Last week already?

At the conclusion of week three, we said goodbye to 3 members of our team: Mike, Linda, and Rachel. The team feels much smaller now. Well, of course it does; we are now 21 percent smaller! My own departure feels like it is rapidly approaching. I leave the Kibbutz to go to the airport at 5:00 (I think) Friday morning. Basically, I now have 4 days left, and all 4 are busy workdays. After that it's over, except for a lot of flying! It's funny to imagine that Friday morning I'll be driving across Israel to the airport, and I'll be back home in Minnesota in time for dinner! Ok, maybe a late dinner. My guess is I'll get home about 10:00 at night. For those who don't know, Israel is 8 hours off of Minnesota (Central) time. Flying home will extend my day Friday by 8 hours!

Who knows what will happen at the dig during this last week. I have shifted to a different square. With B4 officially done, Mark K. and I have moved to square E2, which is in the back of the church. My new "team" is Mark, Arny, and I. Now normally an atrium would be found in this area of the church, but our church is so strange that we don't know what we will find. Right now we are removing a "floating wall", that is, a wall built on dirt, not on a foundation. Perhaps being able to see the flooring underneath this wall and dirt will help us learn something about the structure of this oddball of a Byzantine church. That's the plan anyway.

Meanwhile, the team in square B0 is almost done exavating one of the small rooms in the row of rooms north of the church santuary. They have found some nice Mosaic floor already, which raises a good question: why was this small, difficult to access room decorated with Mosaic flooring, and what purpose did the room serve? Perhaps the answer to that question will come into light over the next few days.

The remainder of the team is now working on preserving the Mosaic floor sections in the sanctuary that are still intact. It appears very tedious. The little 1 cm by 1 cm tiles all have to be scraped with an exacto knife and cleaned and blown off and whatever else they do. At least they have had the excitement of discovering something significant: several cross patterns in the Mosaic.

Also of interest at the dig site as of late are Dr. Schuler's cistern explorations. He climbed down to explore the cistern in D0 a couple days ago. Eventually he brought Andrea down with him to measure and draw the shape of the inside of the cistern. He also let any of us who so desired go down into the cistern for a quick look around. Obviously I took a turn in the cistern, and I'm glad I did. Later, Andrea and I looked at her drawings, did some math, and estimated the volume of the cistern. My calculations came out to about 16 cubic meters. Of course, that is a rough, rough estimate.

Today, Dr. Schuler descended into the E4 cistern, which is by far the largest of them all. The ladder couldn't even reach the floor, so he had to jump off, I guess, to reach the floor, and he had to a special climbing rope system just to get back onto the ladder! I think the depth of this cistern is 5 to 6 meters, compared to about 3 meters for all the others. Tomorrow I will no doubt be calculating the approximate volume of this massive cistern.

Random fact at the dig: Our group has developed an addiction to chocolate spread at breakfast. I'm proud to say that every day I make myself a chocolate sandwich! Don't worry, we still eat plenty of eggs, fruit, and vegetables too!

Random running update: yesterday (Saturday) I ran about 13.3 miles in the evening (just farther than a half marathon). I ran south on the highway to the junction near the southern tip of the lake. It feels very good to get that one under my belt. Also, as of my run today, I have logged in 50 miles this week! I'm going to miss all my new running routes that I've made over the last month. Being able to run here has been great! This week I'm taking Monday and Friday off, which means I only have 3 runs in Israel left. It's funny, there's not really anything about this trip that I can complain about! It has been the opportunity of a lifetime (thank you especially to Mom, Dad, and Dr. Schuler for making it possible), and I will try to savor these last few days as best I can.