Daily Life

June 30, 2010
dear jack, here is what my day is like:
-i get up at four to the wake-up call which is someone ringing hand bells. i think Audrey does it which is needless because she just has to snore and every feral cat in the region takes a shit from pure fear! Audrey looks to be about 80,000 years old dating back to early early neolithic but she snores like a dragon.
-i put on my dig clothes and go down stairs and out of the dorm to the cafeteria which smells like armpit. Four and a half is when they serve breakfast and i usually have labnuh (thick yogurt) and cinnamon sugar on pita. sometimes jam too. Then i fill my water bottle and go back up the dorm stairs to brush my teeth.
-Five o clock is the time everyone starts to head out to the two buses which park outside the cafeteria. i must take empty buckets to the tall (tell) so that our square can fill them with pottery plus i bring my gear (trowel, knee pad, and pick) in another pail. once we get to the tall i climb up the hill and start brushing out my square.
-then i help my square supervisor measure rocks for her top plan. the top plans are gay and no one ever wants to do them so i will just say that they are a scale drawing of what the square looks like based on an x and y axes system...stupiddd.
-I work in field "L". "L" stands for labor. Hard, stupid, dusty labor added to pain!! i would never let you dig here, jack, because your bad knees could not take it! yesterday we broke ground in my square. this sounds fun and adventurous, but really it is a nuisance because topsoil is a little bitch 100% of the time. it is rocky. there are many narly roots.
-I use a dust pan A LOT because once you trim your balk or move dirt you gotsta sweep it up to dump in the guffa! When the guffa is full, i take it over to the sift where i weed through rocks to find pottery that i will later wash.
-At nine and a half, we eat second breakfast which is, every day, filafel sandwiches and watermelon. that meal got old really fast but i eat it because i am hungreeyy!
-After breakfast, we go back to work until noon thirty. before we leave, i help stephanie take elevations in the square to see how much lower we have gone. yay. we have Jordanian workers aka "shabobs" who help us and they speak zero english but i speak no arabic so it's aight!
-finally we head down the hill and pile ourselves into the buses and it's back to camp.
-lunch at one, then i shower and nap. at four we wash exorbitant amounts of pottery, most of which just gets dumped back onto the tall the next day after pottery reading.
-supper at six.
-BED