Indiana Jane And Her First Crusade

I have a few more stories for y'all. One of them is about the waterfronts in Israel.

Every 'beach' I saw there (most notably, on the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea) wasn't anything like the beaches I see at the Great Lakes or anything else in the Midwest. Most of those have sand. If they do not have sand, they have sandy-gravel or mucky silt. I have learned to live with these sorts of beaches.

But in Israel, it was rocks. Big rocks. (Not as big as the rocks we had to use the Arnie Net on to move out of our squares on the digsite... I mean, rocks ranging from fist-sized to larger.) You know, like the rocks you find at the bottom of a lake. Except that they were what made up the beach - no sand. This was a particular problem for me, because I cannot balance on said rocks in order to get in the water. I, being the amazing, no-balance, non-graceful klutz that I am, cannot stay upright on these rocks, ESPECIALLY when trying to walk into water that's full of waves. The Sea of Galilee is nearly always in motion, and so I made a habit of falling, either on my way IN to the water, or on my way out of it, and most likely on both in one day. (I even strapped my sandals on tight and held my arms out and none of it worked. Even when I walked slowly, I would inevitably stub a toe on a rock I didn't see and fall over anyway.)

And at the Dead Sea, it was rocks, big ones, and covered in salt! Surprisingly, this did not make it any easier to walk on. Thank goodness it was easy to float there, so that I could just plop into the water and get as far away from the rocky beach as possible. However, there was still that awkward point where you're only up to your knees in water, and you're trying to keep your balance, but your buoyancy is so messed up by the stuff in the Dead Sea that getting either up or down gracefully is impossible because your feet pop up immediately and the rest of you goes the other way to compensate!

Needless to say, it was difficult, but a good memory. :P

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So on the last day of digging, upon getting home, I told Sarah I wanted to jump into the Sea with my clothes on, and invited her to come with. We told the guys about it, and then they wanted to come, too. We didn't mind waiting a few extra minutes while they... did whatever it was that they needed to do. We girls grabbed our laundry (Thursday is laundry day, remember, and as long as we drop it off before we leave in the morning, it's clean by the time we get home to the kibbutz) and waited. And waited. And waited. Then someone else heard about it and wanted to come, too, pushing us further behind. There were profuse apologies from those who didn't know that Sarah and I were waiting for them (we really didn't mind), and eventually, we were on our way.

Kyle had his camera with and I think he recorded us walking into the Sea. Our goal was to walk into the sea, and keep walking, as long as we possibly could! I think those of us who kept our boots on made it to about our shoulders before we couldn't walk and were forced to swim or else be ravaged by the waves. :P It was great!

Swimming fully clothed is something I have not done since my early lifeguard training. It was pretty awesome, especially after how dirty, sweaty, and generally filthy I was after digging (as all of us were, every single day that we dug. Just a part of life!) After I took off my boots and rinsed them out (amazing how much dirt gets into those things, and STAYS there!) I swam over to the pier with everyone else.

Once I got up there, Dave decided to push Sarah off the pier. I found it amusing. Then he pushed me, too. I would have found this very amusing and it wouldn't have bothered me one bit, except that as I was falling, I remembered that I was wearing my sunglasses.

My $270 prescription sunglasses.

My hands flew up when I hit the water, and somewhere along the line I did feel my glasses as they came off, but I couldn't catch them. I swam up for air, frantically flailed my hands around in the water in search of the sunglasses which I knew DID NOT float, and cried out,

"DAVE! ... my SUNGLASSES. ...DAVE!!!"

I was more surprised than angry. In fact, I really wasn't angry at all - just worried. It's not in my nature to get mad at people when they do something surprising at me that ends up badly. And Dave felt so bad, too! Everybody froze and was like "OMIGOSH what do we do" and Dylan and Dave asked everybody if they had goggles so they could dive and look for my glasses. Nobody had a pair on them, but Dylan had a mask back in the house, so Dave ran off to get them. He planned to dive and find my sunglasses.

I felt so bad that Dave felt so bad. I really, really wanted nothing more than to say, "It's OK; I just got them at the gas station, they cost me five bucks; I'll just get another pair." But I couldn't say that, because I just bought them before the trip, they're the best sunglasses I've ever had, and they're prescription. The awesome folks at the vision place even cut me a special deal so I could have them. Neither Dave nor I could afford to replace them. And so I said very little.

Some of the guys tried diving for them before Dave got back with the mask, but it was way too hard to see. The good news, though, was that the bottom of the Sea wasn't much more than 10-12 feet, so while it did hurt our ears, we could make it to the bottom. Dave returned with the goggles and insisted on trying to find them first (and he's told me he's not the best swimmer, so I really respect him for that!)

