Pictures from the Journey Homeward

thea and marie at the Terontola train station The Pantheon
The Colosseum

Home Sweet Home

Nothing can quite compare to being at home! The last week in Ossaia went by in a flash. It was filled with lots of on site digging and finally closing the trenches by mid-week. They were closed earlier than planned. The university had originally hoped that this year would be the last one on this site. It has been running in Ossaia for about 13 years. But unfortunately (and fortunately), they found a wall that began running east and right into the scarp... so that means that they will continue next year and most likely a few more years after that! On the last day of work, I was selected to help chemically restore the floor mosaic in the 1st century AD villa! On my last night in the dig-house I stayed up past everyone else, and used the peace and quiet to write my essay. At about 3 in the morning, I guess the creatures of the dig-house decided I was no longer a threat and started to creep and crawl -- good thing it was my last night there, because had I known that some of these creatures were currently living in the dig-house with us... On Friday, my friend Marie and I said goodbye to everyone and began our journey to Rome. We arrived at our 3 star hotel... well, for certain it was a step up from the dig-house, and we were minus about 13 people in our room, but what the Italians consider "3 stars" is considerably different than what we here in Canada would consider quality lodgings! There indeed was a shower, but it was merely just a showerhead in the corner of the bathroom. There was no curtain, or any other indicator that it was a shower. Water fills the entire bathroom floor. Anyway, we shrugged off the "hotel" and head out on the town. We had one plan for the evening: to see the Pantheon. This proved harder than expected as it is one of the only monuments without tourist signs indicating the directions. It took us close to an hour, but we finally came upon it. The building was very impressive. As we continued walking along the streets of Rome, it was becoming dusk. We walked past the forum and towards the colosseum. I would have to say that the colosseum was my favorite ancient site in Rome! The next day was Saturday. I had the longest Saturday of my life... quite literally actually! It was 32 hours long! The Rome airport was chaotic! Marie and I had a rushed goodbye, and my gate was changed 3 times. By the time we loaded on the plane (45 mins late) most of the passengers were angry. This delay meant that my connecting flight in Frankfurt was going to be a close call. I did end up having to run across the Frankfort airport, and funnily enough got a Frankfort stamp in my passport (but I still never got an Italy stamp!) haha, oh well! Anyway, the Frankfort airport was special in the it had an underground walkway that had changing coloured lights - pink and blue and purple! Then after I reached Toronto airport, I had about an hour before my flight to Edmonton. So I walked to my gate... and guess who I found at the next gate over... Marie! (my friend from Ossaia!). Her flight from Rome had been delayed and she'd missed her connecting flight to Vancouver. It was unfortunate for her. But also it was a nice end to the trip. It had come full circle. (Marie and I met in the Rome train station, both in a panic to locate our train to Ossaia!). We decided to get some dinner, and we officially ended the trip with a toast to Ossaia! The entire trip was an unforgettable experience. Yes, it had its ups and downs. But it was ALL worth it!

Siena and Arezzo

Yesterday we took a day trip to Siena. It was a very beautiful city. We took the early train and got into Siena around mid-morning. The train that we took was a very fancy train, it was a high-tech train with computer capabilities and the seats we placed in semi-circle formation. We arrived in Siena really not knowing that much about the city except that it was not Ossaia, and that was all that mattered! haha! We managed to navigate the bus system to get us to the heart of the city. Everything else from there is walking distance. We went to the Palazzo Publica, it had wall-paintings of good vs. bad government and one of my friends on the trip is an Art History major and had studied this very building, so we were given a private tour through the palazzo by him! The piazza in front of the palazzo is famous and is broken into 9 sections on the ground with each section leading to an exit and to another area of the city. After a nice patio lunch in the piazza, we all split up for a while. Some still needed to finish their gift-shopping for people at home, and I really wanted to walk around for a while. So I took every street and corner turn that I could find, but always keeping the clock tower of the palazzo in my eye-sight so as not to get lost. I ended up going for a 3 hour walk around the city and took almost 100 pictures! We all met up at the appointed hour, got pizza to go (yummy!) and then headed back towards the bus stop. We had a perfectly timed trip back, we were just in time for the bus, caught an earlier train, and then the connection in Chiusi arrived just as our train did. We made it back into Terontola to catch the last bus of the day. We've all decided that it is probably not the best idea to keep walking the dangerous highways at night, so we are making real efforts to plan our travel around the sparse bus schedule in Ossaia. Oh well, it's all a part of the experience. It was so nice to go to Siena yesterday and have a much needed break from digging in Ossaia. Today I got to sleep-in again, and right now I'm in Arezzo. It was a short train ride from Terontola, and a nice change from always going to Cortona for internet and the occasional meal. Alright, this is my last week in Ossaia, and I will be heading back to Edmonton by next Sunday. I will be spending one night in Rome on my way back and my friend Marie and I are planning to have a quick tour of the Pantheon before our flights back to Canada. The temperature is a boiling 30°C again... Ah, Italy is... WONDERFUL!

