Arma virumque cano

I'm sitting in a smoky bar in a city cover by a perpetual haze. My cigar is slowly burning away between my fingers as I stare at the last centimetres of Ouzo in my glass.

Some girl in a sparkling, low-cut, red dress is making love to the piano. She is flushed and I grimace as I see a bead of sweat run down her left breast.

The city's heat is intolerable.

Intolerable, but not without a profound sense of forlorn poetry. A longing, or more an echo of a time long gone. A time not like to return again.

I down what's left of my drink and get up, grabbing the table to steady myself. One of the serving girls comes up and purrs a question.
I don't hear her and my head spins as I push her aside and bull my way to the exit.

The air is hardly fresher in the streets, but the lack of smoke and piano helps clear my head.

I look at my watch and see my wrists are bare.
I grin and look up at the skies, some old instinct to try and measure time from the celestial bodies.

I grin again at the thought of celestial bodies and crush the stump of my cigar under my heel.

There is no time in the Mediterranean, only the slow cadence of  the wind on the water and the shadows on the streets as the sun lazily crawls its way across the sky.

My gaze wanders to the horizon, if that's what you could call it in this wretched blotch of urban expanse.
The mountains try their best to hold back the civic cancer that is trying to strangle them, but they won't make it. This city is to ripe for that, its oozes will just spill over and run into the next valley and then the one after that.
Only the sea seems to have been able to stop, or at least stunt, its growth.

The first rays of dawn creep over the mountain side and I feel a tugging sensation, something pulling at my innermost being.

The East is calling, and I've no intention to resist.

It is past time I left this city.


__________

Of Camels and Khans

A little over a week has passed since my arrival in the Holy Land and many things have happened.

The Americans are very friendly and against my expectations the cultural gap hasn't proven to be unbridgeable. Though I don't think I'll ever get used to their trouserless culture. I've never seen a more underwear-obsessed culture.

I've have however seen my first proper digscorpions. The ones we had in Italy were hardly bigger than a fingernail, but these were the real McCoy, the full 6" long and nasty looking creatures from the Great Void.

During the day I have the honour of being in charge of three students and 8 shebabs. They are young and inexperienced but are quickly learning, except for this one guy called Abdullah, Aboud for the friends. Needless to say I call him Abdullah, he is a pubescent retard of the highest level and I think he is somewhat akin to a crossbreed between mouldy Jell-O, a bag of clams and Alfred Hithcock's pants, his English pants not the American ones.
If he doesn't rectify his degeneration soon I'm sending him up the tell to work on the boring sites.

In the evening we sit by the pool or on the rooftop terrace and have Arak and a smoke, ranging from modest cigars, over meerschuim pipes to full-blown argyles.
Tomorrow we'll be celebrating one of the team's birthday on the tell with more Arak, Philadelphia Beer and Nebo Wine.

One more thing before I leave you be.
This place is black booger country, my sinusses have forgotten what the colour green looks like and have instead replaced it with the murkiest black of the deep Abyss. And they're hard as well, I figure if I was to the hardness scale it'd be around 7 or 8.

PS: There's a lot of camels and one or two Khans.

Once more onto the Dunes, dear friends.

Wednesday I'm going back to my beloved Jordan, the country and not the model.

I will be rebooting this blog and trying to faithfully write on it every now and again.

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.

A Camel and his Pants

I finally managed to destroy my first real pair of cargo pants. I feel slightly odd without it, but I've never been a pants-loving kind of man, so I think I'll get over it rather swiftly.

En-Nur the Camel has been on a walk-a-about for the past few days and I sincerely hope that he will return soon, because the stale bread we brought for him has almost turned into granite and also because I'm a camel-loving kind of guy. Well, not in a physically intimate kind of way, of course...

Which brings me to the next subject.

BREASTS!


I've always been a breast-loving kind of guy, you can interpret that any way you like, and this absence of even a nicely outfitted scenery of cleavage to look at is driving my up the walls. As long as those walls aren't the ones of a goat shed I should be all right, for now...



And now for something completely different...

We went to Petra last week. That was fucking, no pun intended, awesome!
When our driver saw we could get in for free he went along, but I think the man seriously came to rue his decision to follow a bunch of crazy cliff-jumpers on his day off. We took him to and fro and up and under every hill, mountain, nook and cranny we came across and this on his day off from his two, yes two, regular jobs during the week.
Allah wasn't entirely satisfied either and He caused our car to break down before we even started to head back. Many hours and friendly Jordanians who had cousins with the same type of battery later we were able to head back to Aqaba.
We had to sing for the entire two hour trip to keep the driver awake and I'm not sure who was more damaged by the experience, the poor driver or my fellow van-mates...


Anyhow, next Friday we got to the Wadi Rum, insjallah!

(In a bar) Under the Sea

I went snorkelling for the first time ever today.
That was fucking awesome.

Also, Spring has set in in Aqaba!
Hooray!
More sun!
Party!
Arak!
Beer!