JULY 29, 30, 31, and August 1

So - after I finished my last blog entry at about 1:00, I got ready for bed. I went in the bathroom and made the mistake of closing the stall door behind me. Boy was I surprised when the door didn't open! So I pounded and yelled, and finally someone heard me and let me out - thank goodness!

Let's start with the Italian words for the day - formiche (ants), api (bees), ragni (spiders). Does that give you any idea of what my days are like now? Regarding ants, I now know the words for ants, anthills, and pins-n-needles, which is a dirivitive of the word for ants. I can carry on a whole language using ant-words!

Friday was another day of removing another layer of dirt. There isn't a bone in my body that doesn't hurt! Friday night, though, was lovely. I took a shower and then went across the street to the bar and had a glass of wine before dinner. It was wonderful - sitting outside in the sunshine in Italy, drinking a glass of chianti and watching the world go by.

On Saturday I took the train to Pisa with one of my field schooHenares. The Leaning Tower is much more impressive than I expected. It's amazing that it is still standing, given the degree to which it's tilting. I saw the tower, the cathedral (which was beautiful), the Duomo, which wasn't as good as I had hoped, but it was interesting. We also saw the Camposanto, which is a cemetery - very cool. There were tombs in the floor, similar to what we see in some of the old churches, and a chapel with ossuaries. In one of the ossuaries the skull was facing outwards, so it looked like he was yelling, "let me out of here!" I also went into a couple of museums. We met up with some other class friends for lunch, and then after some roaming around, we headed to Lucca.

Lucca was fun because after dinner, when we were heading to the train station to catch the 2nd to the last train back to Altopascio, we saw some street performers doing an act with their bicycles, singing and dancing. As they finished up their song and left the piazza, they motioned for the crowd to follow them, so we did. They performed in the next piazza, motioned for us to follow again, and we did. We did that through their whole performance, which was fun but by the time they finished, we had missed our 2nd to the last train, and so we took the last train home...or so we thought. As it turned out, we took the wrong train and ended up on the coast in Viareggio, which was about 40 miles away from where we wanted to be. The problem was that there were no more trains that were going to Altopascio that night. We were virtualy stranded in Viareggio at midnight. To make a long story very short, I paid for a cab to take us home - and let me just say it was not cheap!

Sunday I took a walk around Altopascio and then we rode our bikes to Lucca and made another tour of the city.

So now it's Monday and what did we do? We removed another layer of dirt from our site. We did expose the rest of another wall, and we excavated a hole (a round one) that we decided must have once held a tree. However, since we found a gun shell casing in the hole, it was obvious that it was a modern hole and not anything we needed to be concerned about in the future. We also started removing the few bones that we knew were in the site when we started the excavation. The bad news is that so far we haven't found any other bones of any significance.

One other thing - Dr. Clark Larson, who "wrote the book on bioarchaeology" and is currently teaching at Ohio State is here this week. It's going to be really interesting hearing him lecture about the projects he's working on. We've all met him now, and he's a very nice man. This is almost the equivalent of meeting Dr. Leakey!

I sit here wishing the bar across the street was open, but apparently a lot of restaurants close on Mondays in Italy. I'm going to bed early tonight, because tomorrow promises to be another hard day.

Thanks for taking the time to read my rambles,

MB