The Archaeology Olympics

Okay so Yesterday I didn’t do much except another exceptional night of crazy karaoke, but today was a different story!!  Today was the annual Archaeology Olympics.  Event one:  The Backfilling Bonanza…as described in some of my previous blogs backfilling is the process of using free soil to cover up the trenches you have excavated fully to ensure that no one falls into them or further damages the remains in the case they should need to be revisited.  However, this event was slightly different and resembled your traditional wheel barrow race, in which two pairs from each team had to relay race and switch positions of the crawler and the carrier half way through.  I have to say I broke out way in the front at the sound of the whistle, but on our return trip we failed miserably and ended up getting like seventh place haha.  Event Two: The Artifact Preservation this also is just a creative name for the egg in the spoon relay, but rather than eggs and spoons we used trowels which are the flat gardening looking tools that we use on site and a very small souvenir Athenian vessel.  The vessel had to be handed off without being dropped or you start over.  This one went a little better for my team but it was still looking meager!  Event three:  “FOOTBALL” (with a European accent) aka soccer.  This was great because the game never stopped but eight teams rotated through only playing for 30 seconds at a time.  So when the whistle blew you either changed sides and faced a new opponent or you were off.  It was just scored by overall goals and though my team was the first team to score we ended up tying for fourth with only one goal.  Event four:  (and by far my most favorite and yet obviously most ridiculously stupid) Hoplite Warfare.  This game is a bit hard to describe but the idea is that you and your fellow army cannot break your flanks and you must push the other team over a line.  Kinda like reverse tug of war, picture the scrum of a rugby game with everyone bent over shoving each other.  Okay so this challenge looked quite hopeless for our team.  The Leper Lovers only started with one male member two young women (including myself) and all of the other women on my team were over 50.  To top that off we lost Frank our only guy to a broken toe in the final soccer match.  We also unfortunately had to be the guinea pigs and go first.  It really wasnt looking good for us but no one really knew what we were doing and luckily we won the first match up.  This game went tournament style and somehow we made it to the final match.  We were facing a team of two men (including my professor an expert of Hoplite warfare in the ancient sense) and three undergrad women.  Our chances didn’t look good against them either but we were the only all girl team out there so we had the fans at our backs.  As all of our shoulders met and the pushes began we managed to hold their strong side while we pushed over their weak side and TRIUMPHED!!  However Im not sure this game will be returning next year because it ended with a broken nose, toe, and almost everyone bleeding in one place or another.  Kinda cool we may be the champions for eternity.  It was the biggest upset for sure!!  Event five: The archaeology obstacle course..Part one crawling under the grid markers with measuring tape (resembling the typical army crawl) Part two fill the bucket with your hands as fast as possible…Part three throw a large melon size rock as close as possible to another rock as if removing it from a trench..Part four someone must stand near the rock that your team threw and “sacrifice” the artifact your team earlier preserved on a rock altar to the gods smashing it to peices…Part five and the most essential part GET THE PERMIT (dig through a pile of dirt to find a small paper permit.)  The obstacle coarse was great and a good break from head to head combat.  Event six and the final event the spin around in a circle with your head down on a pole then carry a a full Athenian cup of beer without spilling to another pole, spin around some more and then pass off the beer to your next team-mate.  This is where having an entirely female team came in handy.  We dominated the race with only one negative point for a fall to the knees.  We were right on the oceans edge and lets just say almost every guy ended up fully submerged with their cups under water.  It was hilarious!!   As the games came to an end the points were tallied (and as most of my friends and family know I wont settle for anything less than first and the Leper Lovers came out on top!!)  We won a big vessel trophy that lives in the local bar every year, but it is just for bragging rights for the rest of the dig.  Anyways I will elaborate and update with pictures tomorrow but were headed to a big barbeque to celebrate so I shall be off.  Love you all!  Sammy

