Dr Tho does Thorikos

Against my hopes there is a pretty stable, insjallah, unsecured internet connection at our place in Lavriou so I can rant and banter about casual stuff that comes up during the expedition.

So Thorikos, hey?

Well, it's in Greece, in the east of Attica, about three quarters of an hour drive from Athens.
The last campaign we did here was a clean-up action and we basically weeded a big part of the industrial quarters. Whilst doing so we discovered some discrepancies in the ground plans and decided to aim the next campaign at researching and investigating the flaws in the plan.

So here we are, in Thorikos, on a nice mountain with plenty of ruins, a wonderful sunset and pretty nice crew.

But what do we do here?

Well, basically we take a map in hand, walk around, look at structures and discuss their function/dating or whatnot. To make it more difficult we do this with a silly French accent. Why?
Because we are multi-cultural, of course.

My partner in crime is Guy, one of the coolest and most sober people I've met in Archaeology. And since today he's also a retired soldier.

Retirement, hey?

Yes, retirement. Retirement equals champagne, so we had champagne, toast with sausages and cheese as we watched that beautiful sunset mentioned earlier.

I love being me, not only am I so smart, clever, funny and ruggedly handsome, I also have the best job in the world, or will have anyway when I grow up.

At the end of things.

I can hardly recall the last time I wrote here. The Wadi Ram seems ages ago, back when the Irish were still here and the French hadn't arrived.

That is far too long a time to write an interesting piece about, so I will briefly sum up what happened.

We went to Wadi Ram, awesome, played in the dunes, brilliant, rolled from the highest dune I've seen in my life, fantastic, so fantastic I'm still crapping red sand.

Then we got back to work, my trench soon turned muddy, not because I didn't like climbing up three metres every time I had to take a piss, but because of the altitude of the groundwater table.
We dug some more, said goodbye to Helen, Bart and Joris after some nice partying and welcomed the French and Walloon replacements.

It is uncanny how little faces there are in the world. Magalie, the French drawer(Person who draws, not part of a cupboard), was the almost exact double of my former sister-in-law. It goes without saying that she wasn't immediately high up on my list of people I like. Luckily, she turned to be nice enough, for a frenchy ;), so that was that.

The Walloon guy, Jacques, looked like the father/brother of the guy some of you know as Consul Colin. Apart from them both being awesome and their spitting resemblance they had very little in common. So that too was that.

The Bedouin.
I love these guys. They are one of the most hospitable people I have ever met. They have given us names, they have given us tea and they have slaughtered a goat for us. In the beginning they were workers, but now I call most of them friend, not because of the fact that their names are as similar as they are(yes, that is entirely untrue and very colonial of me, a flogging is necessary), but because they are friends. They are honest in their handling of matters and if they dislike you they will not hide it, plus they liked my knife. People who like my knife are my friends.

Salah, what's in a name, invited us to his 'house', beit bedouin, in Humayma and we camped under one the starriest skies I've seen in my life.

I will cease my writing for today, because I'm starting to bore myself. More of my exciting adventures tomorrow.