go there some time soon. The villa also has a “library” of books people donate but they are known to be pretty trashy and terrible. I still have a good 500 pages left in Murakami though so that should hold me over a bit.

2008-03-07T06:51:00.000-08:00

I know I already posted today...but I just want to say that spending the day by the pool at the hotel, reading was definitely the break I needed....I intend to spend every Friday at that hotel. It's a good thing I saw mostly everything, in terms of sites in Cairo the last time I was here, so I wont much be missing out!

Also, Richard left today and in doing so gave me his voda phone to use....so in the event of an emergency you can get a hold of me!

016-106-7301

It's a pay as you go phone though so don't count on me making frequent calls home or anything. I can get text messages though for the occasional check in. I consider it awesome mostly in case I get stranded somewhere downtown away from the Villa.

That's it.

Cheers!

Friday March 7th 2008 a Day off!

2008-03-07T00:37:00.001-08:00

So i dont know why pictures may not be showing up...grr, My guess is as good as yours, I will try and figure it out.

Today is our day off. I slept in until a whopping 7:00 am. Last night I went out for drinks and dinner with Richard and Mary Ann. We drank red wine, which I managed to not cringe at, and ate at a restaurant at the Meridian down the street. Richard and Maryann tried desperately to get me to try cheese. It started with an H I think and it looked like roasted marshmellows on top of grilled vegetables. I told them that if I came to my blog and wrote that I tried cheese and liked it, that a huge part of my identity would be lost…that no one back home would know who I am anymore. Well, I didn’t need to try it, there were little pieces of cheese in my food and within one bite I realized it, and wanted to vomit. For me, cheese is more than just a food that I don’t like the taste of…if I can taste any hint of it (and I will be the first to admit that there are probably times when it is in my food and I can’t taste it…but if you are preparing my food and you miscalculate the point at which I will detect cheese, I’m sorry I can’t finish it)- in the event that I can taste it, it is like having an instant gag reflex. My stomach ties itself in knots…it is like dining turbulance. Boo Cheese.

Okay back to more interesting things…. Richard is going back to the states today and wont be back until close to when I am leaving. It is really amusing this year…there are a lot of new people on board, especially girls who live in the apartments with me, and so suddenly I am the person to which questions are directed. This was really something I did not foresee happening, and for a few reasons. First of all I didn’t realize how many different specialists there were going to be here, though it makes sense since half of the team is down in Luxor this season. Also, I didn’t realize that I actually knew that much about living in Egypt. I was only here for 5 weeks last season, but it turns out I learned quite a bit about the ins and outs of this project, navigation through the city, and the standard do’s and don’ts. One girl said that she didn’t think her arabic would ever be is good as mine…this too is laughable. While I have gotten better and picked up more arabic, I am pretty sure that she just keeps hearing me say the same 3 or 4 phrases to everyone and with that, I am cleverishly letting on that I know much more than I do! My cousin Melanie I think would really like working on an international team like this. Perhaps not an archaeological one, but the amount of languages being thrown around is head spinning. In addition to arabic, I’ve started learning Japanese. Polish and Swedish are other languages that you can hear bouncing off the mosquito laden walls.

Speaking of mosquitos….I’m conviced that my blood type is either B or AB. If you have a B in your blood (I just had the mental image of a bumble bee drowning in a river of blood)…anyway, if there is a B in your bloodTYPE (there we go) apparently bugs, particularly mosquitos, choose you last for a fix. In the mornings when I ask how everyone slept, they all chime in about restless nights fending off mosquitos. I haven’t gotten bit at all yet…at least not mosquitos. A little bit by bed bugs ( I know gross right?) I need to get some euclyptus to spray on my bed to fend off those suckers.

Yesterday on the field we finally have all area leaders (Ana, Mark Lehner, Peter, and Amelia). This finally meant organization! Me and this other Egyptian girl who had completed the field school last year, Noha, went with the four of them to talk more about the site, the goals of season and how it ties to the Workers Town settlement where they have been excavating the part 20 years. Me being the over-achiever that I am, had already read everything I could get my hands on for Khentkawes (reports from 2005 and 2007 excavations by Mark, as well as the 1930s excavation reports by Salim Hassan, and the early excavation reports by Reisner of Menkenre’s Valley Temple and Temple Town). Since I had done so, I knew everything that Mark was saying (in addition to knowing that a majority of his information was taken straight from the intro of the Hassan Report). So if he blanked on a date, or a piece of information, I was first to interject and answer….I tried to balance coming across as obnoxious with coming across as prepared…prepared was what I was going for…but no one likes a know it all. I don’t really care though…as Richard said at dinner last night…the one with all of the knowledge wins.

I am not sure who I will be working under for the next few weeks. So far, my job is to work on the areas that were mapped in 2005. Unorganization seems to be the common denominator for digs, at least here…and seeing as though this is the second most funded project next to Catal Hyuk, that is a bit unnerving. But apparently in the 2005 season the areas built along the the causeway of Khenkawes Pyramid (typically pyramids have associated with them either towns that housed the mortuary cults that would carry out daily purification and offering rituals for the deceased tomb owner, settlements associated with the construction of the tomb and pyramid, or any combination of this depending on when building was occuring and when it finished). No one really knows what was going on at Khentkawes (KKT), but its stratigraphic link to the Workers Town site associated with Menkenre, and the settlement site along Menkenre’s valley temple is really important to resconstructing the ways in which these sub communities came together and functioned together within a state level operation under a pharaoh…this is about as well as I can sum it up on the surface, though I assure you its very complicated…I mean I spent a year and a half researching the Worker’s Town site alone, for my thesis…so to summarize when there is so much detail seems nearly impossible and a waste of time….it basically boils down to identifying relationships between different settlement sites on the Giza Plateau….chronological and functional relationships. Were the communities kept separate? Was there interaction? Did KKT reign as a Pharoah? How can we tell? Plus there is just a lot of other weird stuff going on that needs explaining. Here is a plan for the site overall, from a birds eye view.

Anyway…so back to my job for the next week or so…We unbackfilled some squares (about 4-6 10mx10m squares), beginning at the western edge of KKT’s causeway and extended south. Now these squares have only been mapped (so drawn to scale from a birds eye view). Nothing has been excavated, so we don’t have any sketches in profile, or revealing layers. However, what happened in the 2005 season was that they tried to map as much as possible and in doing so failed to assign all proper feature numbers and to fill out all the information on feature forms. I've started basically at where the town turns south.

Archaeological feature or context: any single action whether it leaves a positive or negative record within a stratigraphic sequence is known as a context or feature. Can consist of a deposit, cut, coffin, structures, artifacts, timbers, walls, etc.

For every feature or context, a form needs to be filled out. They are super detailed, asking about material, color, composition, measurements, extent of feature, measurement of bricks if applicable, orientation..anything that you see you basically have to write down and then you have to link it to all other associated contexts, for example if a wall abutts another wall, you have to lay it out in a sequential matrix. And of course, you have to draw everything.

Many people hate feature forms…who wants to be doing paperwork when you could be digging more right? Well, I guess I don’t mind paper work…but I also know that I am learning a lot by completing these forms. I had no idea how to figure out which wall was built first, and how bricks were laid before doing this. Also, I feel like I am getting a much more thorough understanding of the site and what’s going on more than everyone else who is just trying to piece together information based on sketching more and more squares. Like I said though, it should take me about a week to catch up on the 2005 paperwork…and then we will move to new squares. I may get to map out some squares by myself I was told, but I don’t really want to do that because I feel like I am terrible at drawing…and no one should rely on me to do that very well. I think a lot of my responsibilities will entail following other people around as they map, assigning feature numbers, and documenting them and cleaning them….it doesn’t sound all to thrilling but so far I don’t mind it….I walk around in my socks (can’t wear shoes or else you willl destroy what little is left) carrying large maps, pencils and pens sticking our of my hair in every which direction, and I write and draw and think….even if the work gets boring after a while, I still get to be off in my own little world at least.

Okay..it's Friday and 91 degrees here...I think I am going to walk down to the meridian and see about getting in the pool. Hope you are all enjoying the snow in Michigan :)

2008-03-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

Under reconstruction

2008-03-05T09:22:00.000-08:00

I’m supposed to be working on database stuff but the internet is not working so I am just typing a blog entry on microsoft word. The days are going by quicker…I am learning more about methodology and things like how to use the camera equipment, how to use all the different logs we have etc. There is a lot of paperwork in archaeology. So far, I like working in the lab more than I like working in the field, which is not the standard amongst archaeologist from what I understand. The work in the field is still pretty early on though and our team isn’t even all here yet. Hopefully by Saturday or Sunday we will break off into groups, dividing the Khentkawes site into 4 parts and work on recording as we re-backfill. It is important to cover the squares as soon as possible so that the information can be as preserved as possible. Any amount of of rain or wind can do a lot of damage to a site, especially one like this that has been reduced to centimeters after decades of trampling humans, horses and camels. The destruction of the site comes after exposure from a 1930s excavation done by the University of Cairo.

Like I said, hopefully once we are more organized, I will be able to enjoy and appreciate everything that I do a bit more. As it stands, I’m given very little instruction and then left alone on the site…when I do finish whatever it was that I was told to do, I usually return to sketching until someone shows back up to tell me something else to do. The problem with this project is that it has gotten so big that the administrators, who are supposed to be working in the field, are constantly doing other operations…whether it be accomodating the chaotic schedules of everyone here, setting up the house, taking potential donors on tours, working out any type of legal issue, and I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface here. But like I said…a lot of time, especially because I’m alone, I have no idea what I am supposed to do next. Usually I just reread the London Manual of Archaeology or some of the previous reqports on excavations at Khentkawes.

If I continue to feel this uninspired about this kind of work, at least excavations only last until mid april and then I can turn to writing, something I actually enjoy doing….and if finish up writing earlier enough, I supposed I can either come home earlier, work in the lab, or just travel briefly…something who knows. I will still want to see what its like to work on another project before making other decisions about the direction I’m going with my career…though really, I think the discipline needs more people to shack up in labs and actually analyze more material as opposed to more people digging around…so much stuff has been dug up that has never been looked at.

