Today was a good day not to be sick, as it was our first field trip out of our beautiful dig house!
The house itself is a sprawling mudbrick structure with several stories - each with large courtyards open to the sky, in fact, the only roofs on the house are over the kitchen, library, and our bedrooms. The weather here is beautiful, only slightly chilly at night, and being able to sit in a comfortable chair with a glass of tea and a shady awning is pretty much perfection. I haven't been able to really enjoy the food, but with my recent immune system comeback (plus 10 to antibiotics) the last 24 hours have been full of delicious food. They definitely feed us well. And often. Really often.
Our field trip this morning began with the gang piling into the "Magical Mystery Bus", a bus from the 1970s with an amazing paisley roof and bright red seats, and heading to our future archaeological site at Amheida which we will all know very well all too soon. We ran around the site (literally we ran up sand dunes because for some reason we had only allotted ourselves an hour at the site) and Ellen, our professor, pointed out the major finds so far: a large Roman villa which the team has faithfully reconstructed several meters over, a large Old Kingdom village and temple, a giant hill made up of human bones (which was really crazy), and several prehistoric campsites. Pretty much all of human history in a few square miles.
After a short delay during which our poor Magical Bus became horribly stuck in a sand dune and we had to call several bedouin villagers to help us dig it out, we continued to a school where Gaber's (the leader of the house staff) children go. It was actually really nice for such a small village, they had a large room full of computers for the students to use, and a room full of dancing preschoolers who coerced several of us into joining them. Much hilarity ensued.
Then on to a two thousand year old mosque and village located in the heart of Gaber's modern village, which was really incredible. We ended our excursion with tea and peanuts at Gaber's brother's house which was beautiful.
The area around the dig house can only be described as "lush". It has the most neon green fields I have ever seen. EVER. It is pretty much crazy insane. I will post pictures of this day and the dig house soon, so far all I've been able to manage is the first few days in Cairo, what with the being deathly ill. Anyway, so far the days I have not been tied to the house - meaning today - have been pretty darn amazing.
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Hillary -
ReplyDeleteI'm soo relieved to hear that you won't be living off of cliff bars for the next four months. phew! however, that somewhat disappoints me considering that the unnecessarily high number of bars took up extra space in your bag, meaning that you could have packed more fashionable clothes successfully. oh well.
You should also know that I am insanely jealous of you - I'm glad you're having such an epic adventure.
Much love!
Becca.
Oh, and I'll have you know I created a google account simply so I could comment on here.
It's okay, I will just eat/give away the cliff bars and then have tons of room for amazing things to bring back! As it stands I'm probably going to have to buy another cheap bag and check it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for making a google account! Your comments are greatly appreciated
The bus reminds me of the Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters at work. Did you ever read the Tom Wolfe's - when he was still doing journalism and not his dumb novels - Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? Got a picture of the bus?
ReplyDeleteI thought the prophet Muhammed appeared in 500 or 600, but I guess a 2000 year old mosque would be prophetic.
Sounds terrific, but my encounters with Montezuma's revenge makes me think I am glad I am here eating bad fast food. Remeber to avoid to avoid stagnant water.
When do you put shovel to sand? What's the process by which they are getting you to the point of digging? Are they more professional than the Kansas Archaeological Society, back when?