After a few tense minutes of us guesstimating where my glasses fell in relation to where the pier now was, he didn't find anything. Dylan tried it, and so did I, and I think someone else did, too; but even though we could see the bottom when we swam down, we weren't finding my sunglasses. There was a very awkward sense of sad. I didn't want to be that girl who lost her nice new sunglasses at the bottom of the lake, and Dave didn't want to be that jerk who pushed her into the water so that her sunglasses fell off. And nobody else wanted anyone to feel bad on our last day!

So we searched and searched and searched and took many many turns and didn't find anything. Then Dave took the mask one last time, and the rest of us gathered around the pier, because diving for anything is hard work. And all of a sudden, Dave popped up, and silently held up his hand.

My sunglasses!!!


Eeeeeeeeee I was so happy and everyone was so happy and there was much relief and cheers and I hugged Dave in joy and he apologized again and I told him I was just thrilled he'd tried so hard and found them and I was grateful and all was well!

We enjoyed the rest of our afternoon, as much as tired kids who are about to leave the trip of a lifetime can be. :)

The Party Boat (That Wasn't)

We had a 1-hour rental on a 'party boat' - a boat on the Sea of Galilee that had a sound system, strings of lights, and plenty of room for partying on. Both our team and the Haifa team were in on the shindig - apparently this is a yearly thing. There was party music, wine, and... casual discussion. Seriously, there was no dancing or partying or whatever, which I found rather amusing, because I'd been led to believe that these Israelis are real party animals. As some of our returning volunteers said, this was the quietest, non-partiest group on the Party Boat they'd ever seen. Everyone seemed quite content to pass the wine and watermelon around and talk a lot. (Personally, this is my favorite way to spend the time.) Sarah, Dave, and Dylan did their socialite thing and fraternized with the locals, while the rest of us were content to hang out up top. It was nice to be out on a boat again, I really do like it.

(It's funny - I live near Lake Michigan, and some people would think that I spend a lot of time there, but I don't. The water's cold and we don't own a boat, nor are we close friends with someone who does. Seems a shame now, really!)

And I guess I shouldn't say there was NO dancing... Michael (second in command of the Haifa team) and some of the other Israelis broke into a little circle dance at the last minute while the boat was docking, and it was fun to watch! I think Sarah even got a video clip of it. It's short and cute.

Oh speaking of videos and photos, I haven't gotten those up yet for a few good reasons. The first is that I took thousands, and none of you actually WANT to see them all. So picking out the ones worth showing, or which you may possibly find the most interesting, will take time. Second, the place I originally intended to upload these pictures probably won't work unless I pay to have more space. (The free version always comes with limitations. Go figure!)

There will be pictures - they're not here yet, but I'm working on it. ;)

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(Partially taken from a personal letter)

Today was one of the best days on the dig ever! It was such a ridiculously awesome day that I want you to share in my joy vicariously! (By the way, 'vicarious' is the word of the day/week. Other words of the moment have included 'copious' and 'ridiculous'.)

Aside 2: I'm trying really hard to avoid typos, but I got a slew of new blisters and cuts today, so my hands are wrapped up again. Kinda hard to type right with them all wrapped up. Of course, now that I'm paying more attention, I'll probably fix them all before I send this out. This note could be fairly p=ointless. Oh look, there's one. I'll keep it. Point made!

I'm not sure I made it apparent in my blog - then again, perhaps I did - yesterday just sucked. It wholly and irrevocably sucked. Dylan, Darryl, and Anna were all home sick, and it was blasted hot, and nobody felt motivated, and I had nothing left in me to give. It was the slowest, most miserable, frustrating day of the dig so far, and I shake my fist at the memory.

Today was everything but! We had Anna and Darryl back (Dylan had a fever last night, so he had to stay home.) Dr. Schuler picked about 9 of us to work in G9 (the room that we had to fill in with rocks and debris, just so that we would have a path for clearing out the main room - what is it? F9? I suppose it was.) We had John, Darryl, myself, David, Sarah, Jackie, Meghan, Anna, Kyle, Dinah for some of it... so it was basically everyone except Schuler, Jim, Trevor, and Rachel. (Trevor has been working on drawing the dig sites as per Schuler's request.) Schuler told us we might hit floor by the end of the week, or clean it out if we were particularly industrious. We accepted the challenge.

It was kind of mellow before breakfast, but afterwards, things got hokey. Jackie was lifting buckets to Meghan and I, both of us on wheelbarrows, while the others pickaxed and tariah'd and stuff. And then we started getting giggly. (Maybe it was the fact that the three of us were together... maybe it was because of the awesomeness of our team... maybe it was the strong iced coffee we had at breakfast. We don't know. We don't care. :P) We started laughing about anything and everything. And then the guy who has been interviewing us sat Dr. Schuler down on a column piece behind the three of us, and was recording him. Jackie, Meghan, and I made every attempt to be in the video - we were flexing our muscles, striking poses, then we broke out into a fake fight. I 'punched' Meghan, Meghan reciprocated, someone 'tackled' Jackie and she went down to the floor, etc. And it was so funny, we kept at it. We're not entirely sure we made it in the background of the video (we think it was pointed too low, and focused closely on Schuler), so we might not be in it at all. But it was awesome! Maybe our feet will show up.