I think uninspired was the word I used earlier…it pretty much sums me up right now. I’m tired, I’m frustrated…I’m someone passionate about information, knowledge, facts, data….but a majority of what I seem to be picking up is “fake it ‘til you make it.” I was told that I’m being thrown into this head first to see if I will sink or swim….seeing as though I am demanding more responsibilities (hence why I now work on the database in addition to survey, mapping and excavation), and the fact that I’m organizing the smaller tasks and being asked questions by students who already completed the field school when I’ve never been to a field school ever, and that I’m the first to voice exactly what I think is and is not time efficient, I would probably say that I am swimming just fine….one thing I was asked to do today though was to create labels and log any new features I saw on site…a new feature is just basically anything that changes or is different within a certain context…if it sounds kind of vague or abstract, that’s how I feel about it too. I was told to do this, and per usual all individuals in charge disappear. So I’m staring at squares, which already have some features labeled from previous seasons….and I have no idea what is and isn’t a distinguishable feature…for example if you are looking at a wall, and this is the with a few centimeters of sand removed from the surface, we aren’t talking deep levels here…how am I supposed to know whether or not a mudbrick wall, as I am seeing it, is one continuous feature, or if it is broken up by different rooms and buttressed by different installations? Are there ways to determine this? You betcha! Have I been taught…no…Is it obvious…in some areas yes, in some areas its really ambiguous…I’m a conservative archaeologist…I do things with certainty…when I explained that I don’t know, but that I want to know and I want to know how, I was told that archaeology is like poker…true analogy…that if I say it’s a new feature, keep my bluffing face on, and chances are, most people will agree with me. This is very UNSATISFYING information to me….and if I ever run a project or a field school, such things will never be uttered.

Oh well. I do get to spend every day at a place most people never even get to see. I think one of the things that is really just offsetting to me is the underlying anxiety that when I leave here, on paper it should appear as though I have all of the excavation experience in the world given the reputation of the project and the reputation of the excavators on board, but if things continue the way they have been, and I still walk away feeling this aimless, I fear I will wind up on a project with high expectations but really having no idea what I’m dong or what I’m talking about. Fortunately enough, each project kind of does things their own way so any fumble I make, to an extent, could probably just be chalked up to that kind of difference…but hopefully my fears are unfounded and I will leave here a pro…and hopefully a happy one….who doesn’t write in run on sentences. In shala (if god wills it). But I suppose the earliest archaeologists didn't have any direction either and they just relied on a common sense, and accute detail....so yes, here's to common sense and anal retentiveness.

Ah I was able to upload some photos:

Here is a shot I took after climbing some huge formation. Obviously the more well known pyramids can be seen, but Khentkawes (not neraly as well preserved, nor massive) is in there too, on the left.

Here's a close up:

And here are pictures of the workers unbackfilling.

Thats probably the extent of what I can post from the site without getting into trouble.

Monday 3/3/08

2008-03-03T06:34:00.003-08:00

Until I get internet in the apartments, I probably will not post every day. It's just really inconvenient.

In happy happy news, I'm finally back to my babysleepingschedule. Went to bed at 9:20 pm last night, and slept straight until 5:00 this morning.

I'm quickly catching on to things and even started taking over some of the minute work that needs to be done before we can really make other progress...things like labeling all of the grid pegs on site. This morning when I woke up I had no idea how one went out mapping and establishing coordinates for a site, especially one like the Giza plateau where there are various settlements and areas that both have and have not yet been surveyed. By the end of the day, I had mapped out where all of the pegs were, beginning at the Khentkawes Pyramid, and moving east, I made all of the labels with coordinate numbers and the North and East measurements.

I don't feel like writing anymore. I'm pretty bored at work with this kind of stuff. Hopefully it gets better.

Also, I'm not sure where the misconception came from that food is scarce out here...There is Breakfast at 6:00: eggs, yogurt, beans, bread etc , Second breakfast at 10:00, bean or falafel sandwhiches , Lunch at 1:30, and dinner at 7:00. Coffee and Tea in between and plenty of other biscotti-ish like foods available.

Sunday March 2nd 2008

2008-03-02T05:38:00.000-08:00

Where do I start? Ugh.

So if you had not deduced already, knowing me to be the avid blogger that I am, I have been without access to the internet the past few days (amongst other doses of chaos- where’s a Pharaoh when you need one?)

My last two days in Luxor weren’t anything too amazing. Thursday I never even left my hotel, though I did do a lot of research on graduate programs and other things I should probably know more about. I worked on posting pictures, which still proved to be a pain in my ass. I suppose it is better to pace myself on posting pictures anyways since I probably wont be doing too much more site seeing, which means less pictures overall. Perhaps it will work out better if I can divide up the areas I went to and devote a detailed blog entry to each and post that about once a week….I’ll think of something. Either way, I’ve taken over 400 pictures, so fret not, this trip is documented.

In general, the last you heard from me, you read of my very public love affair with Luxor. Well let me assure you, the honeymoon is over. Friday, my last day in Luxor, began great and slowly deteriorated. In the morning I ate breakfast with Mohson, and later met with Richard to head back to Luxor Temple. Even though I had already been to Luxor, I knew Richard would point out things that had not originally caught my attention, and that he would know information that wasn’t presented in my guide book. Sure enough the day was completely different than the time I had spent there Tiuesday. We actually, privy to our specialization, went through the relief scenes and focused on the animals portrayed. Anthropological Archaeologists who study in Egypt are different from Egyptologists and one of the ways in which they are different is that Anthro Archarologists are not as focused on the texts. To be an Egyptologist you are required to know Egyptian texts, to be able to decipher hieroglyphs and various other aspects of Egyptian wrtiting systems and language throughout Egyptian history. Even though anthropological archaeologists don’t approach research questions with that avenue of knowledge, we still look at the texts nonetheless. For example, one way we can double check some of the taxa present in our samples would be by seeing if they appear in the text reliefs. Its just an additional piece of evidence to provide a context to evaluate some of our results. We can double check certain species of fish, like the catfish, because we see catfish depicted in Egyptian carvings…in other words we have collaborative evidence to suggest that they consumed fish in some sort of context whether dietary, or ritual etc. Additionally we can see how animals were used, how they were prepared, what ways they were butchered etc.

That’s all a little bit tangent, remember the point was, Friday started off good. Well 5:00 p.m. rolled around and I was getting ready to leave for the airport when Richard met me to tell me some news about my living arrangements. Originally, before I left I was under the impression that I would be staying in the Villa again, which although a little run down, I was happy about since it’s the main hub for everyone and its where the meals are, and where our transportation to the site leaves. At some point while I was in Luxor, I was told I would be staying in the large apartments, which is where I stayed last year for the final 2 weeks. If you read my blog last year, you know that I enjoyed the apartments very much since it was air conditioned, but also, those last two weeks, no one else was around. Since it was just Richard and I, we went out to eat every night, and the transportation still picked us up there. In other words, all the reasons why I prefer the Villa, applied to the large apartments as well. Regardless, I was not displeased with having to stay in the large apartments. I was told I would have two sweedish roommates (any guys out there reading this can keep their sick little fantasies to themselves!). I was pretty content with all of this, especially after I heard about all this drama going on with the living arrangements and everyone else having problems. One problem is that, a crew member this year is bringing her new born baby, and no one wants to be shacked up in an apartment living with her and her baby. The problem eventually seemed taken care of because they were going to put the woman and her baby in the small apartment complex, by themselves, and everyone else would be in the Villa, the large apartments, or in a hotel. Well before I go to leave Richard says he has some news for me. First he tells me that I am going to be here before any one else and so I will be all by myself my first night in the apartment. This isn’t that big of a deal to me either. I’m not going to get in until late, I have Saturday off to sleep in and Richard comes in early in the morning on Saturday and we were planing to go into town to pick up some stuff at the market…I was looking forward to it all. The next thing Richard tells me is this, “Also there’s been another change…you are no longer staying in the large apartments. You will be in the small apartments, and beginning April 1st..dum dum dum (he actually said dum dum dum)…you will have to be with Ferra and the baby.” I could feel my blood rise to my cheeks and heat my face with my lividness. I did not know what to say….this was not something I signed on for…Earlier in the week though, Richard said that if I really wanted, I could use his tent after he leaves Giza (he’s leaving the 14th of March). Richard stays in his own tent in the yard of the villa. It has an air mattress and electricity. Initially when he offered, I considered it for a second, thinking it would just be neat to say that I stayed in a tent, but then said I didn’t want to be antisocial and opted for the apartment and the swedes.

Recalling this I say….”Okay, well then I am going to have to take you up on your offer to stay in your tent….remember how Jessica was complaining about originally having to live with the baby, and her feelings on it were that she likes babies some of the time, she just doesn’t want to live with them…..well, that is not me…I don’t like babies ANY time.”

Richard said that it was not a problem and that I could move into his tent as soon as he left…and you bet your ass that is where I will spend the next two months…yes I would rather live in a tent, outside, in Egypt, instead of in the same apartment as a baby.…I don’t say aww when I see a baby…I don’t want to hold it, I don’t want to touch its “itty bitty hands” or its “itty bitty feet”….I don’t want to make faces at it, and most importantly, I don’t want to hear it crying in the middle of the night when I have to get up at 5:00 am.

Oh well though…I’ll live in the tent, be closer to the villa, and everything will be fine. I am calmed back down and I get on my flight for Giza. Again, after calming myself down, I realize I have it great, I am excited about my job, I’m excited to spend the day in town and to just relax before I begin work and learning on Sunday.

I get into Cairo airport at about 8:00 pm. For whatever reason I don’t get my lugguage until almost 9:00 and I don’t make it back to my apartment until almost 11:00. At this point, I’m pretty exhausted to say the least. I’m given a key to my apartment and a note which reads:

“Kelly, we are actually opening the site tomorrow. Morning meeting is at 6:45. See you soon.”

Really?

Wait….

REALLY?

This was the EARLIEST I could be informed that we were working…not to mention this didn’t even make sense….I was the first person here, who else was going to be working?! The whole point of me being here was that I was paired with someone to teach me everything…I have absolutely no idea what I am doing.