A Tough Week in More Ways than One

This week was certainly more stressful than last. For starters we were stuck in Ossaia for the entire week. Ossaia, as I have mentioned, is SMALL. There is one telephone, and it is in the one bar in Ossaia. "Amelio's" (the bar) has turned into the Canadian students second home-away-from-home. We go there for gelato, bottled water (surprisingly inexpensice 0.80 euros), and (my fav) latte caldo ( hot milk, really what we call a steamer). Anyway, we've been digging in the trenches on rotation all week. My trench partner and I have been moved to a new trench EVERY SINGLE day. Not a happy experience for us as we do not get to see the evolution of the trench (which makes keeping the site-journal tough), but also, the people who are regularly working in that trench are not very happy for us to come in and work on it. People have become SO territorial over "their" trenches... it's making things become difficult... anyone with an imagination can understand this: 16 girls in ONE room, seeing each other 24/7 for 3 weeks... doesn't exactly spell out FUN. Anyway, some cool things that I've found this week in the trenches include: a bronze ring, a chunk of red-painted column fluting, and lots and lots of brick chuncks. We are in Cortona this evening for Friday night dinner, seems like a bit of a pattern forming, but all the same it is nice to get out of Ossaia once in a while. My plan for the weekend is to go to Siena on Saturday. So far the weather has not been too hot, we actually had a bit of a cold week, and it rained on Wednesday which meant everyone was confined to the dig house... I certainly will be appreciating my home when I get back to Edmonton! Ciao.

A Terrifying Walk and a Day Trip to Florence

So on Friday after we all had a fabulous dinner at a resturant in Cortona, we realized that there are no taxies in Cortona, and the bus had stopped running hours before... so we walked back to Ossaia... in the pitch black night. These are extremely small towns, so there are no street lights and the cars drive at VERY fast speeds. It was probably the most frightening thing I've ever done in my whole life. There were 8 of us, and the usual hour and a half walk took much longer because we had to run back and forth across the road to avoid the cars, and there are no shoulders on the highways. We had one extreme close call and all of us screamed, and also one of the others fell into the ditch dodging a car. It was scary at the time, but somehow also a lot of fun and all of us really bonded on that walk home. After surviving that frightening experience, back at the dig-house and right before bed I accidentally got a severe electric shock, when I was attempting to recharge the batteries on my iPod. I plugged in the converter before I plugged the iPod in, somehow (I'm not really sure) my finger touched the electrical socket and 240 V shot into my right arm...that was the weirdest feeling in my life and I was scared for my life... All these close calls... my conclusion: Italy is dangerous. Then on Saturday a number of us got up early and caught the train to Florence (Firenze in Italian). It was only about a 2 hour train ride from Terontola (the nearest train station to Ossaia). We arrived early in the morning and had breakfast on a street patio. They eat pastry for breakfast here in Italy. I also had a cioccolata caldo (hot chocolate), and here it is as thick as pudding... Really it is probably just hot pudding. Anyway, then we walked to the Duomo and then to the Palazzo Vecchio, which was a palace of the Medici, but is now the Florence city hall. Then we crossed the Ponte Vecchio, this bridge has jewlery stores all the way across the entire thing. We then went to the Boboli Gardens to see a display of Pompey gardens. The grounds were huge and I have lots of pictures. I will post some later. Then we got pizza and eat it on the street corner... it was at that moment that the trip really felt like a european trip! It was nice to just stand on the corner of some street, and just be...exist. It was a great feeling. Then we did a bit of shopping... why not while we were in Florence! We made it to the "leather market" which was tents and tents of street vendors for about 6 blocks. I managed to actually successful barter with one of the vendors and got a great deal on a leather bag! (My one treat for surviving the accomodations in Ossaia - haha!) Then we found a little place on a street patio for dinner. At about 8 we had a mad rush across the city to make it to the train station to catch the last train of the day back to Terontola. We made it and the train seemed to take longer on the way home than it did on the way to Florence. Again, the bus had stopped running hours before, so we had to brave the highway once more... but this time I had come prepared. I had brought along my headlamp and it made the trip a tiny bit safer... but also Terontola is a lot closer to Ossaia than Cortona, so the danger did not last as long. After all the travelling I slept soundly! Today was the first day that we were able to actually sleep in! Even though 9:30 am would not really be considered much of a sleep in for me at home, here it was precious sleep-in time! We decided today that it was time to do some laundry, and since the laundry sink at the dig house was broken (how I have no idea), but it was. We were told there was a laundrymat in one of the very small towns nearby. So we walked with our laundry to Vallone, and when we got there we realized that we needed change/coins to work the machines. So we ventured to the nearby store... a hardware store...and we found... Toiletseats! And only for 9.50€!!! So we bought 2 for the dig-house! Yay! But seeing how inexpensive the toiletseats were just made me even more mad that they had not gotten some for us before at the dig-house... Oh well. Anyway, we did the laundry very quickly (mom and dad -- I shared a load/machine with 2 others... wow! Can you believe it?!!). We were rushing in order to catch the bus into Cortona for the afternoon. We just made it and then there was a flee market going on in Cortona today. The medival festival isn't as exciting as I thought it would be, but Cortona sure does look even more beautiful (if indeed that is possible) with all the medival flags hanging in the streets. Tomorrow we are back in the trenches, and I haven't decided where I'll go next weekend... I'm learning to just go with the flow of things and not plan...anything! Ciao!

