Day den xero of excavation:

Good and  bad. First, we found mostly red in my trench and haven’t found any sort of  architecture, so Trench 33 is officially closed for the season. =( The bad side is that all of us were spread out. Kate, my awesome trenchmaster, was sent to “wall chase” in 44, 45, looking for a section of wall that we know for sure is there, but not necessarily excavating the entire trench. She took Allison and Ella with her. Dan has his own couple E.U.s all the way across the site and is excavating there by himself. I am now excavating a bulk (rows E and 1 are kept
in place as a pathway during regular excavation and it’s referred to as a “bulk”) in trench 54 under Γιοργία (or Georgia  in English). It’s between two walls and near an “L-shaped” grouping of rocks that Professor Maggidis believes could’ve been the base of a wooden staircase. That’s because within the “L” there are two round sections missing, possibly where wooden beams went to support the stairs. The big question is, where is the staircase to? The two walls aren’t parallel to each other and only one lines up with the “stairway”. We also found a lot of “kitchen-ware” pottery sherds (big stuff with handles and the like) and there
was a pit that has been excavated but is still on the plans that were drawn up. 
 So basically, like everything in this dig, we’re not sure what’s going on. That’s why the next
  five years, DEPAS is going to excavate in Gla and people are going to study what we’ve excavated in the Lower Town at Mycenae. I liked the way Jen described it to me. She likened it to looking at pictures of the Earth. When you look at a tree or a group of trees, you can’t really see the size, shape, or type of forest. But when you zoom out and look at it from satellite, it all
  becomes a little easier. Of course, that doesn’t stop archaeologists from trying to identify the rainforest by looking at a few leaves, if you get what I’m sayin’. Right now we’re looking at a close up, but the five years of study will help us get a bigger picture, and then maybe it will begin to make sense.
The really cool part of today wasn’t the staircase, though. We were pulling out a lot of rocks and rubble in the bulk when Andreanos, our workman, pulled out…a figurine torso! It was so COOL!!!! Angelos and Professor Maggidis both identified it at a Late Mycenaean and Antonia said it was female. Basically, the reason they say it’s Late Mycenaean is the stylistic features. It’s HIGHLY STYLIZED, so we’re not looking at something that resembles a human all that much. It’s kinda got the same shape, and the head is obvious, but that’s about it. I said before, I’m fairly certain my little cousin could replicate one of these figurines, and the same holds true for this one. But it is REALLY BEAUTIFUL, in its own way. The eyes, shoulder pads (like shoulder loops on a uniform), and medallion around its neck are all added (as in attached after the original piece was sculpted) which means its Late Mycenaean. Earlier Mycenaean figurines don’t have those attachments. They are very plain. Also, the face is pinched. It’s basically like someone took the clay between thumb and forefinger and pulled it forward, pinching it outwards to make a nose and mouth.
Honestly, it doesn’t look like much to your average person, maybe something a child made at day-care that you’d put on your mantle because they were really proud of it, not necessarily
because it was a work of artistic genius. But you should’ve seen everyone when it was pulled out. Andreanos handed it to me and I showed it to Georgia and Angelos and it was like a new mommy had brought their baby to work. Everyone was crowding around, cooing over it, talking “archaeologist” about all of the features. Heidi named it «Αφροδίτη»(Aphrodite) because of how pretty it was. I had to go get a number for it because we had to take a point on its find location with the Total station (aka“Hal” after the evil computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and it took me a good twenty minutes to get it registered. Joe took a photo of me and Aphrodite, even though Andreanos found it. But because I was the student in the trench, I end
  up being the “go-for” for all the numbers and etc., I took it to the registration tent and that’s where everyone came up to see it. Professor Maggidis said it’s possibly, and I quote “the best figurine found so far” (in reference to the dig in general, not Mycenae of course!). =)
 It was all cool and although I feel like a turncoat saying this, I like the new trench. Georgia is obviously Greek, so I get to practice some of my Greek, including listening to native speakers. She speaks slowly enough naturally that I can better understand her words, and typically when Angelos or one of the other supervisors, or Professor Maggidis comes to talk to her, they speak in Greek, so I can pick up some excavation terms as well. It’s difficult, but my Greek is already better. I understand more of what I hear, though my speaking remains BAAAAAD. Of course, I’m going to go home and lose it all, but we’ll cross that hill when we get there.
