quickly with careful!!

t is finally a nice, sunny day here (for now) and it is our day off on top which makes it doubly nice! For the dry season, it sure does rain a lot....it usually rains just about every day, though lightly, except it has really been storming this past week. Martha says it’s more like the really, really rainy season and the less rainy season because of this. Good to know! It also gets surprisingly chilly here in the evenings, especially after a rain has cooled things off, so I am glad I decided to bring my hoodie and sweatpants after all.

Work at the site has slowed down the last few days. There are really some curious anomalies in our unit that don’t really appear in the small pits being dug around the site. There is a LOT of bioturbation making it difficult to interpret things and we have several light and dark soil stains that we are unsure of- one larger dark soil stain in the very center of the unit is where we keep finding big tools and flakes; just yesterday we found a large mano, or grinding stone, the size of a brick! It is quite interesting...

It rained a bit again yesterday morning which slowed work a bit, but we didn’t work a full day anyhow. After getting home and cleaning up, Jen and I went downtown with Carmen to look around and find some cheap artisanal crafts. The city of Pereira is actually quite nice, with three large plazas and lots of shopping. The main plaza, Plaza de Bolivar, is equipped with a large statue of Simon Bolivar riding a horse, naked. The second one we checked out further west had this enormous system of fountains and water that took up most of the square. These areas are nice because they are lined with palms or some other type of tree which brightens up the city. 

We checked out an old church where some archaeology had been done recently in which they found the original foundation of the original church from the 16th century, along with burials and other structures. The inside of the building that stands today is really quite stunning as they have left the roof/rafters open through reconstruction and rehabilitation to the structure and all of the arcing wood beams are visible.

Most of the shops and storefronts in the area are more commercial but there are a few artisanal places, though, we found the best stuff was from the indigenous people that sell hand crafts from little stands along the wide pedestrian walkways between the shops. Even still, things are either quite pricey or not very well made, so we didn’t make many purchases. 

Carmen was a very good guide of the city even though she is from Manizales and hasn’t spent much time in Pereira, herself. Between her broken english and my broken spanish we were able to communicate pretty well; she is such a cute and funny person, so we all had a good time. After we had worn ourselves out from walking all over the place, we rested our legs at a juice bar for a fresh pitcher of pina en aqua and super empanadas! The empanadas were probably the second best I’ve had, the first being this roadside place in southwest Costa Rica somewhere along the road from Montezuma toward the rest of civilization to the north, and the juice was nice and fresh, though, I’m a sucker for mango or maracuya (passionfruit). 

We headed back toward the bus terminal so that Carmen could get on her way back home and Jen and I continued back to the apartment. The traffic here is a little nuts and stop signs are really more of a suggestion than anything else, so it was like a game of frogger getting around town, the whole time Carmen saying, “quickly with careful!!” We had a little siesta after getting back to the apartment and then went to check out this little eatery down the street that we had seen a few days earlier on a walk down to La Catorce, the major shopping area. The food was tasty and the atmosphere was cute, but the music was in stiff competition with the street traffic and the bar next door that was playing Aerosmith’s entire discography. All in all a pretty enjoyable afternoon and evening : ) 

Thunderkat!!

Let’s see, it’s been a few days since I last sat down and reminisced about my time here so I have some catching up to do. It starts the day before last, we got to the field and saw that the makeshift bamboo canopy we had made (and already altered several times) had fallen down from the weight of a very heavy rain the night before. This sounds like it would be a problem, but I took the opportunity to step up and take over as engineer, which meant not only planning a reconstructed canopy but chopping some bamboo down machete-ninja style!! I’ve said it before, but machete-ing things is like the best therapy ever....too much fun : ) I only wish I had brought my machete from Belize (which coincidentally I think was manufactured in Colombia) so it could see some more action. So far my design has held up quite nicely as it is much more slanted to help with water runoff and a bit lower to the ground. So we’ll see how well it keeps; so far the the weather has been mostly nice as it’s the dry season, but even so it spits on an almost daily basis. 