At this point I’m too tired to care….I just wanted to walk into the apartment, make some hot tea and get into bed…I walk into the apartment, and it is absolutely barren. I mean empty. Last year it had furniture, the kitchen was stocked, the internet was on…it wasn’t the most lavishly decorated place, but it felt liveable. This was just big empty open space. The stove didn’t work so I couldn’t heat water for tea…I was such a sadface Kelly…haha I literally felt like it was similar to being sentenced to a night in Jail. It was freezing and the blankets here smell like gasoline (which I guess is what mothballs smell like to me?) the only good thing was that I ransacked the apartment and stole the most comfortable pillows.

The only good thing I could say about it all, was that I was exhausted and I fell asleep pretty quickly.

Then I woke up and went to the meeting…my premonitions were correct, I was the only person going to work at the site, anyone else that was here was working at the lab (which is actually really far away from the site, so it means that I will not be in the vincinity of any one I know). At 7:00 I went down to the site with Ana. She is an excavator who holds some other important position for the project because she is constantly on her cell phone and seems to be who a lot of people answer to or go to when things go awry. She shows me the site and then a team of Egyptians, entirely non english speaking Egyptians, start removing the backfill on the site (at the end of a season, a site is covered up with sand to protect everything = backfill). Ana tells me to go grab a brush, and join the men in removing backfill….which seems like an easy enough thing to do right? Well, it’s a fucking desert…that’s a shitton of sand…and if I wasn’t doing something right, or I wasn’t removing enough, I couldn’t be spoken too, I was just tugged on and yapped at in arabic…always they tried to tell me things in arabic…apparently my looks of utter confusion and bewilderment were of no indication that I had absolutely no idea whats going on…mind you at this point, Ana has left me there. So there I am, with a brush, removing sand from some mudbrick structures amidst a group of 40 or so arabic strangers. I didn’t know where the bathroom was, I didn’t know where water was, I didn’t know anything and I didn’t know any one.

When Ana returned after a few hours she gave me a notebook and pencil and told me to start sketching the layout of the site…didn’t give me any sort of standard or convention on how to do it, and I certainly don’t know what they are, so again, I’m left alone teaching myself archaeology apparently. But I wasn’t complaining at that point…I would draw for the rest of the day if it meant not returning to the stupid brushing.

Finally Ana comes back to the site with Richard and another student, whose English is also not good. Ana brings the site plans and goes over a lot of information for the site and what the general plan and goals are for the project this season. Finally. Information. She gives me and the other student two things of measuring tape and tells us to go map the features to scale 1:100….if you think I knew what that meant when I was told, you’re wrong…I had no idea. The student and I tried to work together on it, since she had actually done it before, but not being able to communicate really prolonged my ability to grasp what was going on, but I think I got it eventually.

We ended at 1:30, which made me happy. We had lunch and Richard and I went to town as planned. This was especially a relief since there was no food or anything in the apartment. So we picked up some things after a long long taxi drive there. The ride there was long and pretty standard chaotic Egyptian driving…but the ride back…I really thought I was going to die this time. It took me a few times before I was adjusted to the recklessness of Egyptian driving last year…I thought this time I wouldn’t even be phased….but that was until I got into the car to return home from town. This guy was terrible...I felt like I should have been praying in the backseat. I seriously questioned whether or not I was going to survive that ride home, and sure enough….we got hit by a bus….A BUS! A bus. Side swiped by a bus, along my door no less.

It wasn’t really that bad, because luckily, traffic is so bad in Cairo you’re never really going that fast.

That brings us up to today. Finally internet! Today was a basic repeat of yesterday...again I'm pretty much on my own a lot at site and try to figure things out. I've done a lot of background reading on Khentkawes so that I can approach the archaeological material with as much knowledge as possible.

Well there are a lot of things that are wrong with the apartment I'm living in (no internet, only 2 minutes of hot water, no shower head, toilet doesn't flush etc) and we are going to go attempt to take care of said issues now.

Sorry for the delay in postings, I am safe and making it through, and per usual working on the picture posting situation.

Wednesday 2/27/08

2008-02-27T07:27:00.000-08:00

Last night marked another sleepless one for myself, which was most unfortunate because I feel like it really did take away from how much I could have really absorbed and enjoyed my day at the West Bank. However, as I mentioned to Dan this morning, at least with the West Bank being the land of the dead, I seemed to fit in well with my zombie like state of mind. Again I took a lot of pictures, but the internet/blogspot is being really touchy about uploading my photos right now. I have a full description of the Luxor trip documented, and about half of Karnak written up, so as soon as I can attach the images those entries will be available. I really put a lot of time into editting all of my photos and writing out descriptions of them...even to the point that I used in text citations! Seriously, they are like mini reports so I hope everyone enjoys them, not that I expect you to read everything, just scope out what you think looks cool.

Back to what I was saying....so I only slept for about an hour last night, and then I got up to have breakfast and head down to the site where I was introduced to Kaneawi, my driver for the day. His english was pretty good and he asked me a lot of questions. We went to the ferry and sailed across the Nile. There were about 5 or 6 hot air balloons scattered across the skyline. Kaneawi said that he used to work on the hot air balloons...at least I think that is what he said. The trip across the Nile is really short, only about 10 minutes. Once we docked he drove me back into the high cliffs, the same place where I visited the Valley of the Kings. I really wasn't sure what his duties to me were for that day, but a lot of the sites are really spread out across the landscape. Usually people travel in huge tour busses. He was quite sweet and had already planned out, what seemed to me a pretty good agenda. He would drop me off at a site, park, and wait for me to come back before driving me elsewhere. We started at Deir el Bahri, home of Queen Hatepshut's Mortuary Temple. Recall that Queen Hatepshut is one of the more well known instances where a woman held the throne over Egypt. Though famous for this title, she was probably not the only woman that assumed the role of pharaoh in Egypt. It is really amusing...when walking around temples and sites, Egyptians will always approach women with information about Hatepshut...they will show you where she is depicted in reliefs and hieroglyphs and really play on the hype of a dynastic feminism...not that I really mind or anything, I think Hatepshut was pretty badass too. However, I was kind of disappointed with her Mortuary Temple...I know a lot of it was destroyed and most of what you see is restoration, but I still had high hopes...again, lots of hype. The images against the high cliff backdrop though, are phenomenal. It was a completely alternative way to visually command and overpower the viewer that deterred from the previous trends in pyramid construction. I was really excited to see the birth collonade (actually I have found that any room where there are birthing scenes throughout all temples and reliefs really intrigue me...which is ironic because i hate babies). The Birth Collonade for Hatepshut was particularly important in representing her justified royal and divine right to rule. Since women were not allowed rule as Pharaohs, Hatepshut had to prove divine origin to legitimize her position. Additionally in her reliefs, she is depicted as male. As I said, i was really excited to see these images, but they were just really difficult to make out and I really just couldn't connect with the story and history the way i wanted to.

After Hatepshut's Temple at Deir el Bahri, I went to the Tombs of the Nobles. So the other day I had visited tombs of the New Kingdom Kings when I visite the Valley of the Kings. Visiting the Tombs of the Nobles was a superb way of comparing afterlife preparations between the royal kings and the elite who worked for them. I really enjoyed the Tombs of the Nobles, not only because they were just rich in color and structure, and all very different, but also, no other tourists were there. It was just me and who ever was overseeing the tomb at the time. Because it was just me (and because I had extra money) I was able to take pictures when normally people aren't allowed to...but that is not all i got to do. Allow me to backtrack. So this morning after breakfast Richard hands me something. It is a headband with a big ole light on it. A lot of times I just take things and figure out what I'm supposed to do with them later. So later comes, and I enter the Tomb of Userhet, scribe for Amenhotep II. By now this is the third tomb I've seen, and I'm kind of getting ADD about it, so I just kind of glance around. I peak around to the blocked off tomb shaft. Jokingly I ask if there's a mummy in there. Usually all mummies and such are removed, either having been looted some time in the past, or are on display at the Cairo Museum. So you can imagine my surprise when the guard tells me yes. I tell him I don't believe him and the next thing I know, he's removing the chain that blocks the entry. He asks me if I have a light...without missing a beat i bust out the headlight that richard had given me. The next thing I know, I am literally army crawling through the underground passage ways of Userhet's tomb. Heat hangs on me as I continue to inch over the dirt and rubble. The space is narrow, extremely narrow...think of it from this perspective. I love this stuff...haha i totally "dig" it...I'm not claustraphobic at all, and dead bodies don't bother me...and even I was seriously considering turning around and foregoing this experience. It was that difficult for even me to handle at the time, so if any of those things get to you, this could have been your nightmare turned reality. It was a good 3 minute journey into the underground, which as you can imagine seemed much longer and then there it was...the dismantled mummy of Userhet. The linen wrappings undone and charred black. The skull looking straight up at us and the pelvis to the right. The tomb of Userhet had been burned by the Coptics. All of the items were removed from the tomb, but because the mummy had been taken apart and burned, apparently the museums had no use or interest in it. Where the body was located was not the original resting place however, We moved further to where the sarcophagus would have been and there was the intact spine, sternum and vertebra. It was absolutely unreal. So yeah..that probably goes down as one of the most awesome things I've done.

After that, I really didn't know what could top it, and true probably nothing could, but I did continue to be impressed with everything else I saw today. I went and visited the site of Deir el Medina, which is a worker's town kind of similar in function and idea to the site at Giza that my thesis research was based on. Also here is temple, which from far away just does not seem very impressive, basically just ruin...but I actually adored it once I was inside. Kamil mentions that most visitors skip over it because it does not seem nearly as lavish or magnificent compared to Luxor and Karnak and others, but that such a choice is most unfortunate. I would have to agree and am very glad that I chose to go see it (I too almost passed when I saw the lil hike involved). Rich in history, this temple encompasses both trends in Egyptian and Greccoroman style. Again when the internet isn't being a pain, I will post images.

So even though I continue to be pleasantly surprised..(you know at some point you start thinking, you've seen one, you've seen them all, or that your brain simply does not have any more room to really appreciate any other ancient monument, image, or artifact) I am really thinking I want to just stop for the day. Had I been with other people I think I would have been even more antsy and counting down the time until we could leave. But since I was by myself, I was better able to self check and gather my patience...and boy is it a good thing I did, because the next thing I visited is probably my favorite that I have seen in Egypt so far. Seriously...I wish I could have photgraphed every inch of this place, and even then I could not even come close to giving you a glimpse that does it justice. I was in awe. If you are in Egypt, and you ask me what I think you absolutely must see, I will say, "Do not leave until you have seen the Mortuary Temple of Ramses II, or the Ramasseum." I will definitely detail, at length, all the images once i can post them...hell maybe I will even do an entire entry on it by itself. The place was just COVERED in inscriptions and large (LARGE) scale reliefs. I just tried to look for a virtual tour of it online, but couldn't find one, but if there was one I would post it. Haha sorry this entry must just seem like a big tease...