piazza della Repubblica (the main square in Cortona)

Into the Trenches

So we've started digging in the trenches on Wednesday. My trench partner and I have dug in 3 different trenches. We were moved up the hill on the site and after a full day of digging, we came across some pink mortar and bricks which were identified by the professor and TAs as a floor. They had not hypothesized that the building extended in that direction, so it is a pretty cool find. I found a piece of impasto pottery in that same trench! Then on Thursday my group had "potshed" which means a day indoors (very nice break after one full day in the hot Italian sun, high of 30°C). We spent our time washing pottery sherds (with toothbrushes) and identifying their types and dates. We also organized all of the artifacts from all the previous years on the dig, I believe it goes all the way back to 1996. Then today we were back in the trenches, and again, my partner and I had a new trench. We were required to make a complete pass of the trench with a pix axe. It was so much fun, but a lot of work and now my hands have callouses! Today I found a piece of pottery with a flower decoration on it! It was pretty amazing to me. Yesterday another group actually found a pot that was almost complete! We are also finding many things like sherds of brick, pottery pieces, glass, marble, and bones. The work is tough, and involves pix axing, sorting through the spoil with a trowel and then carrying the spoil (left over dirt of no significance) up the hill and off the site. I did remember to put sunscreen, that is everywhere but my lower back (hadn't even occurred to me) and now I have a dark red (and painful) strip right across my lower back. Ouch! Yesterday also happened to be my day for kitchen duty. This meant that I had to get up at 6 am (before anyone else) and make breakfast for 27 people! (along with a partner). Then we also had to prepare "second breakfast" at 11:30 and take it up the hill to the work site. Then lunch, there was a bit of a fuss when everyone ate the food that was prepared for the vegetarians... we had to improvise after that. And then we had to monitor the dinner that a cook had made and clean all the dishes after each meal. My partner and I divided the labour and I got dishes duty, so I think that I washed somewhere around 120-130 dishes yesterday... by hand! And we were the fastest group so far for completing the chores, we finished about an hour and 15 minutes ahead of the others who had done kitchen duty before, we were very efficient! And that meant that we could have a bit of free time to head down to the one bar in Ossaia and get a gelato! (after all our hard work in the kitchen all day, we really needed it!) Today was a half-day in the trenches and then everyone headed down to Cortona for supper, a nice way to end the week! Tomorrow it looks like we'll all be heading to Florence for a bit of a break. And then there is a medival festival going on in Cortona, so we are planning to go to that on Sunday. Time is just flying by here. Oh yeah, this morning walking to site, as we were crossing the road I saw my first snake here in Ossaia... but it had been squashed by a car... but they live here, it's for sure now! eek! We've also seen things like a dead rat on the road and and lots and lots of lizards...little ones though. I would post pictures from the dig-site but we are not allowed to take pictures of an unpublished site. At the accomodations in Ossaia, being at such close quaters with people has really sped up the process of getting to know everyone. I am really enjoying my time here, even though it involves hard labour... perhaps I'll come back with a tan!

