Still alive!

Hello all!

I've been terribly remiss in keeping things updated, and can only say that exceptional laziness has claimed my week. But I see that I left you all on last Friday, so let's see if I can catch up to today! The Saturday after that, I headed over to Heraklion with Brett and Brian, and we stayed there overnight so that we could go see Knossos the next day.

Grafitti - Heraklion had some pretty interesting ones, this was drawn large scale on a wall we passed in the city.

Our harbor view from the restaurant where we had dinner.

Knossos! Much of the site here was reconstructed early on by Sir Arthur Evans, the first excavator at the beginning of the 20th century. He's faced a good bit of academic censure for that, but it is rather interesting to see his impressions of what the site ought to have looked like.

The famous throne room. This was either a political or (more likely) religiously significant place in the very center of the Knossos palace complex. This room is rather well done, as it was found, for the most part, in situ. The stone throne, in fact, was only a couple inches below topsoil. It managed to survive all the centuries by that tiny little margin!

Horns of Consecration. This was a prevalent symbol in Minoan society, generally taken to be religious in nature. Indeed, this example is huge (taller than I am) and if you stand between the horns and look through them, you will see a mountain where a Minoan shrine was located.

So, as it has been before, the site was awesome, if a little warm. After visiting out there we headed back into Heraklion to take a look at the museum. The archaeological museum there has been under construction for years, and they have a little basement room where they display all the most prominent and important pieces they have. But this year they managed to open up a couple things in the museum proper and now have a Roman sculpture room and a fresco room open, both of which were quite nice. I can't wait until they get the rest of the museum in working order!

Me, posing with a Roman Persephone, Hades, and Cerberus. You're not reeeeally supposed to do that in museums, but the guard was rather remiss and it was too good an opportunity to pass up!

 Before we left to come back to Pachia Ammos, we wandered around the city a bit, and stopped in for Chinese food, because as tasty as Greek food is, a little variety is necessary now and again!

The Golden Dragon. A Chinese owned Chinese restaurant, and quite tasty!

Heee... this amused me.

 So we made out way back to Pachia Ammos for work the next morning, and returned to this:

This chair is straight out of a horror movie. The wind is rather strong off the ocean sometimes, and blows the chair down the hallway. Of course, the first time Brett and I saw that, was when it decided to chase us. For some reason it never really makes it past our door, either... The best part was when Brett went to put it back where it belonged and it proceeded to chase her back around the corner. ^^

So that was Sunday! Most of this week went by pretty slowly. Work went along as usual, and we finally have a good bit of pottery to deal with in the lab, which means no more plaster for a while, yay! The plaster project is going pretty well, though, and Max has made some good progress on it.

Pretty Kitty, napping on the bench. She and Freddy are the two cats that live at the Center.

One afternoon I wandered over to Irapetra for a bit, and passed this statue, though I'm not entirely sure what it is supposed to be for, if anything.

Ta-da! The one good thing about starting our day so early is that the walk up the giiiiant hill to the center affords a nice view of the sunrise behind us. 

 Not much has gone on besides that! This weekend I have decided to be lazy and lounge about with a book on the beach, before we move into the last stretch of the dig. Hope all is well at home, loves to all!