The Ramasseum was my last stop and then I went with Kaneawi to his village to see his house and his wife. He lived in a mudbrick house where some rooms had open roofs, while others were covered. It was along a small canal with a vast farm of the greenest land behind it. I don't see this kind of green in the United States ever...but I haven't really been to many farmlands throughout it either. He invited me in to have tea. He showed me around his home, showing me pictures from his wedding album. His wife had just finished making soup and it was offered to me. Now...this is where I started to go into a foreigner's dizzy. First of all, I'm a vegetarian...but I also know that turning down food would have been an extremely insulting gesture...or to even begin to complain or be picky about food in such a poor area of the world, and such a poor area of this country, would have been dispicable on my part, so meat or no meat, I was going to eat it. But, nonetheless, I do ask how its made...naturally, rural Egypt soup making is not done by purchasing stock at the store so the first answer I hear is, "Oh you boil the water...." Water Water, oh crap, I''m thinking. I remember earlier, kaneawi point out to me how they got their water, via a man and a donkey-pulled, wagon carrying a huge metal apparatus resembling a gas tank. Not to mention, there is not a single bottle of water in this home. At the dig site, all you see are boxes and boxes of bottled water...but of course, people cannot afford to use bottled water ( I probably couldn't either if the water wasn't safe for me in the U.S.!). And if you grew up on the local water, the bacteria is not a problem...however for me, and anyone else who doesn't live in Egypt, it would be, which is why when you travel to places like Egypt, or Mexico etc, you aren't supposed to drink the water. I had no idea what to do...do I turn down this soup, and the tea I know is to follow, because the water could make me really sick? Do I disrespect this man who has spent the entire day driving me around, talking with me, befriending me...Of course I know the answer...the answer is no. The answer is eat the soup, drink the tea, tell the story whether it turns out ugly or not. Well, I do try and leave as much of the water broth as I can, to which Kaneawi says, "Oh make sure you drink this part, it's the best." Bottoms up. I do it. I did it...and I'll let you know if I'm puking my brains out two days from now. Later when I came home and told Richard, he assured me that I would probably be fine and that I did the right thing.

Once we finished tea and talking, Kaneawi brought me back to the ferry and I sailed home. I took a shower, and then a much needed nap. Afterwards, i decided to walk to the store to get some pop/soda/coke. There were no cold ones, but the store merchant said he would get some, so i sat in the store and talked with some of the other men in there about my inability to speak arabic. I had them help me with pronounciation until he came back. At first he tried to scam me on the proper amount of change and I refused to leave the store until given what was owed to me. He finally did, and then I went back to the hotel and practiced more arabic with the hotel clerk.

Then i came up stairs and started writing! Now I am going to go get some dinner. Upon my return I will retry with the pictures.

A note to my family: not that I expect e-mails everyday or anything, but KEEP ME POSTED ON THINGS TOO. Ahem...me reading Janel's ambiguous away message about the hospital inspired an onslaught of fear and worry, and even though I know she's okay, that's not very fair! I want to know things that are happening there too...that goes with everyone. Let me know what is happening, AS IT HAPPENS, in your lives, back in the states.

(as always, i abstain from proofreading)

Tuesday 2/26/08

2008-02-26T03:23:00.000-08:00

So I definitely went from the girl who sleeps all day, to the girl that barely sleeps. Like clockwork, my body, unable to sleep through the night, wakes me up at around 2:30 a.m. despite any time that I fall asleep, and despite how much sleep I’ve managed to accumulate overall in the days before. My only explanation for this is that 2:30 a.m. Egypt time is around 7:30 p.m. U.S. time and my stomach is saying, “KELLY WAKE UP, it’s time for Aunt Marcia’s Dinner!” Only there is no Aunt Marcia’s dinner for me to eat at this odd hour. So instead I toss and turn. Monday I was unable to fall back asleep and therefore I wound up being awake from 2:30 a.m. all the way to 10:30 p.m. Four hours later I was awake again, quickly finding myself repeating the same pattern. Originally I thought going to bed too early was the culprit and that is why I stayed up until 10:30 even though I was really ready to sleep much earlier. Now that that does not seem to be the case, I will have to go to sleep earlier tomorrow and just accept and brave the late hour when it coaxes me again from my slumber. That being said, it is going on 2:00 p.m where which means I've been awake a good 12 hours now. It has been another wonderful day in Luxor. At 6:30 I went down for breakfast. After I was done eating I switched rooms again. Now I am actually staying in Mark Lenher's room. It is much bigger and the internet works from inside the room so I no longer have to sit in the hall way in order to use it. The only thing is that a lot of Mark's things are still in here and get worried that he is just going to show up in the middle of the night or something! I like it though. In this room are water steamer/boilers so I can make my own tea now if I wanted to. I was pretty much done moving around and ready for more touring of the city by 7:30. I began at Luxor Temple, which is really a 5 minute walk from the hotel. I spent about an hour and a half there taking pictures and going through with my guide book. Sometimes it is really great to have someone who knows a lot about sites and monuments and history go through and talk to you about everything you are seeing, but I enjoyed going solo as well. Everything was done at my own pace, I could look at the things that I found interesting and at no point was I zoning out. This book is absolutely excellent too. It divides the temple into various components, maps it out, labels it, and refers to the map when explaining significance and context, so I knew exactly where I was, what I was seeing and where I was going next. Once I finished at Luxor, I came back to my hotel, grabbed some more batteries for my camera, and went to the site at 10:00 for second breakfast. There I was hooked up with a driver to take me to Karnak Temple. Karnak took me a bit longer to get through, but it was stunning. It is much larger than Luxor Temple and there were times when I would be completely isolated, hidden away from anyone and I could have probably stayed there all day without a single person running into me..it's that huge and divded. Karnak really blew me away....it is like a huge monumental palimpsest. Seeing Luxor and Karnak on my own finally inspired me to learn to read hieroglyphs, something I never really was interested in before (haha when I told Richard his response was, "oh boy.."). I'm sorry I just can't stand to be looking at something andbe shrouded in mystery. Anyways, I am going to look into some books on that. After finishing Karnak Temple, I walked home...it's about a 2 mile walk from the hotel so not too bad. I get so excited now about the fact that I can do so much in Egypt on my own now. Last year I would have never felt safe enough or comfortable enough to go anywhere alone, and now I find myself independent on most occasions. I am still careful though. I always have my headscarf and I know this area really well now. I havent yet deal with arranging my own cab ride though...that will be quite the experience. I really appreciate how supportive Richard has been and how aware he is of when to guide me and help me out, and when to let me stand on my own....though I suppose it's a mentor's job to recognize and balance those kind of things.

Anyways, I am going to work on organizing the posts for the Luxor and Karnak trip. I took over 100 pictures today, so its going to take a bit to organize it all and to explain the images. 100 may seem a bit excessive, but i am going to be teaching one day and you never know what kind of stuff I'm going to need. For now, I am going to wash my face for the 3rd time, because I still seem dirty from the walk home, and read/nap...though napping is probably a bad idea if I was to try and overcome this 2:30 am business. Tomorrow it's back to the West Bank to see more of the Land of the Dead!

Monday 2/25/08 West Bank Valley of the Kings

2008-02-25T06:43:00.000-08:00

Today was hands down, the best day I have ever had in Egypt. Here was me at the beginning of the day ever so excited about my travels to the west bank!

Despite the fact that my wonky jet lag has had me up since 2:00 am, it has no bearing on how absolutely awesome today has been. Waking up at 2 did not thrill me by any means, but it also did not surprise me. I tried to fall back asleep for a while and then I just gave up. Quite randomly one of the movie channels was showing Halloween 2. I watched a little bit of that and did some reading. I’m nearly done with the Luxor Guide Book Richard got for me and I’m also finishing up Middlesex as my fiction fix, or fixion. That is all besides the point. Today I made it a point to wake up early and stay up! Even the staff has started calling me, “Girl who sleeps all day.” That’s pretty sad seeing as though the entire point of me being here is to see the sites. I mentioned yesterday that I was supposed to head over the the West Bank today with Mouhson, one of the excavators here. He was also going to see to it that I had a permission letter to get into the sites since my aniquities pass has not yet arrived. Unsure of what time that all would take place, I met Richard for breakfast at around 6:30 where I had coffee for the first time SINCE THURSDAY….rarely do I bust out the Jesus Christ…but Jesus Christ was that a beautiful thing…3 cups later and I was finally feeling fabulous and 100% Kelly. After breakfast, Richard gave me his cell phone so that Mouhson could call me when he was ready to go to the West Bank. So I stayed up the entire time only to wind up being too antsy by 10:00. At 10:00 I decided to walk to the office where the field school classes are taught to see if I could find Jessica, the osteologist specialist here whom is supposed to trade me my American cash for her Egyptian pounds. She wasn’t at her office so I walked with the librarian archivist, Mari back to the site to see what was going on with the West Bank excursion. When I get there Mouhson says that he is unsure if he can go anymore…which I had kind of figured at that point and in the event had already started replanning, thinking I would hit up Luxor Temple instead, it is afterall, a really close walk from the hotel. However, instead he tells me that the is going to have two of his friends drive me there and that they will take me to pick up a letter from the director to ensure that I get into all of the King’s Tombs in the Valley of the Kings for free. I look over at these men, both complete strangers to me. I had that nervous unease start to radiate from the pit of my stomach. He explains everything to me again, these men work on a site in the Valley of the Kings…they will drive me there, show me where they are working, get me my letter, and then I can walk around on my own…once I am done, I go back to their site and find them and they will take me home. I wont lie, I was not 100% comfortable with doing this. The men seemed to speak very little English, and if anything happened I did not have a phone, or a good understanding of the area I was going to, and again that ugly language barrier never makes any situation seem like a good one. However, I know that my team would never put me in harms way, so I got into the car. This was a pretty long car ride which took us deep into the small Luxor villages. One guy turns to me and says, “These are the local roads, not the main roads.” This begins what will continue throughout the rest of the day an onslaught of sarcasm, banter, and inside jokes. I respond with something along the lines of, “Oh you don’t say…not the main roads eh?” He laughs. I start asking questions since talking to him makes me feel more comfortable about the car ride. Later, he points to this building and says, “That is Carter’s House” (Carter is the archaeologist who discovered Tut’s Tomb). Pretending not to have heard what he said I say, “Ohh that’s YOUR house, how fancy.” We get closer and closer to the Mountaineous landscape beyond which lies the hidden tombs of New Kingdom Pharaohs known as the Valley of the Kings. By this time in Egyptian chronology, pharaohs no longer bury themselves in Pyramids. Pyramids, despite having many trick passage ways and chambers, continued to be unsuccessful in guarding the sarcophagus, mummy, and treasures of the dead kings. Preservation and protection of these things were essential to the maitenance of a life after death and so new tactics were adopted. The Moutain Peaks, still resembling the pyramid, and the primordial mound of creation, became symbolic aspects of the landscape that the kings could utilize for their tombs, however instead of being buried within huge mortuary constructions like pyramids, they would have their tombs cut into the rocks and hidden within the Valley. The pictures really do not do justice at all…even I, someone who has been studying Egypt for a bit, and even took a class just last semester, had no idea what to expect when my journey began.