Then there was the matter of the dirt ramp and passing buckets. I started making sound effects (HUURGGUUBLUUHARRAAGH) every time I would lift a particularly heavy bucket, which cracked the girls up, which made ME laugh, and laugh, and laugh, until tears were mixed with my sweat and stung my eyes as I took out my wheelbarrow, and I shouted about the burning. The ramp was awesome because we were failing at it. We tried progressively heavier wheelbarrow loads (which required even more sound effects and grunting to move), which was only partially a good idea, because our new ramp was pretty pathetic and hard to maneuver on. Every time someone came back with a wheelbarrow, we found something funny to say. We started singing Greek or Hebrew alphabet songs or paradigms from our classes; Jackie and I sang and danced to Father Abraham and other Sunday school songs. I don't know where we got the energy, except that we were feeding off of each other, and loved every minute of it.

(And we just kept going. We were driving Darryl and John NUTS, we made so much noise. It was kind of obnoxious. They still love having us, of course, but I would really, really like to know what's going through their heads about today, because they totally looked exasperated.) At lunch, Dr. Schuler stopped at our table and suggested that we take naps like kindergarteners so that we calm down. I thought the idea was to take a nap so that you would have more energy, not less...?

Other antics included sending Meghan to the ramp in the style one would send a naughty child to her room. I don't even remember why. But I know I sent her to the ramp like her mother, and Meghan went off pouting with "But I don't want to!!" and Dr. Schuler and company heard it clear across the dig sites. They were ready to pretend they didn't know us.

And at one point, Arthur, leader of the Haifa team, came by while I was on wheelbarrow. He took one look at me and said with a smile, "I take a picture of you and send it to your mum. She never let you coming here again!" (It is an established fact that we American students work harder than the Israelis. The Israeli team takes tea breaks, coffee breaks, random we-just-want-it breaks, they stop to watch the tractor, they stop to chat in the shade. We Americans are a little more hardcore (when led by such a fearless leader as we have), and we were complimented by Arthur on the sheer volume of work we did and earth we moved. Apparently, "No Israeli team could do what we did." And we're darn proud of it, too.

(So there you go, Mom. Your little American girl spend a month getting down and dirty like no Israeli girl would. :P) OK, prideful moment is over. On to other things.

Now, flash back to my home square, XX/YY0. We found the floor there, as well as old piping on top. Here's the theory: The room was originally a foyer, or entrance hall, because there's a blocked-off door near the outside door with the lintel stone. Also, it has a lovely blue/white pattern, and an inscription. WORDS ON OUR MOSAIC FLOOR, YAY! But because that doorway is blocked off, and because there's a catch basin in the floor, and lots of piping was connected to the floor, it seems that the room was converted to... something which needed pipes. (Obviously.) Like an oil press or whatnot. Rest assured, the piping was cool, but  not as cool as the mosaic floor.

BUT EVEN BETTER - part of the mosaic floor was dug out, and someone over a thousand years ago placed a jar in the hole in the dirt! They found the jar peeking out today, and uncovered the top, but didn't have time to finish getting it out. And why would someone tear out mosaic, dig a hole in the floor, and put a jar to be hidden in there? We don't know what's in it yet, but wek're REALLy excited, because there's probably gold or coinage in it. (It's both unlikely, and yet logical. after all, we found 2 coins in that square. We can hope, right??) Hopefully, we'll find out tomorrow what's in it. (Darryl is mad that we've found 2 coins in that square. Poor guy, the coin collector, who has been here like 5 years, and he's never found a single one! Then my square gets 2 in one dig season!)

And in the course of my writing this e-mail, Darryl, then a couple of the girls, then John, then Jim-jim, then Meghan all came by and asked me what in the world I'd done to my hands. The wrapping makes it look like I'm ready to get into a fist fight. I just might punch the next person who gawks at me to make it worthwhile.

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P.S. NO I haven't punched anyone yet. Don't worry about it.

Travel Day

If this entry seems erratic, that's because it is. I spent 2.5 hours on a bus, 5 hours being processed at the Tel Aviv airport, and 10 hours on a plane. True story. My stream of consciousness is iffy.

