Look ma there's Syria or I'm in Turkey!

I made it to the Alalakh dig in the weesmalls of Tuesday morning. Leaving Belgrade went ok except that I felt gross with stuffy head and general achey-ness. Hung out for many hours in the domestic terminal of Istanbul airport reading during my layover before 22:55 flight to Hatay. I wasn't sure if there'd be anyone there since never got a confirmation to my emails, but after helping a Ecuadorian film-maker with her bags and chatting with a police officer in English I saw a man with my name on a sign. Huzzah! We drove down the deserted roads out into the middle of nowhere Turkey speaking a mix of Turkish, English, and German as he told me about where we were going, asked me questions and tried to answer mine. We arrived to the dig compound at 2 a.m. and I was shown a bed, quickly got into it.

People were up and moving to go to site at 5 a.m. so I got up with them, looked for someone in charge to tell me what the heck I was supposed to do. Murat, our general man with a plan, told me to sleep more and not worry. Easy enough. Mike was also sick with heatstroke, so got to chat with him a bit as well (he's better now). Found Aslihan (our fearless director, she hides out in this little office that wasn't too hard to find) and she told me what was going on, gave me the grand tour of the compound, and then handed me over to Ferhat, my new leader.

My job here is assisting (or being a minion) to Ferhat, the recorder of the excavation. That means that he looks at all the objects and writes up what they are, then I type the sheets into the database. He's into heavy metal, has long black ponytail down his back, studied American Lit for his BA, is totally fearsome and laughs at things I say. We get on well. Except that I type too fast and keep finishing up the little amount of work they have for me (there's this database backlog project that looms but we're running into technical glitches that I can't fix so I keep not having it to do). Thus I made coffee yesterday in the morning, today entered all the conservator's data from this season... and am writing this as he looks at more objects so I can enter them soon. He even let me switch the music from metal to a mix on my ipod - apparently I'm liked and accepted. Which is awesome.

The tone of the dig is relaxed and long. Field crew leaves about 5:15-30 in the morning, we house crew (since stay at the dig house compound here where we also all sleep and eat) start around 6 (or so). There's first breakfast then, 2nd breakfast at 8:30 (which reminds me of hobbits), we're working all morning with official coffeebreak at 11ish. Field crew gets back and we all lunch at 13:30, chill out until tea at 4ish, then back to work (others sort pottery, enter their data for the day or what have you - I do same kind of stuff regardless). Dinner is at 7:30, we've watched some cartoons one night, there are a bunch of movies that will debut soon too. People wander to bed starting around 10 and it begins again. I got my own bed yesterday - been using someone else's who was sleeping on the roof until some people left (their season had started way earlier), so now settled for real I suppose.

You can see Syria from the roof of the dig house - it's a mountain right there (20 km) after a heavily guarded border. The sky at night is gorgeous and starry as is watching the sunset over the mountains. I've not made it into Antakya yet (the city nearby), there's no reason yet and the massive amount of sun means this girl stays in the shade a whole bunch.

Speaking of which, I should go and get those records recorded before lunch (to justify my "slacking" right now). It's a good place and I'm glad to be here (and already making jokes like the box that contains "non-artifacts" (a response to the pottery expert's box of artifacts which are pieces of stone that are worked but have no context because they come from the gravel in the compound, thus are no good for us)). Look at me learning.