Sure enough once we got in, winding through and through the steep limestone cliffs, they brought me to the site they were excavating. I was introduced to another man whose name I can pronounce but will probably make a fool of myself if I try and spell it (phonetically it's Al fifi). From what I gathered he was leading the excavations on the site but I am not allowed to discuss any of the things he told me. It was great though, he brought me up where no tourists are allowed to go explaining to me all of his ideas and why they chose to excavate there, what they are finding and I was able to have a dialogue with him about it, and ask him questions. After that convened, he introduced me to the director who woud give me the permission I needed to enter the various tombs (to enter tut’s tomb alone is 40 dollars/80 pounds). All that coffee this morning must have really put my on my game because I seemed to be hitting it off with everyone. I nearly felt like an archaeological celebrity, getting to walk around with the people who worked there, given personal tours of the tombs, and all while laughing and having a great time. I mean, yeah I went into Tut’s tomb, I saw king tut’s mummy, I went into Tutmose III tomb, probably one of the most successful military leaders within Pharaonic Egypt, and I went into Ramses the VI tomb (but even I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside so anything interior I stole from google- and so can you! ahh nevermind it's taking to long to load)…but nothing could really compare with the experience of talking to Egyptians, about their own history and being apart of their cohort in a way that we could make fun of other tourist and other americans haha! I didn’t even care about seeing the rest of the tombs, I just wanted to hang out. But I did learn an incredible amount, beyond what I had read and been taught so far. In Tut III tomb, you could see the grid that would be laid out before the inscriptions of heiroglyphs were placed. Most of the time though, as soon as I was being told something, I was finishing the sentences (both correctly and incorrectly that is). Upon leaving, the guy who had been taking me in everywhere says, “I didn’t get her to say ‘Wow’ not even once!” It’s kind of like playing hard to get…the less impressed I seemed, the more impressed they seemed! Eventually it was time to return to the East side. By the way, that the kings were buried on the West bank of the Nile is not an accident. The west is considered the land of the dead. Since much of Egyptian mythology follows the sun, Amun being the Sun god, fertility, birth, and renewal are associated with the east since that is where the sun rises, and the west is associated with death and the setting sun. Instead of driving all the way back, we were dropped off at the ferry and just took a straight shot across the Nile back to the East side, side of the living, where my hotel is, where the site is, and where Luxor and Karnak Temple are. Here are pictures of the from the Nile Ferry Ride. You can just barely see the Mountains outlined.

I went to the site after my trip was over, ate some lunch and talked some more to Mouhson (again I’m pretty sure I’m spelling this wrong, but that’s better than what I originally thought…I originally thought they were calling him Molsen, which strikes my memory as a type of beer, which also may be spelled differently). He said he may be able to set me up to talk to yet another person from UCLA, which would be so so awesome. I just sat back and turned to him and said, “You know, you just met me yesterday, and you’ve already done so much for me (arranging my trip to the Valley of the Kings, getting me a permission letter to the sites, UCLA, also seeing if we could get my room changed so that I could have a better view)…his response was, “You don’t meet people everyday that are this passionate about this kind of work.” I hope I never take for granted what it means to love what you get to do.

To top things off, I came back to my room and this is what the housekeeping women had done:

The past two days I have been not letting them clean my room because I’ve been sleeping when they came by…finally today I let them have at it, and they made me a swan out of my blanket haha and a flower out of my towel, leaving other flowers on my bed.

Tomorrow is Tuesday! I am going to wake up bright an early and go visit Luxor Temple. Afterwards, I will make my way down to Karnak. Wednesday or Thursday, I will return to the West Bank and see more things that I was unable to see (Deir el Bahri, Queen Hatepshuts Mortuary Temple, Tombs of the Nobles etc). Then Friday I head back to Giza! I am so excited to begin excavating. It is a really weird thing…I love archaeology, I love my work, I love my research, but at the same time…all throughout I have had this HUGE piece of it missing…that being I was completely unaware and unfamiliar with the methods and techniques that give rise to archaeology in the first place…mapping, surveying, digging, flotation, identifying features and I’m sure those are only the token words that I know right now…the adventure’s only beginning…these shoes are still too clean for this nomad’s liking.

Sunday Night 2/24/08

2008-02-24T20:19:00.000-08:00

Today was rough to say the least. I was pretty set on waking up early, catching breakfast, and heading over to Luxor Temple. Richard says that Luxor Temple is best seen in the morning as the sun comes over it. I spent last night reading my guide book and was ready to spend the day getting lost in the art and architecture of Egyptian History. However when I woke up this morning I felt absolutely awful. I was naseous and weak, every limb felt heavy. As miserable as I was, I was convinced that getting some food in my stomach would help, so I went downstairs to grab breakfast. My hands were shaking as I tried to spread jam on my bread. I took little bites of anything I thought would make me feel better. I was upset to waste food, but I just had to go back to my room and lay down. I downed a bottle of water and laid in my bed surrounded by 3 others simply so I could cool off. Sickness, of which I wont detail, ensued, and I spent the rest of the day in bed, waking up on the hour to head back to the bathroom and be more unhappy. Finally at around 2:30 I felt a lot better and took a bath. I have felt fine since…I don’t know if it was dehydration, exhaustion, or mild food poisoning…either way it seems to have passed and I am happy about that. We’ll see how dinner goes tonight though. Last night Richard and I ate at this restaurant called Oasis. I had a sandwhich with grilled egglplant and green pepper. Tonight, Richard, Mary Ann, a friend of Mary Ann’s and I are going to eat at an Italian restaurant. My antiquities pass still isn’t in and I am in the process of getting more money changed over to Egyptian pounds so that I can do more site seeing on my own. However, tomorrow I am going to go to the West Bank Necropolis with one of the Egyptian Team Members, so I am stoked about that. The West Bank is home of the Valley of the Kings, tombs for the New Kingdom Pharaohs, as well as Deir el Bahri which has Queen Hatepshets phenomenal mortuary temple. I will take plenty of pictures.

After some technical difficulties....

2008-02-23T12:35:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay in postings. The internet in Luxor is not very good and doesn't work in my room at all. Right now I am sitting in the hallway of my hotel on the opposite end of the building from where I am staying. I have been writing regularly though so, soon enough you all will get a recap on how the past few days of traveling hiatus have been. Obviously I managed to get myself from Detroit to Luxor, with only a few major bumps in the...road? sky? frogger like sidewalk? I did have quite the nightmare when at Cairo Airport waiting for my next flight out to Luxor (the man who met me there escorted me to the wrong terminal and then I was basically trapped since if I decided to leave the area I was, the security said they would not let me back into the airport). I have basically spent the last 2 days sleeping. Last year, since I overnighted in Zurich, the travel did not take as much out of me and I was ready to work once I got into Cairo...this time, days went by before sleeping through a night was an option. To say that I have been exhausted is the understatement of the century.

Friday Morning: 2/22/08
I am writing this initial entry from the Cairo Airport. My flight got in at 2:15 a.m. from Amsterdam, however, my flight to Luxor is not until 7:00 a.m. I had originally booked the 7 a.m. flight just incase my flight out of Amsterdam was delayed…it seemed the perfect option to avoid running around like a crazy woman in a foreign country looking for my next terminal. So here I am at 3:00 a.m. the only person in the entire terminal with the exception of some security guards who cannot speak any english, except to tell me I have pretty eyes. When I try asking questions they smile and shake their heads, but go on and on about my eyes…it is oh so helpful. At least they are friendly. They all seemed to find it HILARIOUS that I am here so early. But before I talk more about my adventures so far alone in Cairo, let’s backtrack a few days (man is my perception of time completely warped as of right now).

I left Detroit a little after 7:00 p.m. Wednesday night. The flight was wonderful…I was so exhausted that I didn’t even stay awake long enough for take off. As the plane ascended into a night adorned with a lunar eclipse, I lay asleep. I slept for most of the flight surprisingly which made it seem quick. I would wake up here and there and talk to the woman next to me. She was a physician. Upon finding this out I immediately thought about how pleased my aunts would be knowing that I was just about as safe as I could be for that flight. The woman was originally from India, though now she lives in Memphis. She was flying to India to visit her mother whom is currently ill and in the hospital. Naturally, we talked about how I will be flying out there come september as well. The most entertaining anecdote from my exchanges with her happened when the dinner cart came:

Flight Attendant: “Vegeteable Curry or Chicken” (repeats to each passenger)
Physician (to me): “But what is the curry?”
Me (utterly perplexed): “I’m sorry what?”
Physician: “He keeps saying curry, but what is it?”
Me: “…oh… the vegetarian entrée?”
Physician: “Yeah..I hear the vegetarian option, and the Chicken…but what is the curry?”
Me: “Curry…it is a spice….”
Physician: “OHHH the vegetable curry is one option…I thought there were three…Vegetable, Curry, or Chicken..but didn’t know what was supposed to be curry.”
Me: “Oh thank God…I don’t mean to be presumptuous or naïve, but I was pretty dumbfounded because I thought you were asking me what curry was…”
Physician (errupts in laughter): “Oh yes it would definitely be backwards if I was the one asking you what curry was.”