There is just one and a half weeks remaining and I can’t believe how quickly this month is flying by. It’s already the 19th, and I come home at the end of July! Only one more Saturday here! I guess I’ll have to go to the beach this weekend and get in my last swim of the Aegean (at least for this trip…=)).  Hopefully I’ll have more cool things to talk about next time!
P.S. Updates will be sporadic the rest of the month. Sometimes I have things to talk about, sometimes I don't, and sometimes the Internet just goes to caput.

So there has been a very good reason why I haven't updated in the last three days. Actually, there are two good reasons...
1) Internet is still sketchy so now we can only use it for personal things after 9 PM. But we have to get up at 5 AM so...yeah...
2) RED DEATH!
Yes, we have hit plenty of Red Death, the river was/deposit that is basically sterile (meaning there are absolutely no finds in it). The majority of our upper half of Trench 33 is covered in the stuff and it SUUUUUCKS! Trench 34 has been retired for the season since we couldn't really keep up with it and frankly we wanted to focus on what was being found in Trench 33. This was, of course, before we found so much red.
I blame Sarah. The running theory is that the abundance of Red Death is a curse brought on by Sarah, our supervisor. When Sarah was a trenchmaster she had LOTS of Red Death. They dug down through two full meters of the stuff without finding a single pottery sherd. It's all because Sarah was, at one point, engaged to a Turkish man. It didn't work out, which is good or bad, depending on whether you hold to the Greek mindset. Since the majority of those working on the site are Greek...yeah...
So rather than talk about all the really AWESOME sifting I've done of other people's soil, I figured I'd talk about the trip we took to the Mycenaean citadel. THAT was interesting! We got to go into sections that are closed to the general public ("This is where the magic happens"-Dr. Katie), including a building called the cult center. Basically it was a room, slightly larger than your average shed, with a little croft that was used to store the cult idols. These cult idols...well I'm fairly certain given a picture, my five year-old cousin could produce a fair replica. They were intentionally ugly, actually. The coolest part of the cult center is actually that everything was found "in situ", meaning in place. About 70% of what archaeologists know is based on where and how features/finds were found. So finding stuff in their original places...BIG DEAL!
The cult center was actually REALLY CREEPY. And not just because of the ugly figurines. Those were in the museum. It was covered over by a tin roof with some rotting wooden beams and no light. There were snake tracks all over the floor and some serious spider webs. I'm talking Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, walking through the booby traps before the Holy Grail room, serious. Not to mention, you could hear shuffling through the walls. CRREEEPY!
We also got to see a series of mudbrick walls, which was actually REALLY COOL! These walls are amazingly in good shape, even though they are being propped up by wooden two-by-fours. But mudbrick isn't exactly the most durable of materials and these mudbrick walls survived an earthquake/fire (that is, a fire started by a preceeding earthquake). So we all basically had to hold our breaths when going through the covered area where the mudbrick was found. The first thing Dr. Katie said was "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"
Of course we also climbed up and over the citadel and down into the cistern, but the cult center and the mudbrick really was the coolest part.
So that was our Mycenaean citadel tour. Yeah, all the tourists looked really jealous. ;-)
I think that's it for now. I'm going to talk more tomorrow, hopefully. We are going to Monemvasia tomorrow. Swimming, medieval ruins, and Byzantine churches. Yay!

Today was awesome compared to what we've found so far! We started out with some pictures and planning out the few rocks in trench 33 and the Red Death corner. I got to try my hand at planning on a grid square. It's meticulous work, if not a little difficult. You take a plumb bob and basically try to get as completely over what you were drawing as possible. Then you have a grid square and you transfer each feature,  square for square. I got lucky, I only had to draw four rocks and a little outline in the northwest corner of the Red Death section. Somehow I managed to draw four circles, roughly the proper size and shape of the rocks in the middle of the grid.
