Safe and Sound and Ready to DIG!!

Day 1, June 27, 2009: Saturday
Arrived in Tel Aviv around 5:30! The airport was really easy and not at all scary (I had imagined men with machine guns). Everything went smoothly! We got ourselves a taxi and headed toward our hotel in Ashkelon (Ashqelon). The drive was pretty quite, Tyler and I were still shocked from everything going so well and taking in the scenery, when our driver said, so, Jackson died!” Luckily Tyler caught on quicker than I did to what the driver was talking about. ☺ Tyler of course got into a short political discussion with the driver, quite interesting, but I will let him tell you about it later.
When we arrived at the hotel Emily Masters, Dr. Masters’s wife, greeted us right away, friendly faces are so inviting!! Soon Katie and Tim (the TIU couple we’re traveling with) met us down in the lobby and took us to our rooms, lets just say Israel and America have a different standard of cleanliness. After a quick dinner we settled into our rooms and tried to sleep in preparation for our 4:30 wake up call…Neither of us got what you would call a good night’s rest, I think it’s because we were anxious for the next day, we laid awake all night wishing for sleep. When 4:15 came around I couldn’t take it anymore and got ready.

Day 2 June 28, 2009 Sunday
4:45 We met our group for bread and jam (our pre-breakfast). All but five of us have been digging already for three weeks, so they are all friendly toward each other, but they welcomed us and everyone seems really friendly!
5:00 When we arrived at the tel (dig site) it was like something out of the movies, columns from an old basilica lined my way to my square. Tyler and I are working in two different squares. My work consisted of smoothing out a baulk (it looks like a wall) and digging a trench using what looks a big hoe and pick axe. I think being an archeologist would be frustrating, because there is a big marble slab sticking out of our ditch, but we have to do 10 cm passes, we dig 10 cm at a time, so we dig 10 cm, put the dirt in the gufas (buckets) carry buckets to be dumped and repeat the process. It is cool, however when you find something, I found a Israeli horseshoe and our site has lots of broken pottery pieces.
9:00: Breakfast and the first time I see Tyler since arriving at the dig! Breakfast consists of cheese, tuna, some veggies and fruit, yogurt hardboiled eggs and bread. Tyler feels a little frustrated because while his major may say Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Biblical Archeology, there is very, very little about practical archeology. The supervisors at his site gave him very little direction and assumed that he already knew what to do, not much of a confidence boost, but Archeology is very much a hands on training and after a day of it, you feel pretty confident.
After lunch more digging, I knew by lunch that the next day I would be sore. Imagine a day of hoeing a garden and shoveling all the dirt you knock loose and then hoeing some more and shoveling the dirt to carry it off to be dumped in another location…needless to say my back and hands are experiencing pain.
1:00 - 4:00: Back to hotel for lunch, clean up and rest.
4:00-6:00 Pottery washing – washing the pottery we find each day (not the most exciting thing, but a good chance to talk with people).
6:00 Lecture (we were fighting our eyes to stay open, so I can’t really say what it was about).
7:00 Dinner
7:30 showers and get ready for bed. I slept much better this night, but Tyler needed some help from Nyquil.

Pictures coming soon..