breakfast with the exorcist

so i think it's pretty funny that this page is titled christina in egypt, because basically i was in Egypt for barely four days, and the rest of the 5 or so weeks have been in Israel. but anyways, had another great weekend, last full one in Jerusalem :( i'll at least get one more day, finally getting to go to the israel musuem and the shrine of the book, it's been closed for renovation and just opened yesterday. It was mostly a relaxing one, went to church for the last time, i will definitely miss the spectacular view during sacrament meetings, and then to the Rockafeller museum with Eric, stacey, and michelle. Eric is working on making me a master pottery reader and so we went through and he tried teaching me all he knew and keeps trying to test me, once in a while i get it right :) so i'm learning and slowly becoming a pottery geek, which is a bad tihng according to jeff (he is) but it's fun:) The rest of the time we hung out and did some walking through the old city and ate some more amazing food :) Oh and one morning we were seated at a breakfast table with what turned out to be one of 5 exorcists from argentina who just got done with a congress in Rome and was making his annually visit to Jerusalem, it was pretty interesting, he was a nice guy, you meet some pretty cool people here. We also managed to find marshmallows (it is incredibly hard to do so) and made tropical marshmallow, exploding cow, tea biscuit s'mores (in a fire i made) sunday night. It was pretty great, talk about working with what you have, but they were delicious, and if you have never had exploding cow before, you are definitely missing out.

Everyone lately has just been finishing up and cleaning as we get ready to close up the season. Last week was one of the most exciting with the juglet and cooking vessel and some things in the other areas like a brick destruction level, though yesterday as we were doing our last digging and starting to clean, we had some more excitement. i, and eric, was starting to take out the vessel, when we got another pottery piece sticking out of a different material. We decided to follow it down and dig it out, mostly because we didn't want to leave it exposed for a whole year until next season. I started digging down and it just keeps going, I got down probably close to 15 cm when Jeff and Aren came over and told me to stop. So far we had the side with intact handle of a large cookingpot/storage jar with the rim seemingly intentionally broken off. We had to stop because it was getting to deep and we don't have the time to excavate around it. So we have to leave it and rebury it, hoping nothing will happen to it for the next year, it was a sad blow to the excitement. You always find the best stuff at the end, like in the square over i was helping with as well, there is a huge plaster installment that dives as well and we still don't have the bottom, but it looks like it abutts the EB/MB (depends on who you talk to) wall and we have to bury that as well :( there are two going theories for the cooking pot/jar i have though, either it's just a storage jar dug into the ground, or it is a baby burial ( as has been found in the iron age/LB surface types we're on), I'm hoping for the latter, it would be much more interesting.

yesterday was jeff's birthday, we had a great party, first of all a couple of us ran to the top of the tell before he got there and made a coca cola tree witht the bottles hanging from all the branches, he was pretty ecstatic, and then one guy's wife made a cake and brought popsicles, it was fun. Last night we also got to go to a concert in the Bell caves,it was really fun, this small natural theater with bats flying around and great acoustics, it was vivaldi, loved it.

Today was the last day for us all on the tell sadly, only a few get to go tomorrow to finish getting ready for the photographs and aerials, but there's a chance I can go and help, so we'll see.It was all sweeping and dusting, yesterday we had taken down the shades so it was a very hot, draining day, but already the area is looking good and you can start to see the big picture and connect all the different squares, it's cool to see the line of stratigraphy our area is especially important for, that we can look on surfaces from the crusader period all the way down to early bronze on this side of the tell. we came back to the kibbutz and did some pottery writing and i also help load tools and equipment and take them to the storage unit which felt like a sauna inside. Tonight is a lecture by Arim Mazar, an important guy from the Hebrew university and is supposed to be really good, I'm excited.