One Foot Two Foot Three Feet Floor

Okay so Yesterday I didn’t write, but it was really one of the most exciting days yet.  As for today really nothing to report…I had a somewhat boring day in the Apotheke learning how to catalog “special finds.”  Though you may think special finds sounds very exciting and cool…turns out I don’t get much excitement from tiny tiny pieces of obsidian flakes and glass and when I say tiny I mean like itty bitty.  The funniest part was i was trying to measure the length width and depth for each of the special finds and everything was like 0.0000001 cm which seems so pointless, but according to the specialists it is very very important!! As for yesterday and to address the three feet I mentioned in my title we start with foot number one which was a fully articulated left foot that Sylvia and I uncovered in the grave.  After we found the left we dug for the right and sure enough foot number two fully articulated emerged through the mud.  It was so freakin cool to just chip away tiny pieces of mud and brush them away to reveal entire feet.  The toe bones were slightly strewn throughout the grave so initially we thought the grave may have been robbed, but then today while I had to stay home and do cataloging Sylvia uncovered both Tibas and Fibulas lining up with the first two feet.  This gives us hope that a single entire individual will be present in the grave and we will be expanding it next week when I am back in the field.  I am hoping that the pelvis and crania will be intact because then we can do a lot more analysis on the age sex and ancestry of the individual.  Alright and as for the third foot…..(drum role please)…….this would be my own right foot.  Though I may have been held back from the digging field I was an all star on the “football” (soccer feild).  We played rookies against the veterans which translated to four girls including me and one very optimistic boy against four very large aggressive archaeologist men.  Although they may have had the brute force and home field advantage, we had the speed and energy to run circles around them.  At half time it was tied six goals to six and we all ran through the huge industrial sprinklers then we all agreed to play fifteen more minutes which turned into a deadly match up.  Everyone was laughing so hard we could barely breathe and I was so sweaty that when I tried to rest my hands on my knees I slid right down off of them.   Having all the girls was an advantage at first cause none of the big guys wanted to hurt us but eventually it was like an ice hockey match everyone checking everyone else!!  Eventually we got down to the GOLDEN GOAL (or next goal wins it) and I got a pass up to the front and took a sliding shot which barely grazed the outer post and went in!!  My right foot is now also a treasured artifact and everyone wants it to be on their team!! Everyone dog piled me (luckily my team was all of the much smaller rookies or else I’d be as flat as a pancake. Actually even the veterans were happy because that meant we got to stop playing and they were all wiped!!  It was so much fun and now we will be playing every week, so Wednesdays may be difficult for me to write. Truthfully we were all horrendous soccer players but thats what made it so fun, and I cant say that many people get to push their professors around in a soccer match which I have to say was both scary and awesome.  After all of those feet I never hit the floor so hard!!  I was absolutely exhausted but in the best most happy way ever! I think I forgot how good it feels to exercise since before Greece my summer has consisted of Law and Order marathons sitting on the couch. We also just found out we will be competing in the Archaeology Olympics this weekend (yay more exercise…and potentially some god beer).  My team is called the Leper Lovers, because were all into bones.  The event list has been posted but I haven’t read it yet so I will post the events very soon.  Its going to be very funny.  Love you all, so much!!  Kali Nikta

The Holiday Trench

OKAY SO TODAY WAS THE BEST DAY SO FAR (EDUCATIONALLY)!! It was a very early morning but I saw the sun rise over the ocean from the site and I went straight to work on the graves.  Okay so there is a huge difference in excavating a trench that has no human remains and one that does have human remains.  Everyone else on sight was wielding huge pickaxes and swinging away haulin huge rocks out and collecting millions of pottery sherds dripping sweat and frying in the crazy sun.  I on the other hand was wielding a TOOTH PICK and scraping around little pieces of bones.  We couldnt take any of the bones out but we were just revealing all of them so that they can be photographed tomorrow and removed after to be washed and analyzed.  The best part about my job though was that the bones have to be in the shade so that they do not disintegrate and therefore I also got to be mostly in the shade.  I had like a mini shovel, broom and busket, I looked like a little kid on the beach having a grand old time.  Everyone was very jealous and when they walked by they asked if I was enjoying my HOLIDAY.  I felt kinda bad cause everyone else was working so hard, but my job just requires alot of patience and dexterity.  I did break a couple little bones today but none that were extremely diagnostic (easily identifiable).  So anyways Yeah I had a great time on sight and then we all went immediately to the beach and then crashed out for like an hour.  Tomorrow I am on sight again and I will get to remove all of the bones I uncover and we will be able to dig down and see if there is a more intact grave below this one.  BONES BONES BONES I love it I felt like I actually knew what I was doing.  Then two more days in the apotheke.  Well thanks to everyone for all of your comments and check my photo page for updated pics of the hugging rock, bbqs and karaoke.  I am also gonna attempt to put some videos up in the next couple days so get excited for that.  Love you all, if you have any questions about stuff I forgot let me know!! xoxo