I'm currently at the Philadelphia airport (Yaaaaaay). This is what I typed up earlier this morning on the plane leaving Israel:

I am in the plane from Tel Aviv. We're flying over Canada now, east coast, and will be in American airspace soon. We have a little less than 2 hours before landing (after 10 hours in the air), so I'm looking forward to that. Actually, I'm looking forward to breakfast. I don't have big problems or complaints with airline food (although I'll admit that the chicken dinner we had earlier wasn't nearly as good as the one we had on the way TO Israel.) Breakfast is going to be delicious. I don't care what it is, it will be great - and you know why? Because we've been eating the same thing every day for a month. Not gonna lie - I got used to eating hard boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, and bread with jelly. Occasionally they'd throw in iced coffee, a chocolate croissant, tuna, or something else marginally exciting at the dig site for breakfast. But a month of that Mediterranean diet, after 22 years of good ol' American breakfasts, leaves something to be desired. We college kids have spent a great deal of time talking about the stuff we'll eat when we get home - sausage, hash browns, French toast, bacon cheeseburgers. McDonald's might actually get a rare and elusive visit from me. I'll probably ask my mom to take me to Pizza Hut when she picks me up at the airport.  Gosh, now I'm REALLY hungry. Not fair. I'd better stop typing about food.

This trip has been a full course in Contortionist Sleeping, by the way. I'd never spent a great deal of time on airplanes or buses before this last month. Now I've figured out some strange ways to sleep on both. This time, though, I had an advantage. My ticketed seat was many rows ahead of everyone else, and I was sad. Before we took off, I wandered down the aisle and found David and Dylan sitting next to each other, and Sarah in one of the two seats behind them. There was a middle-aged man next to Sarah. I chatted with my buddies for a couple minutes, before Sarah mouthed the words, "Ask him!" and nodded her head to the stranger next to her.

So I hesitantly asked, "Would you possibly be interested in switching seats with me, so I can sit with my friends...?"

He had a pleasant look about him (perfectly nice stranger, I like those) and asked where I was sitting. I had a nice aisle seat up in row 9, much closer to the front than his current seat in row 18. I also had no seat mates yet. He took a look, smiled, nodded, and let me have his seat. THERE IS NO WAY TO EXPRESS MY JOY. I got to sit by three of my friends on what was going to be a long, lonely flight to Philadelphia. SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW.

Sarah and I took advantage of our movie screens and watched Unknown (Lliam Neeson) at the same time. It was a little more intense than we'd been hoping for, but a good movie. (You should have seen the two of us shielding our faces or holding hands as Sarah freaked out. Yes, I blocked my view a few times, too. I watch more intense movies with my comic book and movie buddy Jon all the time, but it wasn't what I'd bargained for. It was an OK movie, but there was nothing particularly new or amazing about it.)

We also figured out a great way to sleep - well, sort of. Since we're friendly neighbors, we lifted up the arm rest between us. I pulled up a leg, Sarah leaned over, and slept curled up between her seat and my lap. I was able to put my head against the headrest and get fairly comfortable. Eventually, we switched seats and positions. Sleeping in a friend's lap = good way to end a great trip. (My legs and arms were a little desperate for more blood flow, though. Curling up with your legs and feet pressed against a window is only comfortable when you're unconscious, and never when you wake.) It was a little easier to play Contortionist on the bus, because often we could have both seats per one person. (But I still laugh at the idea that it's easy to get comfortable to sleep on a bus. It's simply not true.)

After all of this, I found out that Sarah had never seen the awesome movie Robots, so we watched that together this morning. She loved it (I totally called it!) and it was a great way to wake up. (Well, wake up for like the fourth time...) There's a lot of little children and babies on this flight. They've had quite a bit to deal with in the last 15 hours, because they had to wait at the airport and be up until midnight, too. Most of them are taking it very well, but every so often, somebody needs to get out a little frustration and have a fit. When everybody was waking up two hours ago, a few of the kids burst into tears. Their parents did a lot of shushing and attempting to placate. It wasn't a happy time.

OMIGOSH BREAKFAST IS HERE

What are our options??

... omelet, or apple pancakes!

OMIGOSH. PANCAKES.

WANT.

BRB everybody, gotta eat some airplane food.

Ok, so I know I left you guys hanging with that last depressing entry, but there's more good stories to tell from my last three days in Israel! I might be able to catch up with some of that during my two long layovers. (Free airport WiFi is a wonderful thing.) Besides, I'm not even off the plane.

Let's see, now... it's 2:40 am, and I won't get home to the Milwaukee airport until 3:40 pm.

Thirteen more hours of travel time. 

Booooooooooooooooo.

... cabbages and kings!