It may not seem as funny in blog format…but the idea of an Indian Woman, who was raised in India, has all of her family living in India, was asking me what curry was…it had me and her laughing pretty hard to say the least.

Like I said I slept throughout most of the flight. Last year I was completely dependent updon watching movies back to back to kill the time…this year I only watched one, Michael Clayton, and it was a very fragmented viewing since I kept falling asleep and rewinding.

So after sleeping some more I finally arrived in Amsterdam where I was met by Frank, the boyfriend of one Mary Casey, whom I met on New Years. Frank was dead set on giving me the Sparknotes cultural experience of the Dutch beginning with breakfast. After a train ride- which I sneakily boarded without a ticket and didn’t get caught- some amtraking and some walking, we stopped at a market near his apartment to pick up some dutch breakfast essentials. We then went back to his apartment and made the food. We had fruit salad (raspberries, bananas, and oranges), juice, coffee…pretty standard. But then we also had this little mini toastish/biscuity things with jam. But that by no means compared to the next two items. Apparently the Dutch really enjoy putting chocolate sprinkles on bread…they butter the bread, add the sprinkles and enjoy….and it isn’t just a matter of being crafty with sprinkles and bread, the sprinkles are actually advertised for the sole purpose of putting them on your bread in the morning

…it was pretty sweet for breakfast I thought, but it was actually kind of an interesting texture- the soft bread and the sprinkles…I don’t like butter though so I had an interesting time trying to eat and not make a mess as all of the sprinkles fell off. After that we had these other popular breakfast treats. It is two small waffle cracker/cookies with a sugary, syrup/caramel in the center. You put them in them in the microwave. They were REALLY sweet but pretty good.

After breakfast, Frank let me take a shower in what has to be the world’s smallest bathroom….I barely had enough room to get clothes back on after I was done, however, beggars can’t be choosers and I was damn glad to have a shower. We then left so that I could see some of the fun things Amsterdam has to offer (I’ll spare any build up, no I did not go into any of the “café’s” I kept this a pretty PG visit. We did visit the Anne Frank House though. We were able to walk through it and everything, walking behind the bookcase that hid the only entrance way into the area that house Anne Frank and her Family. After that we walked through some of the really expensive shopping areas of Amsterdam. I took some pictures because I really enjoyed the archtecture.

What isn’t to love about a quaint and cozy downtown with that classical/gothic character to it…inviting and welcoming…but low and behold don’t get all warm and fuzzy yet…lurking in the center of Amsterdam is none other than Death Itself…Double Death to be exact. I didn’t really figure it out, but for whatever reason, two individuals dressed as the grim reaper were collecting donations or something…what a pitch, “Donate to this cancer fundraiser so that we don’t have to go collect the dead children…” I don’t know if that was what was really going on.

I also took a picture of this man and his music box. The cane makes me think he’s blind, but my cynicism (read: intelligence) makes me think he’s not actually.

After some of my picture taking in the downtown area, Frank and I went to the Van Goh Museum, which was totally kickass even if I was verging on incoherence from jet lag. It was decided that afterwards, I could probably use nap. So nap I did, for 3 hours. When I woke up, Frank and his roommate had made dinner, a spinach pasta. When dinner was done, it was time to return to the airport and prepare for my flight into Cairo, of course not without having one more cup of European coffee.

Again, the flight was pretty speedy and easy. I slept a lot again, this time watching Atonement. I arrived to a much calmer Cairo compared to last year (which makes sense since I was getting in at 2:15 in the morning). As soon as I walked in from the shuttle bus, I saw a man holding a big sign for me. He told me exactly how to do everything, how to get my visa, where to get my luggage etc. It was kind of hard for me to understand his English, but when I told him how excited I was to be here he replied, “You have no idea what an honor it is to hear you say that.” All did not follow smoothly however. While I was most pleased with the fact that he got me through customs VERY quickly and painlessly, he was also supposed to walk me directly to the terminal for my next flight to Luxor…well he certainly walked me somewhere…and after standing in a long line for the security check in, I was told that I was at the wrong terminal, and that I had to go next door. So I did…and when I tried asking if I was in the right place, this is when I was told “No English- but those eyes, Beautiful!” So I show the guys my itenerary to see if they have any idea what’s going on (I’ve learned that most Egyptians really have no idea what is ever going on). Again they shake their heads, apologize, but then say I have pretty eyes. Finally I find someone with infromation and he basically starts freaking out, shouting in arabic about the fact that I’m so early (I’m sorry?) They agree to let me come in anyway, but tell me that I am not allowed to leave once I come in…seemed simple enough because I assumed this terminal would be connected to the rest of the airpoty (it isn’t). So here I am, in cairo airport, FREEZING. It’s only 40 degrees outside right now and whereever I am, there are open doors (despite the fact that I’m forbidden from walking out of them). I am sitting at a café…but I can’t tell if it’s open or not…a nice hot coffee would definitely be ideal right now….but I don’t know…I get the feeling if I try to ask for coffee or if the stand is open (there is a guy sitting there, but there are no lights on) there is just going to be some language barrier that will frustrate me futher. Ugh only, 4:15, still 3 hours until my flight!

Friday Night 2/22/08
Well…eventually I wound up in the right place at the right time in Cairo in order to board my flight to Luxor…I was getting pretty nervous for a bit there. I think I held it together quite well seeing as though at that point I had not had a night’s sleep in a bed since Monday evening, I was alone in a foreign country, at the wrong airport terminal, surrounded by people who did not know any English. I figured things out eventally…Check In for Egyptair was a nightmare. I was fairly certain my luggage was not going to make it to luxor. I stood in this line preparing to check my suitcase. In theory it should have been a a quick line to stand in…but sure enough for every ONE person that was in front of me, moments later, their family of 15 would come and meet them in line (hence cut in front of me) with each individual having their own bags to check…I was getting frustrated until I reminded my self that with all of these people I was just going to be waiting around somewhere until 7 anyways…doesn’t really matter if I was waiting in the luggage check in line for a long time. I got through that chaos and by 8 am I was in Luxor. I was met by Richard, and he brought me back to our hotel where I checked in. Luckily, Richard had things he had to do all day and I just got to do whatever I wanted. Now, as I said…I’m getting into luxor 8 am Friday my time, which is about 1 am Friday in Detroit and this all considering the fact that the last time I slept through the night was on Monday (and even then I’m pretty sure I only slept for around 4 hours since I know I got up that day to drive my aunt to work and use her car to run errands). So we might as well say that the last time I slept beyond a nap frame of time was Sunday Night. But I had slept a lot on my various flights and even took a 3 hour nap at Frank’s in Amsterdam, so while I was definitely tired when I got into my hotel room, I thought I would sleep for 2, maybe 3 hours tops. Richard said lunch was at noon and there was a reception party everyone was going to at 5:00. I start to get ready for my sleep…I go to pee and then when I flush…the flusher gets stuck and as a result, just never stops flushing….beautiful. I am exhausted, verging on incoherent and now I am living with the forever running toilet. Obviously this would not do, so I had to have my room changed. No problem I get settled in room 2 and I fall asleep at 9:00. I don’t bother to set my alarm because I am certain I wont sleep more than a few hours since it is the middle of the day….foolish me, I fell asleep at 9:00 only to wake up to my phone ringing at 4:00. It was Richard calling to let me know that we were meeting for the reception at 6:00 instead of 5:00. I could not believe I had slept all day. At that point I got up to take a shower. Now, for whatever reason there is no shower curtain, but at this point I just don’t care…fine, the bathroom can fucking flood for all I care…I go to start my shower and of course something breaks and the showerhead wont turn on…I’m not about to stop everything I’m doing just to change rooms again, or ask for help from the staff and be nodded and smiled at, so I just take a bath- probably the more relaxing way to go anyways. I took my shower, I got ready, met the crew at 6:15 and then we went to this rooftop party downtown.

I mingled and got to know everyone else currently working in Luxor. At around 10, I walked home with two other girls, came home and fell asleep until 3:00 am.

And that brings us to today/tonight
So i woke up at 3:00 a.m. fell back asleep by 6:00 a.m and then woke up at 1:30 p.m. At this point I decided to get up and shower. Unlike last time, a timid girl likely to opt for hanging out in my room until people from the project were back, I decided that I was not just going to sit in my room waiting around. I decided to walk around the city a bit. Luxor is a wee bit calmer than Cairo, obviously its not nearly as densly populated, but it is pretty similar...everyone asking you to shop in their bazaar or get in their taxi, or carriage...everyone asking you to give them money more or less. After walking around I ran into mary ann, recall that I worked with her last year, she is the ethnobotanist. She was taking some students to the office to look at some charred plant remains under a microscope. I tagged along and afterwards found Richard in the hotel lobby. We agreed to meet up in a little bit and he took me around Luxor, showing me where Luxor temple, the winter palace, and karnak temple were. He bought me an excellent guide book on luxor for me to use. I am waiting on my antiquities pass (the neatness that allows me to get into every site for free) before I explore the monuments around here. I will take plenty of pictures and provide ample explanations for those interested. Hopefully Monday, I can go off to Luxor temple on my own, as well to karnak temple (about a 2 mile walk) and then on Tuesday or Wednesday, Richard will go with me to the West bank and to see the Valley of the Kings and der el Bahri. If i get bored enough tomorrow, i will take pictures of my hotel room and talk about that for a bit so that you can get the full experience of my stay. I'm only here until Friday evening and then I head back to Giza. I thought I started working that following Saturday, but I will actually have Saturday off and will begin work on Sunday March 1st.

There...plenty of reading material for you all. Ma salama!

It's the Final Countdown

2007-06-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

Well this is officially my last night in Cairo and my last entry from Egypt.

At one point here I envisioned having this grand summation of my experience towards the end- something that captured the evolution of my adjustment and my insight. However I do not think that I am even remotely aware yet of what has happened and what will continue to happen as I carry this trip with me, as a part of me, for the rest of my life. All I know right now is that I feel so humbled and grateful for all that has been given to me, all that I am priveledged with, and all that I take for granted. I wont venture to say that I am a new person, a changed woman, or that I even grasped a sort of self awareness that was previously beyond my reach- I think to ascribe to that line of thinking is to confuse traveler's enchantment and nostalgia with what is actually taken away when you take off. I think I encountered a struggle- a struggle with my own ignorance, a stuggle with my own naivety, a struggle to adjust, a struggle to make choices that would shape my future. I think I hit lows I've never faced before, feelings of lonliness and isolation, confusion and exhaustion- utter disconnect.