Becoming Real Archaeologists

So we are all now beginning the phases of becoming true archaeologists.  Step number one……..drink at least three canteens of water everyday. Step number two wear a giant nerdy sun hat/fedora.  Step number three look like you have a black French manicure because of all the dirt underneath your nails.  Step number four major shorts, boots, and racer back tan lines.  Step number five and my personal favorite step…cover yourself with stick on tattoos up and down each arm, leg, back, neck everywhere.  All of us today found this stand that had gum with fake tattoos in it and now we each have at least three tattoos to match the professionals on site!!  These tattoos are no ordinary tattoos, we’ve got dolphins, flaming eagles, skulls, suns, butterfly’s, dragons, barbed wire, roses through hearts, all the best and most Cliche tattoos you can think of!!  But now no one will doubt any of the students true commitment to becoming a full fledged archaeologist.  SO today I was randomly scheduled in the Apotheke and so no site for me but tomorrow I will be on site by 6:20am so pray for me to have alot of energy and good cool sleep!!  Today I went through all the bones that were washed and tried to identify as many of them as possible.  We had almost two full right hands, pieces of ankle bones and lots of toes.  There was also tons of ribs, and the saddest one was a little kid tooth, which made me think of my little brother who as I have heard just lost one of his teeth a day or so ago.  Kinda funny to think about I’m hoping this tooth was one that also just fell out and doesn’t mean that the rest of the little person was amongst the bones.  We also had a pottery lesson today and learned all about the different colors, temperatures and firing techniques.  Tomorrow I actually get to start on the grave so I will try and put up some good info on that tomorrow, slightly an uneventful day but I’m gonna add some pictures from previous events to the photo page so check it out!! Love you all! xoxo

“Thou Shalt Not Sing Whitney Unless Thou Art Whitney”