Sunday morning my back hurt, very close to if not in the same spot where I sprained my back at my factory job last summer. I was wary and disappointed, and wholly unwilling to repeat said back injury, particularly on the last week of the dig or while in Israel. So I spoke up to Dr. Schuler on the bus, who (in his cautious and caring concern) said I would work with Rachel until breakfast on cleaning out the fountain instead of doing the heavy lifting with Darryl and John's team, and then see how my back felt. I told Darryl the same, just to keep everyone informed. (I hate admitting weakness or pain, like practically every single other individual on the dig, but frankly it's better when we do.) Darryl was pleased that I'd spoken up, and I asked him to keep an eye on my form if I joined him later.

The fountain area treated me well (except for the bees - the conservators' team decided to leave all their stuff, including buckets with WATER, out overnight, so we had a whole swam of bees right next to us. I had five or six at a time buzzing around myself inside the fountain tub with me. Every so often I'd stand up and encourage them to leave (or, *I* would leave for a minute or three.) I've been stung once in my life and wish never to be again.

The bees left eventually and I ended up staying with Rachel and the fountain all day. The fountain is set in a corner, so it's shaped like a quarter piece of pie. Up in the corner there is a pipe coming out of the wall - well, not really a pipe. It broke off right at the wall, so you can see the pipe inside the hole, but there's nothing sticking out. Anyway, our goal was to find the bottom of the fountain's tub. While digging it out, I came across several different types of pottery, including some that felt a bit like cookware, some jar- or vase- like rims, and piping! Dr. Schuler wanted very much for us to find more piping and, indeed, an extra hole or pipe coming from the wall (it would have been an interesting archaeological find, you know!) In the end, though, it just looked like a pottery dump. The pipe fragments led nowhere, there was no hole or piping leading through the bottom of the tub, and there were so many random fragments of pottery that eventually we stopped caring. Dinah and Rachel finished cleaning it out today, and it looks great!

Today was the downright woebegone day we've had all season. Three of our team were home sick, and sorely missed. We've been having some random stomach/digestive tract bugs going around, causing sickness, tummyaches, diarrhea, and now other sorts of discomfort and fever. It's making its rounds slowly, but seems to be hitting more people in more varied ways this week. So three great people were home sick, and it was BLASTED HOT today (104*F) (and just gonna keep getting hotter this week, uuuuungh), and (as you may have guessed by my previous entry), I woke up kinda grumpy. I had no energy, and apparently, neither did a lot of people. There was no motivation, some of us felt so sluggish, it was hard to do squat. By 10:00 am, I was crashing and had nothing left to give (but had to keep giving, anyway.) BLAAAAHHH it was an icky day! So I'm going to stop writing about it now, I'd rather forget it.

FINALLY THE DIG DAY WAS OVER. WHEEEEE ~

*skips ahead in the timeline of her day*

I refused to nap because I'd slept so awful last night. I expect to sleep fabulously tonight. Meghan has been taking very good care of me - making sure I get painkillers/anti-inflammatory for my back, and giving me her frozen water bottle as an ice pack. I feel much better today, but shall remain cautious. Oh! and we played cards today. Some silly game called Golf. I love it - I learned it a few years ago from friends, and got to re-learn it this week. It's one of those games that involves absolutely no strategy, and just depends on the cards you're given. It's easier to talk and be goofy when you're not strategizing, so we had some of the most amazingly strange and amusing chats while playing. :P (Including all those Whisky Tango Foxtrot situations)

OK everybody I gotta go to bed now, you enjoy your lunch hour or nap hour and your afternoons! Imma sleep now K thnx bai

*zzzzZZZZZ*

(No, I'm not the one in this room who snores! But it would be impolite of me to mention them by name here, so I'll just let you sit and wonder who it is.)

Night!

There are two types of happy people in the morning.

Those who are quietly happy, pleasant, but not overbearing. They'll greet you, then go about their business. I like those.

And those who are unbelievably, unbearably, obnoxiously happy just to exist in the morning. They greet you with a huge, bright smile, sing songs, even greet you WHILE singing, and ask you how you are and what you're doing and where you're going, even though you clearly aren't fully conscious nor feeling congenial. Can't stand those. God bless 'em, but I can't stand them.

I really should digress.

Saturday Morning

 

It's a good morning. This is our first totally free weekend since arriving here (and our last weekend before traveling home), so I intend to enjoy it and try to soak up more of everyday Kibbutz-Israel. Dr. Schuler led a team of anyone who wanted to hiking up the mountain (whereas we usually take a bus most of the way, and hike the rest) so he could take some measurements and do stuff. It appears that I am surrounded by many people who would rather hike up a mountain they see every day than sleep in on a Saturday. (:P More power to them!) I say, why bother? Besides, I gotta catch up with my blog and take more ibuprofen.