That's when things started getting interesting. The Red Death section was given the context number 321, while the rest of the soil was context 320. When we started digging, we found part of a plaster floor and that got context 329. Along with the plaster floor, we found two stone pavers, including one that I helped the workman remove that was pratically intact. It looked a bit like a puzzle, but we pulled out all the pieces and put them in their own bag so that at the museum they could be easily pieced back together. The wall so far is looking like a series of rocks, but we haven't taken them out yet because we found more rocks underneath. They don't exactly line up nicely, but we're holding out for a connection.
In Trench 34, to the east of 33, we found a lamb bone, possibly part of a leg I think...? It was really cool because there were two pieces that could fit together and we had the end, where the joint would've been. They also found a bronze piece in that trench and I pulled out an ancient, rusty nail from the sift. Again, supper cool. Unfortunately now that we are in a real context and not on the surface layer, we have to send buckets to the sift, which means the majority of our trench spent most of our time down there. I got to come up and help supervise and run paperwork at the end, which is a bit more interesting since you are there when they make these really cool finds.
Right now they are leaning towards the Geometric period with the pottery we've been finding. I found this beautiful base piece with painted lines and an orange and black, rimmed base that they dated, likely to the Geometric Period. This is really cool because, until our excavation of the Lower Town, most archaeologists believed that Mycenae was completely abandoned after the Mycenaeans and remained uninhabited. But since we're finding walls and pottery and other really cool stuff in the Geometric Period (around 900-700 BC), that is obviously not the case! Take THAT Schliemann!
Tomorrow I have no idea what we will find, but I'm super excited. If it's anything like today, it promises to be awesome.

So, Internet has been down for a LOOOONG time. Something about the splitter...and then we were restricted to only using the WiFi after 9 PM (here) so that we wouldn't tie up archaeological stuff.
But really my Friday went kinda quickly. We found a few more rocks, but nothing important really.
Saturday was our day off. We went to Karathona Beach, just outside of Naphlio. Is was BEAUUUUTIFUL! The water was so blue and there wasn't really all that much ocean life (like Jellyfishes) to have to deal with. A group of us took the bus down (which took almost two whole hours but cost about six Euros less than a taxi) and hung out at the beach for the majority of the afternoon. The salt content is so high that you can float really easily and Karathona is in an inlet within a harbor, so there was hardly any wake to deal with. Got some sun, but all around it was a great day off.
Sunday we went up to the new site of Gla, up in northern Greece near Thebes. It took about three hours, but we picked up the team of graduate students that were working on preparing that site. It will go active next summer and I can't wait! The site is virtually unexcavated and untouched. The site is possibly the ruins of a citadel belonging to two different rulers that lived side-by-side in possibly two separate but comparable megarons. It's about 5x the size of the citadel at Mycenae, but unfortunately is covered entirely in really prickly, nasty brush. It will have to be cleared before we can properly excavate, and they haven't been able to do as much as they would've liked so far. So next summer looks like more yard work than excavation, but there is still potential to make some awesome finds. There was a room with a collapsed roof that all of us were just itching to get into, only nobody could figure out how the hell we were going to get a crane up on the citadel to lift the damn thing! Listening to Professor Maggidis and Antonia (who was in charge of those clearing Gla) talk about it...well it was like a kid in a candy shop.
After Gla we drove another hour to the site at Delphi. I've been to Delphi before, but this time we climbed all the way up to the top of the site to the stadium where they hosted the Pythian Games, in honour of Pythian Apollo. MAN is it a hike! Looking down to where the tholos stood near the training area for the athletes, they probably would've had to hike all the way up the mountain the night before  and camp there to be completely rested for the events. Seeing everything after doing Delphi as a project for Professor Maggidis's Olympic Games course, it gives you a whole new perspective. I could give little interesting tidbits, such as how there were actuall two other temples before the current one, and how the stadium was just short of 200 meters long and the marjority of the seating was from the Hellenistic period, after the Greek high Classical period.
All around, Sunday was a long day and getting up Monday morning was painful...