Okay so I have two days to catch up on now…and I am sure you are all dying to hear about Crete karaoke (which rocked by the way).  First, however I will start by prefacing the story of karaoke with the team dinner that we had before we got to singing.  We went to a place called Zygros, and they served all of the traditional creten food.  So when we first arrived there was a mile long table on the balcony of this restaurant and they immediately brought out jugs of wine, lots of sweet bread and olive paste.  The Olive paste was and still is one of the tastiest things I have had so far in Greece…IT WAS DEADLY…haha (the irish version for bomb.com).  Then they also brought out  this eggplant humus, the yogurt sauce made out of cucumbers, liver (which I tried and quite predictably spat out BLEHHH), calamari, these zucchini stuffed with rice and feta cheese, a GIANT FRIED CHEESE STICK (obviously my favorite), and then tons and tons of meat that I’m not exactly sure I could identify.  For dessert they brought out these little doughnut holes that were also very tasty!  Then in true Greek fashion we all got up off the table and danced in a huge circle around this old guy who from the look of him at first seemed like he would barely be able to walk, but then he was a hoppin and jumpin and stompin away to the music while we all clapped and some people through plates.  I felt like I was in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  It was so so much fun!  SO we were all in quite a chipper and sweaty mood and we all headed over to THE PALACE to hit the open micraphone…and lets just say we hit Istron like a hurricane, poured some sugar on it, spiced up its life, put it through the time warp again, woke it up before we go goed, and even turned the whole place into the north pole with even more irish christmas carols.  There wasnt one person who didn’t get up on stage and sing, it was great, and I have to say me and my friends Alice and Alex were some of the most synchronized Karaoke dancers Istron has ever seen!  Then the one American boy on the trip with us (Nick) who by the way plays a key role in the laughs of both Friday and Saturday night, decided to sing I will always love you by Whitney Huston, and though I would give him a superior rating on overall effort lets just say all the stray cats outside were screaming.  Therefore according to the Irish we must all follow the golden rule of karaoke…THOUGH SHALT NOT SING WHITNEY UNLESS THOUGH ART WHITNEY.  Something we should all take seriously in the future when choosing songs to perform in public.  OKAY well now that that’s done and over with, I am on to our first field school field trip!  On Saturday morning we left Istron and went to the nearest site thought to be a Minoan Palace.  It is called Gournia, because Gourn is a rounded out rock used as a type of storage device that is frequently scattered throughout the site.  The place was huge and actually resembled a city.  The most interesting part was this rock that stuck  out of the ground about three feet in the middle of this well paved court.  There has also been found several seels and stamps that show women (potentially goddesses) hugging rocks.  So turns out the people in Gournia were ancient hippie rock huggers.  The rock is thought to have been placed there as a place of prayer and potentially for the residents to host religious practices such as hugging or laying on the stone to feel the energy of nature.  So we all hugged the stone and discovered it was a unoridnarily comfortable rock!!  Maybe these Minoans had the right idea.  Then when we left we all napped back at the apartments and then got all dolled up Crete style to go into the big town by bus about twenty minutes away.  We all had an absolute blast I mean it was really really great there were like twenty archaeologists dancing to music from the (very very recent decades….70’s 80’s 90’s and beyond).  Now this is a pretty unique group of people and while rhythm, and grace may have been scarce, sweat and laughter was definitely abundant.  Then we all got these crazy sparkling drinks and ate cheese burgers at like three in the morning!! When we got back to the apartments me and my roomie “Derv” changed into our JIM JAMS..(pj’s) and then we all went for a beautiful night swim. Today we just slept.. cleaned and hand washed clothes then hung out by the beach and are having movie night tonight.  tomorrow is our first real full day on site and I cant wait to tell you more about it soon!!

PS. About pictures of the dig, I am actually not allowed to post pictures of the finds and excavation  until our work is published by the experts at the end of the six weeks.  Dont fret though I am still taking all the pictures and will be able to show you them all once their analysis and claim of all of the finds are published.  However I will try to upload more pictures with me in them as I go along.  Love you all!  Sambo – new nickname given to me by the Irish translating directly to Sandwich. haha

The Green Light!

YAY, WHOOO HOO, YIPEEE, THANK GOODNESS, FIST PUMP….WE FINALLY GOT THE GREEN LIGHT TO DIG DIG DIG!!  Today I woke up and washed bones for the first two hours of my day.  They were all extremely fragmented bits of who knows what except for a large peice of a left lower mandible with three teeth still entact.  Teeth being made of some of the strongest material in our body, they are actually most likely to be preserved.  Haha it was actually kinda funny because I was using a tooth brush and it was most definitely the first time ever that this particular person got their teeth brushed considering she/he is like thousands of years old.  Then I did some pottery sorting and bagging and weighing which was good it was a very mellow day, but everyone was in great spirits knowing we would get to start digging on Monday, and the best part is Sylvie (the grave director) came straight to me and said that I will start right away working on both of the graves.  We will also all do planning and measuring and cataloging and our days will be way more varied so it will be great or “brilliant” as the Irish say. We are having a trench team dinner tonight to try all of the authentic Crete food, and then the one actual bar slash internet cafe in town is having its weekly karaoke.  All of the Irish people have already signed me and the other american girls up to sing California  Girls by Katy Perry, so it should be very fun and apparently there is free Raki.  Raki is the local drink that is made here on Crete and is known for its icy strength.  Gyros + Tsatsiki+Raki + Stage with Karaoke + Irish friends =  Potentially peeing my pants from laughing so hard…Just another night in Istron!!  Love you all and miss you so much will try and update again soon! xoxo “The Bone Girl” – as I am now know here!!  (exciting right…I thought so too!)