And where am I now? I'm ready to keep going on with my life. I'm ready to come back next year for another two months...I'm ready to plan a summer excavation trip to China or India, I'm ready for new challenges, new struggles, new confrontations, because while those lows were difficult, and perhaps never even appropriately countered with amazing days or moments- the reality that I am and was able to overcome them all, walk out of here with a determination to take on more, is a high that compensates for every wearing second that passed me. Knowing and proving to myself that I can find laughter with maggots on the breakfast table, comfort with a menstruation cycle in the middle of a desert, solitude in the backseat of a near death experience powered by a v-6 engine (if that), a shoulder shrug at mild food poisoning (heh my karmic retribution for driving my poor aunt michele to tears with the malaria bit)- it all shows me that even if I haven't figured out what I want for myself in life, I know that I'm on the right track- my adapatability to this situation has shown me that the things that I want for myself and to be able to offer to other people are not just idealisations, or goals to strive for, they are things I already possess and can demonstrate and utilize. I think I'm finally able to set aside the modesty defense mechanism and realize my strength and in doing so, actually use my strength.

In parallel with the archaeological scientific method upon which I have been operating day in and day out, I cannot simply ascertain these realizations as some form of Law of Kelly's Personality. I've merely made observations within different contexts, considering different variables, and so far have formed ideas, and questions for me to test...what I mean is, I don't expect that I will always be okay with challenging situations, I don't expect that I will always overcome every obstacle, or that I will always learn from every struggle, or that I will always be able to look back on hard experiences in a positive light- but I do know that I look forward to learning more- always.

I am sure I could extend this entry much further, as I am really bored, and too anxious to sleep, but I'v noticed that not all of you read my entries from beginning to end! And most of you probably think I've stopped writing alltogether- who knows maybe no one will see this but if you don't...then you don't know that I will be in Detroit in less than 48 hours!

Thank you for reading and traveling with me- a special note to my closer friends aka those of you who are most likely entitled to travel gifts, 2 things

1) I thought I was going to have an extra week to get shopping done, and so I wasn't able to get everyone everything I wanted
2) Most of the stuff here is junk and you don't want it anyways...I'm coming back next year, if you think of something you want from here, let me know and you have my word that i will get it for you. You don't have my word that it will stay intact or put together by the time it gets from here to there- but that is the essence of Egypt in itself...it really is insane..you would think that coming from the ingenuity that was the pyramid construction, that things would be of a magnificent quality, just goes to show you what happens when countries are poor in the modern world.

Otherwise I try to operate on the, if it made me think of you, i got it for you, basis- and consider yourself lucky if I didn't associate you with cheap, waste of space, junk!

Peace out Girl Scouts!

New Arrival Time

2007-06-06T06:04:00.000-07:00

I was able to get an earlier flight out and so here it is:

New flight info

leave Cairo on Friday at 4:00 p.m.

Leave Zurich Saturday at 8:00 a.m.

Arrive in detroit THIS Saturday June 9th at 12:50 p.m. after customs and what not, should walk out around 1:30ish.

BREAKING NEWS

2007-06-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

So the past few days i have been in and out of nauseousness. I don't like to write about my health too too much because I don't want to worry my poor aunts...However todays was exceptionally bad...I was just feeling not my best in the morning and then my professor and I went out to dinner at which point I became violently ill. I keep going in and out of a fever and chills, and essentially hate my life right now. Per his diagnosis, as he has had it too, it turns out that I most likely have managed to contract malaria, despite it not being the season for it. He has medication for it since he still gets attacks and so I am okay for now but either way, I need adequate medical attention as soon as possible, as well as blood work and so I am coming home early.

That is all i can write for now because i feel so terrible. This is not how I wanted to deal with coming home...

Just kidding!

Well about the malaria part- but not about the coming home early part!

Earlier this morning my professor realized that I am going to finish all of my work by either wednesday or thursday and so he decided to look into moving our flights so that I could come home early!

I was planning on going out of my way to surprise some of you, but I changed my mind. I just couldn't keep it in!

I'm not sure of the details yet, Richard is going to go down and see what he can work out. I could be home as early as this weekend! No matter what though it looks like I will be home before the 15th, giving me extra time to recover from jet lag.

yay :)

I should know by tomorrow what the new plans are!

6/3/07

2007-06-03T09:12:00.000-07:00

So...I think I am kind of running out of things to say. I live in a nice place, which gives me a hell of a lot less to complain about...my work is almost done, and the parts of that which I could potentially vent about, I'm not technically allowed to discuss...I guess in short, the material i am sorting right now is just kind of "uninteresting" not in terms of what it is or what it means to be at the site, but just doesn't require a lot of thought process. Right now I'm just in a little "slump" which probably corrosponds appropriately to the phasing, but as a result just isn't really fun stuff to look at...but thats the thing with archaeology.,.a lot of the stuff you are looking at, is just crap.

When I was first learning how to sort bone, I was working with fauna from Turkey, and it was some of the best preserved material one could find. My professor of course did this on purpose since it would be the easiest to learn from. Then, this past year he had me working with fauna from Yemen, which was just absolutely awful...a lot of junk...but it was still challenging for me because i was not really good with the material yer and so the entire process still kept me engaged. The stuff I have now is inbetween the two, however now that I am really good at knowing what crap looks like, I get more cranky about having to sort and weigh and write about it...but I've already sneaked a peak at some of the last features I have to sort and they are much much better.

Today I saw my first snake- a viper. The egyptians killed it outside of the coffee tent. It was a female, and Richard showed me the characteristics so that I would recognize them in the future. That guy was probably what was keeping the mice away from our bones though...so now we have to guard the bones once again!

I haven't seen the gecko around either. I miss that guy.

My cough has improved a lot. It was really set off by that sand storm we had last week, so now that things are winding down I am doing much better.

It is supposed to be 104 on tuesday...Yuck!

Today is the Third already and here are some lovely countdowns brought to you by June 3rd:

Days left of work: 8 (at the most!)
Days until I leave for Zurich: 11
Days until I arrive in Detroit: 12

look at those numbers, so close but still so far..so fast but still so slow. Such an overall sense of the bittersweet.

Oh the Wonderful World of June!

2007-06-01T07:11:00.000-07:00

Today has been heavenly- except for that wretched, pflegm filled cough of mine...but even that could not significantly drag down today. I'm sure perhaps to the disappointment of those who had their fingers crossed that I would realize that travel and time spent abroad was not the life for me, I am really enjoying things here now, and really do not foresee myself changing my mind about my insistence to travel and see the world. Last night when I went out to dinner with Richard, he told me of all his different field stories, ones in kenya, Iran, and Turkey...I'm sorry but I love this work and I want to have those stories too. There are definitely some down sides to this line of work as I have had explained to me. If you thought that there was drama at your job, imagine having to live with your coworkers for months at a time and in some rather obnoxious arrangements and environmental conditions. It's kind of like summer camp for adults, and this rings true of the field flings as well. What happens when you put a group of girls and guys together for a few months, in a foreign country without any other social network...convenience happens, convenience and hormones apparently, and it is all the gossip. I lucked out since I came towards the end and by now most everyone is gone, but I have been forewarned about some of the ridiculous things that go down.

So far i am still pretty content on doing my next work in China...even though I hate Chinese food. This of course would take place after my excavation apprenticeship next year in Egypt and actually I probably wont get into China for another year or two. But that gives me the time to start learning the language and developing research questions i want to pursue.

I spent most of today in bed, with a mug of coffee reading. If you know me, you know that this is perfection. I was actually reading my professor's report he just completed on the area of the site. It will be a good contextual component for my thesis. It was funny though, after he sent it and I told him I started reading it, he said, "well it's just a rough draft" etc...I told him that I wouldn't judge it too harshly and any commentary I have is intended to be constructive and not taken personally...this is funny because it is usually the exchange he and I have about my writing samples. Again it is just another instance where I find myself being acknowledged as a peer and not just a student, though I'm sure he doesn't really expect me to find any problems with his report...but hopefully I can develop some questions about it.

Most fridays i am off somewhere else around noon, but I was here at the apartments today. Since Friday is the Holy Day, call to prayer lasts for an entire hour, so this was the first time I had to listen to it for that long. Again you just kind of tune it out and it becomes background. At around 1:00 Richard and i left to get lunch. We went to that sushi place again. Delightful! He actually has an allergy to wheat and eggs so sushi works out well since he knows that he can get something there. The sushi place is in the marriot in Zamalek. Zamalek has that store Nomad that I like as well as the grocery store. While at the marriot, Richard picked up a paper and told me that he was going down by the pool to read, and that I was to walk to Nomad and shop. This was an excellent way for me to navigate around the town by myself and to also go shopping! And I walked there all by myself, again feeling liberated, and refreshed, and just very happy. A few cabs tried to follow me around asking if I needed to be driven somewhere. i exercised my little known arabic and would say, "No thank you, I walk" or "No thank you, I have no need"

So as expected, the more familiar I am getting with the culture, the language, and the area, the better I feel about being here which I'm sure is a relief to all. Regardless, I am looking forward to coming home, though part of me is wishing that I was staying in royal oak the rest of the summer. But I guess that just means everyone else will have to come to me in ann arbor!

Tonight we are going to have dinner at felfella. Yay! my favorite, and it looks as though we will be eating lunch there every day frm now on since the villa is now closed and meals are no longer provided. What an excellent excuse to try everything on the menu.

okay back to reading for me!

My weekend is winding down just as everyone elses is getting started. But I know what weekends mean...emails from everybody!! right? please?? :)

Michele you just got a novel from me. Hope you get an extra long lunch break!

byeeee everyone!

here are the pictures of the view from my balcony. The wires are from all the air conditioners.