We finished clearing off the surface layer and took some pictures and were planning on drawing out the rocks that we'd found, but never had the time to. However, we did find the Red Death in our northwestern corner. Dun dun duuuunn!

Day 4 of Excavation:
Theoretically we should be over that “wall” that I was going on about yesterday, and for the most part it’s true. We all headed down to the dig with renewed spirits, ready to go get the day. Yesterday we’d uncovered a rock that looked very promising. Remember, Trench 33 or 34 should hold a section of a wall, either parallel or continued. These walls are, of course, made out of big rocks that are pieced together. So when big rocks just break the surface, the
  workmen go σιγά, σιγά (slowly, slowly) and take a mini pickaxe to the area around and determine whether or not the stone is actually attached to anything, or just a big rock in
space.
Unfortunately, our“promising wall sections” turned out to just be rocks. But not to worry because those were sort of long shots anyways. In truth, we’re still on the surface layer and not
really expecting to find anything just yet. The walls are actually lower than where we are right now. We were hopeful that maybe we’d find taller walls, or maybe the original ground slopes upwards like the current surface does, but again that doesn’t seem to be the case. Once more, we left the day with a few promising rocks, but that was about it. Today wasn’t really as cool, all around. But we’re hopeful still and tomorrow is Friday (as Rebecca Black will probably
tell you). Then we have our first day off and there are already plans being made for Naphlio. Can’t wait!

**Little Note: The Internet is really sketchy here, so updates are coming at odd times. But I am writing every day. They are going in a Word Document and being posted when the Internet is working! Just FYI.**
Day 3 of Excavation: When I  go on a long hike or anything that involves physical exertion for more than just weekend, I find that, whether I’m alone or with a team, I always hit a “wall”.
By the third day, the excitement of a new task is beginning to wear down. You’re getting the hang of things and the physical exertion of the last two days has worn on you to the point that you just feel tired all the time. At“the Wall”, tensions are high, morale is low, and if you’ve studied team development at all, you’d recognize it as a sort of “Storming Stage” (reference for any YLT Staffers out there!), which can effectively be summed up in one phrase, “Low Enthusiasm, Low Skill”. 
I’d say we’ve hit the wall here. Today was a bit lagging all around. Everyone was tired and a little short tempered and the med-kit got a serious workout today. I saw band-aids and taped
fingers/hands all around as by the third day, bucket handles were cutting into palms and thumbs, blisters were popping up in less callused places, and the bugs were out en-force. I personally now have three very lovely, un-popped blisters on my palm, just at the base of my pinkie, ring, and middle fingers on my left hand, and one on the way at the base of my pinkie on the right. I do believe it’s from all the pick axing. Yet despite the general  tenor of the day, we (that is my trench team) were able to get a bit done. We finished the first layer of Trench 33 and began the first layer of Trench 34, immediately to the east of 33, getting a good portion of it done. Among the things found there included parts of a kylix (type of pottery cup). I also had a cool find. As I was cleaning up Trench 33 with a few of the workmen I spotted a
little round stone with a small hole down the center. It turned out to be an almost completely intact LOOM WEIGHT! It’s rounded mostly, but flat on the bottom and the hole goes all the way through, which is where they threaded the material. What’s really cool about this loom weight was that it was mostly intact. We found two other pieces of loom weights before, but this one could really help tell us about the time period we were looking
at. Right now we’re still trying to find the wall. We can see a few larger stones just breaking the surface that show promise, but we can’t be sure until we excavate lower. Another thing we
can’t be sure about is a silt-type of soil that we refer to as“the Red Death”. Basically it’s likely some sort of sediment left behind from when there was flooding. The only problem is, there is absolutely, positively NOTHING found in “the Red Death”. There is a trench at the dig that goes well over my head with two whole meters of Red Death that borders a wall. What we’re hoping is that said wall actually extends to our trench, or a different wall runs parallel
because we are beginning to see possible signs of “the Red Death”on the western side of Trench 33. The lucky part is, if the stones we can barely see are in fact part of a wall, then the wall could’ve acted like the other one and “trapped” the Red Death on just the west side, leaving the east and Trench 34 free of the Red Death. Like I said before, though, we can’t be certain until we excavate, something that will happen tomorrow. It’s a slow process, but we’ve
got a month to do it. We in Trenches 33 and 34 are determined to find this wall!