Holes, Holes, and More Holes!

Okay well, I must first and foremost apologize for my very unprofessional absence from my posts yesterday.  Here is the low down.  So here in Istron we all live in the Stamatakes apartments which is about a twenty five minute walk in the blazing sun uphill both ways to and from any place with food or internet.  Yesterday i was a little worn out and decided I couldnt make it into town, but im so sorry to have dissappointed some of you with my laziness haha and I will try my best not to let it happen again.  Okay so now for the reason I am so exhausted… have any of you seen the movie HOLES?? Well all of us students and  by students I mean chain gang, have been digging and refiilling holes with soil for the past two days.  Basically because of all of the stuff going on weakening the Greek government there have been many strikes and our permit for digging has been delayed and one of our trenches was refused.  So this beautiful three layered gigantic hole right by the oceans edge had to be filled in today with loose soil.  INTERESTING FACT NUMBER 1: Who knew in arhchaeology you had to also fill in holes not just dig them?  INTERESTING FACT NUMBER 2: Who knew that in Greece at an Archeological site you could actually run out of dirt to fill the holes?  INTERESTING FACT NUMBER 3: Who knew a cold ice cream and a swim in the ocean could ever feel like I had died and gone to heaven? INTERESTING FACT NUMBER 4: (Last but not least) Who knew that you could be moving massive amounts of dirt from one place to another and as long as you are doing it with Irish people HAVE THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE!!!  My cheeks and abs are sore from laughing so hard.  We were all very hot and getting a bit delirious and the Irish kids started singing Christmas carols and eventually about 25 people were all singing jingle bells and grandma got run over by a reindeer (no offense to any grandmothers out there reading) while we were dragging dirt bins and wheel barrels back and forth for hours. So anyways Istron is not really a town its more of a single road with two bars, a couple markets and a fast food restaurant, so an understatement would be that there is literally nothing going on here whatsoever, and we really cannot do any excavation yet because we have no permit.  Out of boredom all of the Irish have resorted to drinking  and drinking and drinking making the weekend come to them instead of waiting for it.  I have just been sleeping whenever I can and attempting to get some reading done oh how I love Nicholas Sparks and his love stories.    I have also quite unintentionally let out a few words with harsh irish accents.  I cant help it the Irish are converting me and I have to say i kinda like it!!  Some of you  have asked me what the objective of the dig is here and what exactly we are looking for but that is a hard question to answer because there are so many specialists here doing research.  Mostly because of lack of permit we have been washing the backlogs of years worth of pottery and then it is read and determined as a certain date in time.  They can also tell if it originated here in Crete or was imported in Athens long ago.  Other specialists include those for warfare, site planning, photography, and Greek history.  So mostly right now we just try and act like little sponges absorbing as much instruction as possible so that when we actually get to dig we will know more of what to do!! I think we are digging with the goal of establishing a general idea of how the area was initially developed and how it changed both physically and culturally overtime.  Tomorrow I am on duty washing bones so that should be exciting trying to sort the human and faunal (animal) bones from one another.  Today they washed a huge chunk of a cranial vault (the part where your brain belongs) so hopefully that means we will be able to find more facial features that will give us indications of the sex of the remains.  Also yesterday when we were sorting pieces of pottery I was given the job of looking around and making sure no bones got mixed in with the bunch which is sharpening my skills for recognizing small fragments of very very very old crusty bones!  (Not a skill that many people have or get to work on if I do say so myself).  Hopefully I will have more to share with you soon when we actually begin digging but for now I am headed back into our apartments because it is our photographers birthday and while he mostly does photography he actually did his masters degree on Minoan wine making, storage, and trading…so he has made giant vats of authentic Minoan wine, which is exaclty what would have been held in most of the pottery pieces we find on the site back in the day!!  I am excited to try it and will let you know how it tastes, supposedly it has honey in it YUM!!  Once again thanks for all the love and support, friends, mom, grandmothers, neighbors, aunts, uncles, cousins,boyfriend’s mom, and boyfriend, I love you all and MISS YOU SO MUCH, almost as much as IN N OUT!!  (just kidding probably at least a little more than in n out)!!