5/31/07 Continued

2007-05-31T11:27:00.000-07:00

This is a special post dedicated to Mr. Jay Goldenberg. Tonight I went out to dinner and had the best calamari to date. I told my professor that I needed to have a taste of it here in order to report back to you and he knew just the place to go. You go in and the squid is on ice and you pick the one you want. We had it grilled and it was absolutely wonderful...the best texture, not too chewy, just amazing! So if you decide to visit me next year while i'm here :) I will take you there and this time I will treat!

The restaurant also had amazing grilled eggplant and tahina. Boy do I love the weekends in Egypt.

I took a few photos before going out to dinner of my room. I will take a picture of the balcony tomorrow.

Here is my new big bed, a far cry from the twinner over at the villa:

Here is the closetish thing that im not going to use, because i actually come home in two weeks and don't feel like repacking again! I basically wear the same 2 outfits to work every day and then pajamas when I get home...no need to unpack when i'm leaving in another 14 days.

Here is me before going out to dinner, with the door open to my balcony...again i am being magical and doing the mirror reflection shot, but in order to do this i had to turn off the flash and there wasn't enough light in here so it's kind of a bad picture. I more or less wanted to show off my new scarf that I bought last week though. I love it.

And finally here is my air conditioner and how happy it makes me:

It is more than just savior from the heat. Because I can turn this on i can keep my windows closed which means no dirt and dust can blow in and cover all of my stuff, as it has been the past month, and also no mosquitos can get in.

Another perk to living in the apartment is that it is just me, Richard, and for the next few days this other woman Camilla. While I was told it was okay to walk around the villa in shorts and whatever tank tops if I wanted, i still kind of felt disrespectful since muslim men and women do live and work there. The only time i wore shorts was in my room with the door closed. Now I can wear them and not worry so much, because no one is here.

I am a bit frazzled right now because I know that I will not sleep in very late. Even this morning I woke up at 5:00, 40 minutes before my alarm went off. It is going to be a long day tomorrow if I wake up at 5:00 and have nothing planned to do...although 5 am my time should mean that plenty of you are online to entertain me....so keep that in mind! I can also now leave my computer on more since I don't have to worry about it overheating.

I may actually venture a walk on my own tomorrow to this nearby store, but we'll see how I am feeling.

That will end my post for today.

Thank you to the people who actually go out of their way to keep in touch. It really means a lot when you take the time to see how I am and let me know you are checking up.

5/31/07 Post Move-in

2007-05-31T05:45:00.000-07:00

I just finished moving into the apartments and all i can say is, what an upgrade. My room even has its own air conditioner and balcony. I feel extremely spoiled. The bed is HUGE and comfy, and I am a very happy Kelly, although it does take a bit away from the whole gritty archaeologist lifestyle. There's still plenty of dirt for me to deal with on site though, it's nice to be able to retreat to comfort, especially because the heat has been so bad. I will post pictures later on this evening.

In not so happy news, my cough is back and worse than before. If I were to really consider any reasons why I would choose to not come back here or continue work in Egypt it would be because of how it feels for me to breathe...and that's saying a lot. Few archaeologists would turn down work at Giza, but if I knew I had to feel like this for more than a few weeks, it would definitely be a factor in my decision. I find myself even less able to understand smokers if their lungs feel, in any way, the way mine do now....yuck.

Well i'm going to load up on benadryl and take a nap. Then it's shower time and out to dinner. It is the weekend here in egypt..a glorious 36 hours off. There will be no exciting trips tomorrow though. My professor decided that in the interest of my health, that I should stay in and take it easy...it is also for his health too, whatever is in the air gave him an allergy attack as well. So far it seems to only be him and I with all the problems so maybe it's an animal bone thing!

I will post more later, probably bye for now

5/30/07

2007-05-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

I was pretty crabby throughout the day and for various reasons. One, I did not sleep well last night since it was so hot. I also managed to break my fan at about 9:30...only I could break my fan on the hottest night of the year in Egypt. Per usual, my professor came to the rescue and made sure i was taken care of. The fan didn't help much though as I laid in bed, heat ridden an sniffley.

Here is the other reason I was irritable today:

I had to sort many of these. These sieves are full of fish bones...thousands of them...literally, i had to count them all.

So I start off with those messes. Organize them by type:

And then I look to our comparative collection, this being one single fish, and actually this is only the skull bones in this picture:

If you can get any sort of idea from these pictures, it is just a lot of very teeny tiny pieces to work with..and like I said, I had to count them all...but I couldn't just count mindlessly because, as you can see in the sieve, there are also plenty of rocks and nonfish elements. These are not to be counted and so, I must count bone, see rock, throw rocks, count more bone. Throw in some hot weather and 7 flies buzzing in and out your ears and you have the perfect formula for a kelly the grouch. I took periodic breaks to make a dent in the fly swarms and then I explained to them that if I had to get up again that they all would be very sorry...they did not listen, and true to my word, they all joined their brothers and sisters in insect afterlife. I imagine that if I were in Dante's inferno, one level of hell for myself would be giant flies with Kelly Swatters.

I was actually by myself for a large portion of the time, with the exception of the security guards...it was actually a little unnerving because if something went wrong I had no means of contacting anyone, plus i don't speak arabic. Richard had gone home early because his allergies were so bad and he did not want them to get worse and then later John had to go take care of some other things- so I was completely alone in the lab for a few hours. But it was okay, i just listened to music, killed some bugs, and counted some bones.

I had to take some pictures for National Geographic on behalf of one of the grants I recieved, so here are some of me working quite hard...although a lot of them are me staging working hard, because there's only so many ways that i can measure a bone for a picture...in fact i am pretty sure the one of me laughing is because I felt so silly staging measurements...some of them are authentic though, like me writing things down.

I compare and make a decision:

I Measure:

I "Measure" and chuckle to myself "hehehe":

I look at measurement and write:

I make any additional notes beyond the measurement:

This one was taken the next day. Richard was talking to Mark, the project director for the Giza Plateau Mapping Project and they were discussing some theoretical issues with excavation and interpretation while I was doing some analysis of cattle. Apparently what I was doing was relavent to a point Mark was trying to make, namely I think the size of cattle, and so he had Richard take a picture.

If you have been paying attention you know that I move tomorrow. If you haven't been paying attention...I'm moving tomorrow...to a lovely air conditioned apartment. It's close by though. But this means I need to pack, but not very much because I started packing last friday and really i just don't have that much stuff, at least not much that I actually use or need to take from my suitcase. Anyways, I am going to end on that note. Happy Hump Day Everyone!

Five/twenty-nine-oh! seven

2007-05-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

Geoff has noted that it is funny that I consider 90 degree weather cool at this point...it's not even that I consider it cool...it's that I find those to be beautiful days. Today we actually had a sand storm. It's not as bad as they get, this isn't standard sand storm season, but when they do happen usually you can't see anything except redness from the windblown sand of the sahara. I took a picture from my bedroom window but it didn't do it justice, the haze is incredible...my hair was absolutely filthy though.

I am kind of nervous for what my hairdresser is going to have to do with it in order to make it healthy again. It is so damaged right now from the weather, from not being cut in a while, and from the water here. I figured out that it may also have had a hand in how terrible my skin has been lately. I'm broken out all alround my neck, so now I have a new hair policy...at no point while I'm here is my hair to touch any part of my neck or face. This requires sleeping with it up, which is something that I normally hate, but it really is helping. I don't know if my hair has ever been this long before, and so it makes sense that the oils and dirt from it being all over my face could be clogging my pores more than usual. I also switched to a different shampoo and conditioner at Richard's suggestion. Like I said, so far it is helping a lot.

My work is actually moving along very well...what at first seemed like it was going to be very difficult and daunting, has actually turned out to be not so hard, just tedious and annoying....but it is my job and I do love it. Today i realized one excellent perk of my job...no customers...i never wake up considering how busy or slow etc my day is going to be. It's a job where I just sit and think and figure things out. It's essentially just putting together a big puzzle...which is funny because even when i'm not working i am just doing other puzzles...crosswords, sudokus and others from this big book I have. Everyone makes fun of me for doing them during breakfast and lunch...but I don't know, i like keeping my brain occupied. Plus it's what my dad always did. Another habit I have picked up here, similar to my dad's, is that I started writing in all capitals. It just looks so much neater on my data sheets...my hand writing was getting a little out of control for them, but capital letters slow me down enough and force me to write more legibly. Speaking of data sheets...richard asked me how far along I was in entering mine...at first i was a little embarassed to admit that I had only done like 5.. (no I didn't do any last night like i said i would) he reassured me that i could do it whenever i wanted and that he usually waits until he gets home to enter his...that was a relief. I will probably save it for some bigger computer screens as well as a mouse...this macbook is just too tiny to navigated between 8 different excel spreadsheets.

Today i only had to work untik 3:30. At 4:00 a zooarcharologist from the American University in Cairo came over with a student of hers to go over some material with Richard. She is a delightful woman, very articulate. It was very weird though, to have this cluster of 4 zooarchaeologists discussing at length the differences between horse and donkey molars...but it was actually very neat...I wasn't treated like a student, I was treated like a peer. This also happened yesterday. Richard asked me if i knew what a certain archaeological bone he had was...not because he was trying to test me, but because he wanted to know my opinion...unfortunately i didn't really know...well I kind of knew, by default. It was an unfamiliar looking metapodial, and by default you should always check a pig if it doesn't look right...but when I thought that, I assumed that he operated under the same standard, since he is the one that taught me it, and I assumed he already considered and dismissed pig...i really just should have gone ahead and said it...could have really wowed the crowd.

Because of the high winds, all of the flied are migrating indoors and are worse than usual. Frequently i went on fly patrol with the swatter. I killed two that were having sex...fly and maggot birth control, i just spared us 3000 additional flies.

Also with these high winds, whatever is making me sneeze, wheeze, and sniffle is being blown into my face with much greater intensity. I took two benadryl and its helping, but on that note, I am tired and must lay down. Goooodddnight!

Attention

2007-05-29T03:53:00.000-07:00

It is 107 degrees right now....every time I move, I think to myself...heh, I didn't know it was possible to sweat there!

The wind is outrageous blowing sand in my eyes, lungs, and hair.

It hurts to breathe a little bit.

And my allergies are kicking my ass

Sadface

But it's not so bad. The morning went by quick. We are going back to the lab but only for an hour which will be nice.

That is my update...the weather is supposed to drop back down to 91 tomorrow, but that means high winds tonight and possibly some sand storms.