Enough of my ramblings. Καληνύχτα.

Day 2 of Excavation: Day 2, I've heard, rings with echoes of the same sentiment. I hate sifting. By now the novelty of the sift has worn off and you realize that it's really something that is very dusty and hard on the arms and knuckles (since you're holding a bar at either end and smashing your knuckles against the edges of the sift every time you shake it back and forth).  Most everybody standing around the sift looks like a bandit, though we make a very dirty and colourful group of bandits. Most opt to wear a bandana over their mouths and noses when at the sift. It's hot, but at least you won't have an impromtu asthma attack every time someone shakes up their batch of dirt (my apologies, Mr. Leppold, soil). After a little while, everything just starts to look like dirt clumps (which you have to break up in case there's something inside) and you can no longer tell the difference between plaster, ceramic, a bone, or a rock. There are a few easy ways to tell, though, if your eyes are deceiving you.
1) Tap it on something. Mostly metal works. You find a sherd and tap it on the edge of the sift or a trowel and compare it's sound to the sound of a known rock. They sound different. You don't have to only use metal, though. Many at the dig tap an unknown piece on their teeth. It does the same thing (though you don't usually have to compare it to a rock with this method) and what's a little dirt for archaeology? You breathe enough of it anyways. Everybody is already sneezing dirt.
2) If it's bone, stick it to your tongue. Bone is porous and will stick very well. This is because all the bone marrow has broken down by now. The only thing you don't want to do is stick metal in your mouth. That can be a bit iffy. Today at the sift we found a nail and Andy, the siftmaster this week until Erik comes from the Glas site, was ready to tap it on is tooth, but decided against it when he realized that it could actually be metal.
The cool part of the sift is actually when they find a grave. That's only happened a handful of times (as in you can count it on one hand) at this site, but when a grave is found, you have the opportunity to potentially find things like coins, beads, or even something shiny ;-). At the dig, you're paid 50 Euro for gold and Linear B pieces. Doesn't sound too bad, eh? Of course, that's not found all that often. Like I said, only a handful of times. They've found one adult grave with some stuff and three babies graves with only some little beads, in the course of the entire excavation at the Lower Town.
Luckily, you don't stay on the sift all day (unless you're Andy the siftmaster). You rotate, two in, two back at the trench. Today we made the first pass and sifted as we went, combing through the broken up soil to find ceramics and the like, that way Andy didn't get backed up with our stuff too. We found a few cool things, including a sling stone, but really what we're looking for is part of a wall that runs parallel to a big one, south of our trench. Through the miracle of Geomagnetometry, we belive it would only run through the upper northeastern corner, though. We still do the entire trench (because you never can truly know until your excavate) but so far nothing but a few hundred pottery sherds have popped up. At the end of the day we gridded another trench next to 33, dubbed trench 34. Original, I know. Tomorrow we'll be beginning excavation there and hopefully will start finding that wall. It's supposed to run right through the center of that trench.  Right now neither look like much, but tomorrow will hopefully end with a layer of exposed wall. Cross your fingers!

Day 1 of excavations:
Happy Fourth of July! We started the first day of excavations, which reminded me a lot of weeding at first. In order to dig you have to get rid of all the dead and living plants over the area where you believe there may be ancient whatevers. How do we know there are ancient whatevers before we've even broken ground? The miracle of technology! We use a variety of techniques that can give us a general idea of what is under the soil. It's not a very descriptive idea, but most of the time we are not just digging without any sort of clue as to what's exactly down there.
My trenchmaster (how awesome is that title, really?) is also named Katie, which is very confusing most of the time, and with her direction we cleared about 500 square meters, give or take. I'm not talking just a little bit of grass. I'm talking lots of hay and thistles that get stuck in your hand. Once more, when you're clearing, you aren't necessarily under a shade. So clearing is a lot like gardening, but with shovels and brushes rather than rakes. Not that we didn't have rakes; there are just four trenches and only two rakes. Those who wait don't get a toolbox. Sucks, but that's archaeology. So, I learned how to rake with the side of a shovel. A little difficult, but you get the hang of it after the first ten square meters or so...
