Archaeotek Summer- First day of classes!

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June 6th

The train ride was beautiful, and I tell you what, our room is so gorgeous! I was expecting pallet-style beds in a dorm room, and instead we have an awesome attic apartment to the three of us with our own really nice shower (it has jets!). Apparently it was just renovated. It's kind of nice that the three of us have stayed together (Jaclyn made sure of it) but there are already serious cliches based on who managed to meet Budapest, and it would have been nice to mingle a little more in terms of rooming together. Ah well. At least I'm not rooming with a monster, so that's nice. The whole group is here now. There are nineteen of us, including another student from UW! Weird! Her name is Tessa. Our intro to the program was a shot of awful liquor, called palinka, so now I'm not so concerned about European archaeology being prissy. They all have tattoos or piercings and they're really chill. Whew.

We started classes today with an intro lecture to Osteology, an intro to the culture half of us will be working with (the Noua people), and a placement test to see who knows how much, in order to divide people into fragmented skeletons or more complete skeletons. I have no doubt that I’ll be working with the more complete ones, as a newbie. Huh. The museum that we are working in is totally undergoing a complete renovation, so it's closed to visitors, and we're working in two rooms that have obviously been co-opted for the purpose. In one there are all sorts of museum pieces that we have to be really careful about not bumping or anything. It's quite ghetto, in a way.

We already have tons of homework. Every week we are given two articles of opposing views to read, develop a discussion argument, and write a reading report each week. In addition to that we have weekly quizzes and a final report that includes a paper and a presentation to the group and to the museum. Dude! So. I should probably go read the articles. And read the section in our manual about what we’ll be studying tomorrow, so that I can be a little ahead of the curve.

Other than exploring the lab and starting lectures, we also had a chance to see the part of town we are in, have lunch around the square, and hit up the vegetable market, which was really fun. I got a bunch of fresh basil for 5 leu, which is only about $1.50. Awesome. Alright, I’m going to be good. Tata for now ☺ Oh, I think I’m going to be doing my group project on the dental pathology in our lab. So now I can study other peoples horrible dental afflictions and feel much better about my own root canals 😉

PS. I'm having a hard time posting photos on this program, so I think I'll start posting my facebook album links here so that you can all see the pics. Not that I have very many yet. I'm not very good at remembering to take photos, and much worse at remembering to post them. Plus there are a lot of gypsies, and whipping out a camera is a great way to attract thieves... I may have to pirate photos from my buddies, who are taking them all the time...

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