PS. A little snippit about the Eternal Embrace picture that I posted and love so much.  “The 6,000 year hug – The world has just learned, coincidently just before Valentine’s Day, of the discovery in Italy of a 5,000 – 6,000 year old grave of two young adults locked in each other’s arms.  Not only did this couple apparently experience love as we know it, but the society around them, privative as they may have been by our standards, honoring that love by burying them together locked in each other’s arms.  Archaeologists, tell us that this period was one in which people were also beginning to look beyond themselves and began to conceive the concepts of religion.  Given the condition of their teeth, they were young, probably in their early twenties. Preliminary examination did not reveal any sign of violence thereby ruling out some sort of ritual sacrifice. While further tests, will have to be made, the archaeologists are fairly certain that the tests will show them to be a young man and a young woman. Also, the fact that they are embracing suggests that they died together and were buried together, thereby eliminating the possibility that this was a case of the husband dieing and the wife being buried alive next to him (archaeologists say that in those cases the couple is usually found lying side by side in the grave rather than in an embrace). ” I JUST THINK ITS VERY BEAUTIFUL AND GIVES LIFE AND PERSONALITY AND PURPOSE TO THE REASON WHY WE INVESTIGATE SO FAR INTO THE PAST AND CAN SEE THAT EVEN WITHOUT ALL OF THE LUXURY WE HAVE TODAY PEOPLE WERE STILL VERY CAPABLE TO LOVE EACH OTHER EVEN PAST “TILL DEATH DO US PART”

The First of Many Blisters

Well because I know you are all very very  worried that the title of this post may refer to sun damage but I thought I would put your mind at ease strait away and tell you that the blister formed as a result of using a pickaxe for several hours, not lack of sunscreen!!  Today was my first day working actually at the dig site.  I was taught how to photograph entire trench sites and individual features using the light and the reference scales.  Then it was like a vision of snow white and the 25 dwarfs, except we were not digging for diamonds we were diggin for…actually I’m still not exactly sure what we were digging for.  I think we were mostly clearing brush and top soil to get the site prepared for expansion.  A very interesting and scientific fact I learned today is that here in Crete the Greeks sweep and clean their dirt.  I swept and swept and picked away at brush and rocks today, but I wasn’t exactly sure when my dirt patch was “clean”  haha you can imagine my distress.  How clean exactly does a pile of dirt need to be…but I got the hang of it eventually!  Then I cleaned more pottery.  I know this all sounds like if become some sort of domesticated slave, but it was actually pretty fun.  Then I went back out to site and learned to use the level (which tells you the exact elevation of each and any feature in the site you need).  I actually think I was one of the star pupils today because it was all geometry and numbers so the others all looked to me for help!!  Being a nerd pays of in certain situations I guess, I was the only one who knew who Pythagoras was and what his most famous contribution to mathematics was.  Any guesses?…..It is the Pythagorean theorem ( all having to do with the relationship of the sides and hypotenuse of a right triangle).  Another quite shocking surprise was the fairly even golden tan I got today on my legs arms and face….however to my great disappointment its turned out to be dirt (a lot of dirt), and it washed all away with just a little soap.  The best news of all which I will end with here tonight, is that I had a grand chat with Sylvie (the bone and grave lady) and she hand picked me to work with her on site tomorrow wetting down the graves and spraying the bones with an adhesive that will hold the very fragile pieces together.  I will let you know tomorrow how all of that goes!!  Love you all and thanks for all of your comments it makes me feel less home sick and more in the loop!!  I get very excited to check my email everyday to see what people say!  XOXO