After we cleared most of the larger debris from the area, we marked out one grid (which would be dubbed trench 33 in the computer and in our hearts) of five meters by five meters. Across the north side is 1-5 and down the east side is A-E. But column 1 and row E is always set aside as a "bulk". Basically, it isn't dug and will serve as a walkway between trenches until the area is excavated. The only reason they'd take out a bulk is because they need to, i.e. there's a wall that runs straight into the bulk. If we do our math right, that gives us 16 1m x 1m squares within a trench. These are called E.Us, or Excavation Units. A single person might work in an E.U. at a time, and E.U.s are used when something is found to denote placement and to sketch diagrams of fixtures.
After marking out our grid, we cleared off the smaller bits and pieces with straw brushes (think a smaller version of a sawed off straw broom) and dustpans, and then took preliminary readings with the total station. A total station takes,well, everything. Geographic coordinates, distances, and depth. It's basically this eye-looking machine on a tripod and you hold a staff with a mirror sensor on the head. Then the eye moves around until it finds the sensor. You hold the rod level at the point for a few seconds until the GIS guys say "okay" and then you move onto the next point. The really cool thing is that when you move, the eye of the machine moves with the "magic staff", provided you don't get in the way of the eye's view of the sensor. Yes, I stood there and moved the magic staff up down and all around and watched the total station move and it was really the hightlight of my day. Well actually, maybe that was when the workmen decided if they were going to dig in that grid the next day, they'd want a tarp up so they weren't out in the hot, Grecian sun.
And that rounded off our day. I know it might seem like a whole lotta nothing, but it was preparation that is necessary to archaeology. Archaeologists don't just dig holes, we methodically remove layers of 5-10 centimeters each pass. Every bucket of soil is sifted through and two people have to rotate through at the sift each day. Sifting is where I did most of my heavy lifting. You have to go bucket by bucket and you're standing with a wire sift hanging over a wheelbarrow. Dump a bucket, you are your sift buddy lift the sift to about chest height (letting it hang while you sift tears at the ropes), shake it until every little particle is through, and then you go through with your hands, picking out everything: pottery sherds (that's the proper term, not 'shards'), bone fragments, sea shells, lithics (stone tools and whatnot), you name it. Sherds with paint on them or that are handles or bases are considered 'Diagnostic' (meaning they could actually tell us something important, as opposed to the hundreds of 'body sherds' that we find with nothing on them whatsoever) and they go in a seperate bag. The sift can get hectic, especially with four trenches going at once and Greek workmen powering through 10 centimeters at a time with big pick-axes. You have to keep each trench accounted for and each pass (5-10 centimeter increments) marked. It can get confusing, but never fear for the siftmaster is always here with his handy-dandy notebook and tick-marks. Coloured buckets help denote where each batch of soil came from, until they run out of a specific colour bucket and then all hell breaks loose.
So you see, an archaeological dig is packed with all sorts of things that require thinking. It's not just mindless digging. Like I said earlier, it's METHODICAL.
After the dig we didn't do much of interest and I promptly fell asleep after an entirely cold shower (that felt glorious). So there's my harping for the first day. I hope you enjoyed it!

Hello again everybody! So I know I'm a few days behind with this post, but there was no internet access in Athens and I therefore was unable to update this blog until just today when we left the capital of Greece and drove two hours on a bus for the tiny town outside of the Mycenaean citadel, aptly called by archaeologists and historians, Mycenae! Yes, I realize I have therefore already FAILED to update regularly, but in my defense, that was beyond my control. And I'm updating now.
I guess the first thing I'd like to tell you all is that everybody made it without anyone being pickpocketed or killed. Yay! For our efforts, Chris (one of the graduate students in charge) bought us all cookies. I think I'll avoid pickpockets from now on, especially if we're going to get free cookies out of it!