 

So now that I've sufficiently made myself feel like a lazy bum, why don't I tell you about the last couple days? Thursday was my second day working with my new team - who I love, by the way, those guys are the best! We kept moving at a fast pace to get that room free and clear of the mass of dirt. (Whoever lived here 1500 years ago clearly didn't believe in cleaning... there's dust and dirt everywhere, the buildup is pretty bad. We had to use pickaxes and giant hoes and buckets just to get everything out. A vacuum would have been no good. We did use brooms and brushes when we got to ground level, though our efforts went generally unrewarded. There's dirt and dust built up in the floor stones, too. Next time we go out to clean old houses, there needs to be a stipulation somewhere.)

As I said to someone else, it's easier to stay motivated when working with this group. The constant movement keeps me feeling busier and more productive. Every muscle is screaming from the new strain I'm putting on it, but it feels good at the same time. I'd like to stay with them next week, so we'll see what happens.

Also, on Thursday I all but fell off our freshly excavated lintel stone! (The lintel stone is the rectangle stone that sits atop a doorway, and it's roughly 2 meters off the floor.) My position had been to sit on the lintel stone and take the buckets from the guys inside the room, to pass them up to Dave, who was doing wheel barrow. (When we started clearing out the room on Wednesday, there was over a meter of dirt to stand on in the corner, so passing buckets up to a person there, who passed it to a person above the lintel stone, was relatively easy. Once we dug that dirt down, however, it became difficult to pass buckets of dirt up 2 meters or more high. We realized that having one person sit on the lintel stone and grab the buckets that were coming up worked fairly well.) When I sat there, however, the guys had to be careful how full they filled the buckets. If they filled it totally full, the bucket could practically pull me off the lintel and onto the ground. The joke was, since I hadn't fallen off yet, the buckets weren't full enough. :P

 

When the room was cleared of the mass of dirt, Darryl wanted me on the ground to help sweep up. This room of ours had a doorway, but cleaning it out meant going in and cleaning out the room adjoining, also. That wasn't our job for now, so we had a doorway full of dirt and rocks. Our doorway also had this huge random stone lodged in it, and no matter what we did, we hadn't gotten it out. So Darryl said I should just turn over onto my stomach and slide off, and use that boulder as a stepping stone.

 

I didn't jump or do anything sudden (in fact, I did it rather slowly because I didn't like the idea), but the minute I leaned to stand on it, it completely fell out from under me. I fell forward and slammed my ribcage against the lintel, and hung there, hoping to God that no one had gotten hurt by the falling rock. There was a lot of shouting involved when the rock fell, as everyone had to get out of the way and avoid bodily injury. I was worried about someone getting crushed (and also worried about falling myself), but everyone had jumped away from the rock, and Darryl leapt forward and gave me the lift I needed to get off my ribs, sit on his shoulder, and be set down. Everyone insisted I must have cracked or bruised my ribs, but really, I just have some scratches and slight tenderness. Honestly, I think my elbows and knees took a harder beating, from curling up against the lintel and hanging on. More bruises. Oh joy.

 

Also, Thursday was Dinah's 17^th birthday (she came on this trip with her dad, dig veteran Jim-jim), and Jim offered to take everybody to the nice place across the highway for dessert in celebration. Sarah K and I had gone to the store the day before to buy Dinah a birthday card, chocolate, glowsticks, and sparklers, so that she would have a fun present to open. We got everyone to sign the card; the surprised look on her face was awesome. The staff at the restaurant caught on and brought Dinah a second plate of dessert, this one with burning sparklers, so we all quick sang happy birthday before they went out.

 

Friday

 

This was the first Friday we weren't scheduled to go anywhere or do anything - so six of us got on a bus and headed to Tiberias across the sea. We spend every day and every night staring at Tiberias, because it's right there, so some of us were still hankering to go visit it. (Dr. Schuler does not hold a very high opinion of Tiberias - what did he call it? Tacky? Dirty? So we wasn't interested in helping us plan or in going there himself.) Trevor had already been in Tiberias once this trip, and played the role of group leader. (The others in attendance were Rachel, Sarah, myself, Dave, and Dylan - a fun group!)

The bus ride there was 11 shekels each way (I'm told that with the old bus company, it was only 6 shekels), and about half an hour long. It was strange to be on a bus with a driver I didn't recognize and tons of people who weren't part of the dig. There were a lot of IDF peeps in uniform, too - lots of guns on board with us. (That's perfectly normal around here.)  Tiberias was fun to be in, because it was more like a real town with real people from around here, and less touristic. Sarah and I found plenty of shopping to do, but it was noticeable that Tiberias had more western things than Jerusalem did, because it was less touristic and more functional for the people living there. We would see stores like in any Western mall and skip the ones with American clothes and electronics until we found one that looked a little more authentic. We found a store we loved, but for the sake of pricing, left it the first time without buying anything. Once we'd seen all we wanted too and realized that we didn't like any other clothes or prices in any other stores, we went back to that first one and went to town. (Not gonna lie, I bought 1 scarf for 10 shekels at one store, and everything else at the store we went back to. 2 feminine Aladdin-pant outfits, 1 great little dress, 3 beautiful scarves, and I enjoyed every shekel spent!)