It was business as usual after that, digging, screening, counting, paperwork, lunch, more digging....the work days seem to be getting longer, which is to say that Carlos and Martha keep losing track of time at the end of the day and before you know it, it’s almost 4 and we’re still in the field.  The amount of material we’ve been finding has significantly dropped off lately, save for some larger possible tools. Some of the pits they’ve been digging around the site, though, have had dry spells and picked back up around 80-90 cm below the surface and we are currently around 65-70.

Yesterday we headed over to see the guys at Javier’s site in Santa Rosa. The drive there was really gorgeous because it was clear blue skies and we left early enough to catch a glimpse of the snow-capped mountains that are not too far off in the distance. I may have gotten one or two good pictures of them, but they will be needing some retouching I’m sure, since it was a quick, out-the-car-window shot. The site in Santa Rosa is more tropical and covered with large palms of bananas and other things. The soil is way way different from the stuff we have in La Mikela which was really nice when it came to screening, but alas, we did not find much of anything. I was working with Nicolas and Pat in a Sondeo closer to the edge of the hill where it slopes off; it was not very exciting because we had a large, disintegrating tree root that invaded the center of our pit and cattle had previously walked all through where we were making it even more difficult to keep our levels measured correctly and our walls straight (the soil would compact and compact every time you put pressure on it...) 

They have some really extraordinary views from up on that hill, though, and we took advantage of the one to the southwest for our lunch break. Unfortunately by that time the clouds had come down and covered up the snow peaks, otherwise they would be visible from that spot too. On the other side to the north, where the road is, you can see the town of Manizales up in the mountains and off in the distance. We escaped with Martha and Carlos back to Pereira before the rains came, but apparently missed out in the finding of a possible tomb/burial, which is cool but not exactly something you want to find when you don’t have the time or money to excavate it.

Back in Pereira, we decided on cooking in instead of eating out, so Jen and I walked down to La Catorce to pick up some stuff and ended up making a pretty delicious (and nutritious) meal of shrimp, broccoli, and rice with a salad to go along. I think that meal was the most green things on one plate I’ve seen since we’ve gotten here haha. They don’t seem to eat many vegetables and eat a lot, lot, lot, lot of pastries, breads, and arepas, or corn tortilla cake-like things, so it was a nice change of pace and, of course, some Club Colombia was enjoyed with it as well.

Which brings us to today!

Today was an enjoyable but not very productive day....I was just exhausted for some reason, Jen and I both. It’s weird how it catches up with you at random and unexpected times, like we didn’t do anything crazy strenuous yesterday and yet I am BEAT. Hopefully a good night’s rest is the cure and awaits me this evening, but seeing as it is Pat’s last night in town before she flies back to the states and there will most likely be rum involved, I’m not gonna bet on it. We got a fair amount done though, we are completely finished with level 9 now so we will start 10 tomorrow and see how much of that we can get through. The field was loads of fun today, though, because it was only Diego, Carmen, Lous-Marina, Jen, and I....neither Jen nor I speaking much spanish and only Carmen speaking a bit of English herself made for a very interesting, comical, and informative day haha. Carmen and I have a deal now where she will work on her English with me and I, my spanish with her. Between the two languages, with a little German, French, and Portuguese thrown in to the mix (Lingua Poliglota as Carmen referred to it), we managed to communicate quite nicely.

Carmen is so funny, she was writing the paperwork for the unit for a while so everything was dug today by ‘Jane and Kate’ haha and then she decided that her pneumonic device for remembering my name was ‘Thundercat!’ like the TV show and also because it was looking like a mad storm was coming our way this afternoon and had been thundering for about two hours before we called it a day as a result of the ominous approaching clouds. Now we have some down time for which I may have myself a siesta and then I guess it’s off to Carlos and Martha’s? For now I am trying not to itch my face off; the bugs are not bad here really (especially compared to last summer in Belize) but they still linger forever and continue to itch even after they’ve healed. So now I have a nice-sized one on my face and back, as well as two fresh guys in my legs from our work in Santa Rosa yesterday. Oh joy!