view of the valley from Cortona

my accomodations in Ossaia

residences in Cortona

Learning to Adapt

So the flight from Canada was long. I arrived into Rome 30 minutes behind schedule and I only had a 2 hour time window to make it into Rome to catch my train to Terontola-Cortona. While waiting in the line for the Leonardo Express to take me to the Roma Termini station, some random boy handed me 4.50 euros and walked away. He did not say anything and I was so shocked I didn't quite know what to say, also I had just been travelling for apporximately 24 hours and I was tired. I had to run to catch the train, but I made it on it. Then when I got to the Roma Termini station, it was so large and there was no one willing to help me. The print out of my train info did not have a platform number and it was nearing the time that my train was leaving and I had no idea where to go. Then another random thing happened: someone asked me directions and when I spoke in english saying I had no idea, she asked me if I was going to the Cortona program... she was another student! Yay! I was saved. Together we figured out which platform and we had to run (again) across the entire huge train station but made it onto our train. When we got the the accomodations in Ossaia (a SMALL town), it was quite a shock to the system. As soon as I saw it I wanted to hop back onto the train and head home. We are staying in an abandoned 2 room elementary school. There are 16 girls in my room (the boys only have 6 in the same sized room), and we have to share the showers and washroom with everyone. And to add to that, only 1 of the 3 toilets has a toiletseat, and most of the time the toilets do not flush so you have to get a pail of water and dump it down the toilet. Yuck! This is definitely no where near to what I am used to or what I am comfortable with. But it is what it is, and I guess I'm going to learn to adapt. So the very first night was extremely hard. The night seemed to last forever and I was extremely homesick. Then yesterday some of us got up early and took the bus to Cortona. We had a very nice day. Some of the others in the group had been to the winter program in Cortona so they were able to take us around the town and show us some things. We walked to the top of the hill on which Cortona is settled. We walked through a fortress and some of the views of the valley are amazing! Then we saw huge church, then walked back down the hill to the main square to have lunch. The main square is the only part of Cortona on flat surface the rest go straight up or down -- I mean REALLY steep. Then all of us students just sat on the stairs of the church in the main square for about an hour, just sitting and enjoying the hot sun. We all took the bus back to Ossaia in the evening and went to dinner at the only resturant in Ossaia. This morning, we started the class part of the trip. First we had a lecture about the history and landscape of the area, and then they took us to the potshed to learn how to identify the different kinds of pot sherds. Then we hiked up into the hills to the dig site just to get a sense of the landscape. Tomorrow we learn how to excavate and on wednesday our digging rotations will begin. It feels like weeks have passed, but I've only been gone a 4 days. It gets easier being away from home the longer I am. Although I have to say that having internet and telephone do make it easier. (except that we don't have those in Ossaia, we have to come into town (Cortona) to use them). So after classes today I decided to come into Cortona and I wanted to walk. I started out with a friend, but halfway there it began to pour, so she turned back, but I was intent on making here. So I continued to walk in the rain and then someone stopped on the road and offered me a ride to Cortona (mom and dad please do not freak out when you read this - I was debating whether I should include this or not, but it's part of my experience so...) Anyway, I made it to Cortona and of course, the sun came out again extremely warm and sunny! The weather in Italy is so changeable. It's hard to dress for the morning because the weather changes every 5 minutes! But AH how BEAUTIFUL it is! I forgot my memory stick in Ossaia with my pictures on it, so I'll have to post them later. But the views, even from our accomodation (which is the only good thing about it), are spectacular. Alright, I'd better go, some of the other students are waiting for me in the square. Ciao!