Then we rushed to get back to the bus stop for the 12:00 bus. We met a little after 11:30 and marched back as a group. It was blasted hot out, but bearable (Sarah and I had stopped at a smoothie vendor and bought iced coffees - the best decision all day.) Then we waited. And waited. And waited. And talked and teased each other and showed each other what we'd bought. Dylan was jealous of the cool things we girls had found - he was still looking for some authentic-ish stuff for himself and for his girlfriend. And after lots of waiting, we double-checked the schedule, and realized that the bus didn't leave until 12:30! At that point, Sarah, Dylan, and I decided to race back to the store we'd bought all our stuff at (making this the third time), so Dylan could look around. He did indeed find what we was looking for, and we made the sales girl's day with all our purchases, and everybody was happy, and afterwards we were all safely on the bus for the trip back to Ein Gev. ^_^

 

Hanging out at the beach has become a normal daily activity. I'm incredibly jealous of folks who live on a nice body of water and get to have it at their disposal every day. The Sea of Galilee is beautiful, and has the very best view of sunset. Usually at least a couple of us will end up down there at the beach, either swimming or hanging, until it gets dark. The breeze down there is wonderful, and you can even see the stars (even with all the lights around the sea!) Even if the day has been unbelievably hot, every evening is a perfect temperature. (Mr. Daniels was totally right when he told me about that!)

 

Not gonna lie - I'm really going to miss it here, and miss these people. I was adopted into a new family this month, and I don't forget that easily.

And now that you have an awful lot to read, I'm going swimming!

I found and reblogged this on my Tumblr some time ago. It's about time I put it here.
(It has nothing to do with Israel of everything else I've been blogging, but it's going here just the same.)


Date A Girl Who Reads by Rosemarie Urquico

(In Response to Charles Warnke's You Should Date An Illiterate Girl.)

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You'll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She's the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That's the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She's the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she's kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author's making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce's Ulysses she's just saying that to sound intelligent.  Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It's easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she's going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She'll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she's sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn't burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you're better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

I just told all of you that I was caught up with my blog posts. Then my mother (God bless her) went and emailed me to point out that I have not yet told you about days 6-8, the Jerusalem trip.

Well, phooey.

You're ALMOST all caught up, then!

Wednesday (Day 19)

Today I was indeed reassigned to a different team, to form a sort of 'dream team' (aka, those kids who are physically capable enough and mentally prepared enough to dig deep, dig fast, and move large rocks without killing ourselves, effectively. It could also be known as 'those poor saps who worked too hard and now have to keep working hard because they were too stupid to play stupid.' But that's only behind closed doors, you understand.)

Update on why I was chosen: Apparently I impressed Darryl somewhere along the line (such as the other day, when we had to move lotsa rocks out of my home square), and he wanted me on the team. I was the only girl there! The team consisted of supervisors John and Darryl, and young volunteers Dylan, David, Kyle, and myself. I must say, it was an awesome, motivated, fun group to work with, and despite my nervousness about being put with a new group or being able to do my job, I was told I performed admirably! (Didn't I just say last time it would be ok? I think I'm getting better at self-fulfilling prophecy.) I enjoyed today very much. It's a good thing, too, because we have to do the same thing tomorrow.

There's been more weird action in my home square. They spent a lot of tedious time attempting to uncover our mosaic floor. But there's apparently rocks and other things in the way - such that would get in the way of the mosaic floor. One of the theories about the room is that it could be a triclineum, or perhaps it was for industrialized labor. (Something to do with the catch basin, the uneven flooring, and some other odd features that keep it from being a normal smooth floor.) I really can't explain why - I just heard tell that it's bizarre and confusing. So much for a simple floor mosaic and smooth sailing!

 

Man, I'm about to join the Ibuprofen Club. Today rocked, but I can feel the different labor in my legs. Ow. Sore. Pain. And I'd been doing so well without painkillers, too!

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 Today was The Day Of The Totally Free Afternoon. Usually we need to start trickling in to the Lab to do our jobs (whether it be sorting, data entry, organizing baskets of pottery or glass or bone fragments, etc.) sometime after 3 pm until 5, which is Pottery Washing time. But today there's some important person looking at our finds and Rachel wants us out of the lab, so we don't have to go in for pottery washing until 5:30. Whoot!

I decided to use my time (after lunch and swimming) to re-acquaint myself with one of my old favorite bands, Kutless. I'd recently been reminded of them by a good friend. Kutless is a Christian rock group; back when I first heard about them, they'd just released their second album, Sea of Faces. I'd loved them immediately and listened to that album on my CD player a bazillion times back when I had my paper route (this was age 15.)  Eventually I got tired of it, I suppose, and put it away for later.

