Approaching the end...

The last week at the site was an exciting and also disappointing one. I haven't talked much about the site itself, as the field school was a vast failure at best. We never ended up digging inside the castle. We were working at both a Greek site and an Early Bronze Age site down slope from the castle. I spent the majority of my time at the Greek site, which was a semi-collapsed Greek wall. The Early Bronze Age site was a hut area, which was actually a very significant site, and was eventually closed by Pietro as he did not want inexperienced Americans digging in such an important area. The students working here only dug the out of context areas, and when they hit the edge of the hut, they were forced to stop. Little to our knowledge, apparently professional archaeologists were coming in a few months to do the in context material. Adding to our disappointment, at the Greek wall site trench we hit a Greek stone floor, and were also forced to stop for the same reason. If you want more stories on why the field school sucked, you will have to email me, as I am not going to post a complaint entry on here, because it is upsetting to me.
We went out to dinner the night before students were going to leave (Thursday, June 26th) to a restaurant in Taormina owned by a friend of Pietro's. It was your typical Sicilian meal, with an antipasti dish of assorted prosciuttos, mozzarella cheese, peppers, and sun dried tomatoes. First course was a pasta dish (option to have it with fish or not), and second course was beef. I opted out of the fish option, as I had already tried some of the fish that our cook made earlier in the field school. Oyster I had not tried, and almost did, but at the last minute chickened out (picture sequence posted). For dessert, we had a small slice of cake, and a variety of liquors. We left and Pietro walked us to where part of the filming of the Godfather had been, which was one of the churches from the second movie. We got a great view at night of the towns below. We also walked up a little ways to see a castle. Pietro then suggested going out to a bar, at this point it's already 1am and I was very tired (as what happened that day in the field, was very exhausting, another story in itself), so I opted out and went home with some of the staff that were also not going. Party pooper, I know. I got back at around 2am. The people who had gone out, got back around 4am. We were suppose to be up and ready to work the next day, to fill the site. Least to say, that didn't happen.

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