New Appreciation for Washing Dishes

Okay so today was very very exciting!!  First thing in the morning we were all taken on an overall site tour.  We are not allowed to begin the excavation for another two days but they wanted us to get familiar with the site.  It is on a very small peninsula with bright blue ocean surrounding all but one side of it.  The site is huge and has like 6 different trenches all with exposed walls and roads that date back to 450-400 B.C. and some from the Turkish Ottoman Empire.  As all of that is uhhh I guess interesting….there is even better news!!  I was assigned to trench two with a couple of others for the project which (drum roll please………) has both of the bone pits in it!!!  YAY I couldn’t really be more excited.  I also expressed my interest in Osteology and so I met the woman in charge of the graves and bone washing so she agreed to take me under her wing.  Tomorrow morning we have site photography class so I will be able to post a much clearer picture of the area where I will be spending most of my time.  After the tour I along with about 15 others spent hours upon hours washing dirt crusted ancient dishes (more commonly refered to as pottery).  It was pottery left over from last years dig and it had to be washed sorted and weighed.  Let me tell you I have never been more efficient with a tooth-brush in my life!!! However it was fairly tedious and I have to say washing non thousand-year old dishes is much easier than I previously thought.  It was pretty cool though because a lot of the pottery was painted with intricate design and you could tell which pieces looked as though they broke from the same vessel.  We all looked as though we spent hours in a salon getting a full body clay or mud mask, but then we all headed straight for the ocean, which was so refreshing and great!! Tonight I am looking forward to another Tylenol PM and a good sleep and I miss everyone back home dearly!!  I love you all and will update with pictures as soon as I can! MUAH xoxo Sammy

Thank Goodness for Aloe Vera …..(learned my lesson early)

Okay so im not sure how much of this post will be coherent because I am completely and totally exhausted!!!  It is 10:00 pm here and I just got to the internet cafe!  First things first I am safe and made it to my final destination for the next 5 weeks.  First after the Acropolis which was amazing we took the subway to the ferry port Pireaus in Athens and whitnessed our first mugging!!  IT WAS SO SCARY…a guy right next to us snatched this mans sachel and took off, we all ran for cover and the police went chasing after him.  So that was nerve racking but also generated a bit of humor becasue then all six girls turned our backpacks bakward to our front sides and we were all wadling around like pregnant women on the subway.  Then we got on what we expected to be a tug boat and was actually a beautiful cruise ship.  The cruise ship arrived in Heraklion (the capital of Crete) just as shown in the photo.  Though Athens was pretty it was really nothing compared to Crete.  It is by far more beautiful and much more like you would picture Greece with the white buildings and bright blue sea!  The big issue was fitting eight people in our four person cabin that looked identical to the second photo.  Just imagine that picture with two layers of suit cases on every inch of floor and two people in each twin bed hahah…actually we all switched off showering AND BUFFET GOING so it wasn’t to bad!!

Then when we got off the ferry we went straight to a bus station and took a two hour bus that eventually pulled over to the side of the road in the middle of no where to meet our professor Brice or Brike in Greek.  Then we proceeded to accidentally take a strangers bag with us off the bus due to a slight miscommunication.  It was eventually returned when Brice got a hold of the bus driver, but we felt really really bad.  Then we dropped our stuff and I am rooming with three absolutely hilarious Irish girls who constantly say lovely and grand and bloody hell!!  haha they are great and they know the ropes because they have been there for a week so thats good.  Then to the supermarket and to the beach.  It was great we got a glimpse of our site but tomorrow we have orientation and I am very excited!  I also talked to the two women who were in charge of the bone pit and they kinda gave me a bit of “Dibbs” so hopefully I will be working with them most often on the two burials.  Tomorrow we are cleaning pottery and drawing maps but it should still be great though i am anxious to put my special trowel to work!  Well I’m sorry this post is so long and lacking my normal charm and wit, but I’m practically a zombie!!  I love everyone so much and have posted some photos as well so check em out on the photo page!!  Hope its not as hot where you are for any of you reading!!  Much Love Sammy