I fired up my laptop to listen to that album again on the internet. It was like listening to a long-lost friend. I remembered all the melodies, and a bunch of the lyrics, and thought back to what this group did for me through their music years ago, and wondered why I'd ever put that CD away! It totally made my afternoon, and I can't wait to catch up with the rest of Kutless' music. They have a few more albums by now, including a worship album titled It Is Well. I heard their version of that particular song on YouTube just a few minutes ago - it's exactly the sort of version of that song that I would hope from Kutless. Someday I hope to get my hands on a copy of this album.

 

(Also, I went without napping today. It was a test of my will. I was doing great until devotions. I'm so sorry Sarah, but I really did head-bob twice when you let us have a few minutes for silent prayer. Twice. I've never fallen asleep in church before, and that was kinda our church, so I feel I should apologize or something.) (The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak, and all that)

 

Today marks the first day I am posting in order and am all caught up. WHOOOOT PAR-TAY

I feel like I should make an arcane Xbox game reference or joke. It's been a while. All I can do is think of my little brother, who is usually playing on my Xbox when I call my mom on Skype. That's actually the only time of day I miss my Xbox, I'm way too busy otherwise. (Didn't I say that in the first post? I'm pretty sure I did.)

 

But if you want random, I totally did start singing the Bed Intruder Song today! The response of those around me was minimal, but I knew that Lauren from Sargento was with me in spirit. <3 

("You don't have to come and confess / we lookin fo' you / we gon' find you, we gon' find you / so you can run and tell that, run and tell that, run and tell that, homeboy! Home, home, homeboy! We got your t-shirt and you fingerprints, you are so dumb! You are really dumb! Fo' real!")

Good night, all! (Noon-thirty for you, eight-thirty for me. Bedtime!)

Tuesday - Day 18

 

It was a ridiculous day on the dig site.

We were supposed to find our floor any day, right? So we got to a point where we thought, maybe, we had found our floor! (Believe it or not, these sorts of things are NOT always straightforward in archaeology.) This was a day or two AFTER we thought we were going to hit floor, so we were good and ready to get to that floor level and see cool things. We hoped for a mosaic, but any floor would have been good.

So we spent time wondering, is this hard layer our floor? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it is? Okay, let's act as if it is. So we swept and swept and swept and uncovered and pickaxed and tariya'd, etc. etc., only to find a lot of weird uneven stuff that looked like a really lame floor full of holes. Finally, Dr. Schuler came over, smacked our floor with a pickaxe for a minute, and concluded that we did not have our true floor - we had a layer of mud-plaster mix, which was worthless and needed to be gotten rid of.

We sighed and kept at it.

Some cool things have been found in our square lately - I found our second coin (hooray!), Glenn found a lovely glass piece that came from a chandelier, we've been getting lots of animal bone fragments, some nice mosaic tiles, cool pottery pieces, and I even found what has been labeled as either a needle or a hairpin. We don't really know what it is yet, but it's long and thin, and made of copper on the outside with something purple and sparkly on the inside. Apparently the head or end broke off when I hit it with my pickaxe, which is how we knew it was purple inside, but I could not find the head or end when I sifted through the dirt in the area. Such is life.

During the day, the group next door found a lovely mosaic floor with an inscription on it. Needless to say, I was jealous. I wanted my darn floor. It was a long, boring day of tedious work on our hands and knees. And our neighbors' mosaic floor just kept getting cooler and cooler, while our square got lamer and lamer. THEN, all of a sudden, at 11:15, GLENN FOUND OUR VERY OWN MOSAIC FLOOR. 

We had about 15 minutes to rejoice (which I did, with jumps and shouts and squeals), then it was time to clean up, put everything away for the night, and get on our bus to head down the mountain, home to the Kibbutz. It was exhausting but in the end, joyous.

 

Right after Devotions, Dr. Schuler told of his plans to re-arrange some teams to create a 'dream team' of good diggers and rock-movers. We get lots of large rocks and boulders and sometimes column ruins in our squares, which require a lot of strength and clever work to get moved. Apparently, I would be on this team! (Now Dad, before you get TOO excited, allow me to explain. We recently lost a strong young man, Matt, and a young woman with fantastic lifting technique, Christine. They were some of our best and I know they would have been on that team; I most likely would not have been on it if they were still here.) Dr. Schuler told me I was chosen because I'm short and thus have a lower center of gravity. Lol. (Plus I'm a woman, and since we women have wider hips, we're naturally better at the squat-and-lift-properly technique.)

 

So I'm kinda excited and kinda worried. But I always get nervous with change. And it usually turns out just fine, or better. So we'll see how tomorrow goes!