Put Some Raki on It
June 22, 2013
The first week of excavation is already complete and I can’t believe it! The week has flown by on dust-covered wings. I’m in a small group of five with two trench supervisors, both of whom are pretty cool. So far we’ve moved a ton of dirt and found some cool stuff! The area we are digging in has never been excavated before, which is pretty exciting because we have no idea what we might be uncovering. The area is so exciting that we’ve even extended the trench and the site director visited our trench twice in two days. Apparently that’s something. It’s a huge excavation project, so I’m assuming he’s a busy man.
All this digging has made me extremely dirty and very sore. I’m washing my clothes out on a daily basis and the amount of dirt I rinse out of them could fill a bucket. It’s gross, but it’s a testament to the amount of dirt we’re moving. Yesterday one of the guys in my trench and I went through 40cm of a 4x2m trench. We’re crazy pick axing machines! Yesterday we discovered that we have the same birthday, so it must have something to do with our Roman strength (April 21 = the mythical foundation date of Rome… and therefore people born on that day are born with the strength of a Roman soldier, I’ve decided). Lots of digging yields lots of soreness, especially since I haven’t excavated in a few years and basically sat on my bum all year studying so I could get decent grades in my MA program. On the upside of all the soreness, I can already see the muscles popping out again. Hello little friends, how I have missed you! It’s amazing the horrors that grad school does to your body, and the wonders that archaeology does to your body. At least one makes up for the other.
Another lovely benefit of excavating (and sometimes just being outside in general for me) are the mosquito bites and other various bug bites. For some reason bugs just love me and I seem to get attacked on a routine basis. Like my grandma says, I have “sweet blood.” I’ve tried all sorts of things to keep the bites to a minimum, but not much seems to be working. The most interesting advice I’ve gotten thus far has been to 1. Drink raki, and 2. Put raki on my mosquito bites. Raki is a magical clear alcohol in Greece that looks harmless but tastes and feels like gasoline as it goes down. Most families in this region make their own and it’s a favorite pastime of restaurant owners to dole out several shots of raki at dinner. It’s rude to refuse it, too, so that makes it especially dangerous. Apparently you can also pour this stuff into a cut and it will act as an antiseptic. Anyway, if you drink raki apparently you don’t get assaulted by mosquitoes while you sleep. And if you put it on your bites they will stop itching and magically go away. I’m skeptical but it seems to be a popular opinion among trench supervisors, so I guess it’s worth a try. Now to find some raki… shouldn’t be too challenging.
I keep hearing other uses for this magical substance. I’m starting to think that it’s the real Greek equivalent of Windex in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Got a mosquito bite? Put some Windex on it! Don’t want to get eaten alive by mosquitoes? Drink some… Windex? Okay, well maybe raki is a little more versatile than Windex, but the universality of both substances is pretty dang similar. Maybe they wash their windows with raki here… I’ll have to investigate. Testing out the various raki hypotheses tonight ;).
