"Allez la France!"

Excavations continued this week with a little less rain finally, though we’ve still had to start and stop several times because of the weather. It has been quite cold too, which is surprising. I woke up this morning with a bit of a sore throat which has been going around the French-German team. I’m hoping it’s just because I went to bed late last night and not that I’ll actually have a cold for my last week of excavation…

The excavation itself has been a little under-whelming much to my surprise. Instead of moving many wheel-barrows full of dirt each day, I fill maybe twenty buckets of dirt in an entire day. I’ve been digging post-holes (the holes which held the framing for a house) for two weeks now and am bored to tears with it as are most of the others working at the site. These post-holes are cut into the natural soil, which is rock. I clean the dirt (mostly mud with the rain) and debris out of these to make them ready for photographing. 

It’s the same thing every day, though sometimes I get to “spice it up a bit” by cleaning a ditch instead. Some graves were found, but they are early medieval and only a few people have been excavating these. It has been quite difficult to go from being the person in charge/responsible for an area and all of its data collection and paperwork back to a person who is merely there to move dirt. I feel no connection to the site as I don’t know what is even going on here. I expressed these feelings to one of the supervisors who is responsible for all of the note-taking and it sounds like he may put me to work this week with more of the mental work, which would be a nice change. Here’s hoping. 

Despite the monotonous work, I am enjoying myself over all. We get coffee breaks and ice cream breaks which is nice. I can listen to my French lessons or music on my iPod if I like, which helps the day pass a little more quickly. If I’m actually working near others, we have entertaining conversations while we work. We were all so miserable on Friday that we wrote a song about being miserable in our ditch and it turned out quite good!

I’m not sure why, but we had the excavation party in the second week of excavations and also on a Thursday night. I haven’t been drinking much at all this excavation, probably because there is so much drinking going on around me all the time, but the others more than made up for it that night. We were divided into teams based on country (German, Austrian, Swiss, and the French legionaries which included me, some Germans and the actual French because there weren’t enough for a full team) and had to play archaeological games such as tossing a trowel into a bucket, a blindfolded girl pushing a wheel-barrow with a boy inside around a series of obstacles, and a pick-axe toss. I didn’t even want to participate, but got stuck doing the trowel toss – and no, I didn’t make any into the bucket.

After this was the wheel-barrow race. We needed three girls from each team to participate and a quick count revealed we only had two girls on the French team and I was one of them. I finally agreed to do it one minute before the race began and quickly threw on some sneakers which looked pretty funny with my dress. I got up to the wheel-barrow and got ready to start when they told me I had to be blindfolded. I was in the first race, so I didn’t know this was coming and all of the directions for the games were only given in German leaving the French team quite clueless about most of the rules. I managed to get around and back, though it’s a bit difficult when the person giving you directions speaks only French… I was thankfully finished with the games after that race. We were still short a girl and they wouldn’t let our other girl go twice, so we dressed up one of the French guys in a skirt and sweater and he played for us – we had no other options! We ended up tieing with the Austrians for third place, which was fine with us since we really didn’t care that much. We just cheered a lot and waved our baguettes, French flags and pirate flags while shouting ‘Allez la France!’ (Let’s go France!).

 Last Saturday a group of us went to Bibracte, an important archaeological site for Gallo-Roman history. We decided to change it up this week and go to the medieval city of Troyes. Before we left, The Hobbit, the French girl, our blonde German boy, and I went to the Douix and had a picnic breakfast with croissant, homemade jam, baguette, juice, and fruit. It was quite lovely and there were ducks there that day too, so they enjoyed some breakfast as well. We usually have the same breakfast every day in the cafeteria making this a nice change.

After this, we hopped into the Red Fox (a car) and were joined by our driver who looks like Sigmund Freud’s twin. We made our way through the hilly countryside to the city and spent the day walking around. As it is a medieval city, there are a lot of old buildings, many of which look like they might tip over if you leaned against them – they are very tilted and sagging, but still standing! We had some Lebanese food for lunch since there was a vegetarian with us and it seemed like the best option for all. We ate in a small park next to a fountain and then met up with another group which included TSP, another really nice German girl who I like and a few others. We visited the cathedral and after the museum which has some regional archaeological finds on display. The other group left after the museum, but our car walked around for a bit, visited some shops, and had some ice cream. It was a really perfect day from start to finish with a lot of laughing and joking, good music in the car, and perfect sunny weather. It certainly rates up there as one of my favorite days I hope to remember always. The rest of the night was pretty quiet and I got caught up in conversation with some friends until about 5AM. Overall, it was a very perfect day!

This morning was a bit rough because we were getting up early to go to another flea market. I was in the Red Fox again with ‘Freud’, TSP and the French girl. We were following the car that had the map and was supposed to know where this place was, but they somehow managed to get us lost in the woods and countryside making the drive about 45 minutes long. After we arrived, everyone walked around really quickly and wanted to leave about 15 minutes later. This happened last weekend to the French girl and I who are slow and like to look. We hide when we notice them waiting for us so that we can take a bit longer. This flea market was too small to hide for long and we reluctantly left shortly after. The drive home took only 15 minutes because we saw that it should have been a direct line between the cities – oh well.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. I napped for about 3 hours, ate dinner, and then went to visit a local cemetery at night. I am in the home-stretch so-to-speak, and finish my time at Vix this week. Hopefully it will be a more interesting week for me and the others! So long, for now!