Since it is splashed all over CNN and every other news network (Greek or foreign) many of you likely know that there have been some riots in Greece over, of all things, money! I'd like to tell you all that we were right there in the middle of the action and were given gas masks on our pillows rather than those little mints...but that would be a big fat lie, and nobody likes a liar. Unles you're a really good liar, in which case people don't actually KNOW you're a liar, and then people might actually like you, but then I guess that whole "nobody likes a liar' phrase wouldn't TECHNICALLY apply to you...confused yet? What it all boiled down to was some interesting metro switches and a bit of walking, but other than that, Athens was still as loud and cramped as I remembered it. Of course everyone spoke Greek at you, and since my Greek is quite frankly atrocious, I did not communicate with many natives. I was however, able to order food by pointing and nodding, and most of the cafes had at least SOMEONE who knew some English, so I did not starve. Which is generally good...
In Athens we went and toured the Parthenon and the new museum, as well as the Ancient Agora and the National Archaeological Museum. All of them were great, just the Parthenon day was LOOOOOOOOONNG!!! It was the day after all of us had flown overnight into Athens and all of us were somewhere between Athens time and Home time (not necessarily the same times since we come from all over the place!). So it was a very quiet tour on our part. Not to mention it took a combined total of about 7 HOURS! Our tour guide, Maria, was a very nice lady, spoke fairly good Greeklish, but by the first hour or so, we were all ready for a nice long nap and maybe some γύρο με πίτα. The next day was the museum and wasn't so bad, mainly because this time she gave us a few highlights and let us free to roam. We all pressed our noses to the glass cases with the "Mask of Agamemnon", the Niello daggers, Vapheio cups A and B,  and countless other pieces that we'd all seen over and over again in Prof. Maggidis's slides for classes, but never in person. I'd just like to say, things look a lot bigger in photos than real life. For example, there were two rhytons (ritual drinking vessels) in the shape of a bull's head and a gold lion's head that we'd seen plenty before. In the pictures, these things seemed about as big as someone's head. Well... actually they were about as big as a wide-open hand. Still as cool as ever (especially the lion one, that one is still my favourite rhyton), but surprising.
After the museum, we were turned loose on Greece and told to shoot Erica or Chris a text of where we were and what we were doing for supper when the time came. Marjorie, Ella, and I did some shopping in the Plaka, the touristy, flea market area where you can get all the fake vases and mini models of the Parthenon. Needless to say, I ended my day with my wallet a bit lighter and gifts for everyone on my list. ;-)
Today we got to sleep in and then boarded a coach bus and drove down to Mykines (the Greek name for Mycenae). It wasn't that long of a ride, but we got to pass over the canal that cuts through the isthmus between the main part of Greece and the Peloponnese, where Mycenae is located. A big ditch, would probably be a big enough understatement to describe the canal. It's basically a straight-shot  with huge, rocky clifs carved out of the ground. People bungee off the bridge over the canal. It's such a straight drop that, if you don't know it's coming up, you can totally miss the canal itself. It's just, tree, tree, tree, tree, WHOOPS CLIFF!, tree, tree, tree, tree... They even gave us fair warning and some people actually missed the canal.
The town were staying in is close to the dig, but we still have to be shuttled up and back to and from the site. There are only around 200 people in this town and one road which everything is off of. Compared to Athens, it's like a ghost town! Marjorie, my sometimes-woefully-confused-but-generally-fun roommate, and I went exploring, found two gift shops and three restaurants/taverns, and saw only four people. I think it might be just because it's a Sunday and, like usual, bloody hot outside, but I'm not sure. Something just tells me this place doesn't exactly have a hopping night-life. But then, Marjorie and I are SUCH party-animals...
Tomorrow is a half-day and is orientation. I'll meet my trenchmaster (how cool does that title sound?), find out which sector I'll be working in, and then Prof. Maggidis will give us troops a rally speech (possibly) before we have to really start the main work. Yes, I know tomorrow is the Fourth of July, but it's Greece!
Okay, I think I've blathered on enough, so I'll leave you for now.  Check out the photo gallery because I'll be posting pics from Athens!
Για σας!