Mosiac Scrubbing

Hello! Today was a much more laid-back day at the worksite today. All day Nancy, Kat, and I worked on the mosiac floor in the center of the church. Because no work had yet been done on the floor, our first task was to clean it. Because over 1500 years of dirt was on this floor, we had to use scalples and dentist tools (like the ones your dentist cleans plaque off with!) to scrape the dirt off of each of these 1x1cm tile, one by one. Needless to say, it was tedious work, although it had to be done!

One exciting discovery that I found was a few crosses in the mosiac! When I started working this morning all of the tiles looked gray, but once I started scraping, I found that they were white, black, pink, yellow, and even some blue! It was kind of tough for me to sit there and scrape tiles all day, espeically since the scraping sounded like nails being run down a chalkboard, and I like the "heavy" work of moving dirt better, but this work today has yeilded good results and will allow us to see a more complete view of the church because the designs and pictures on the mosiacs are so important.

(the picture on the right is me right after I took all of the notes while the pottery expert was here; can you tell my hand is sore from writing so furiously?! hahaha)

In other news... I went swimming in the Sea of Galillee today after lunch. I also ate a delicious orange today. Yum! We often have peaches (although they are more firm and less juicy than peaches you find in the USA), cantelope, and watermellon during our meals, but at the store we bought some oranges and apples, so when I get one of those, it is a treat!

Well, that is about all... today at 5:30 we will clean pottery, eat dinner at 6:30, and have a church service at 7:30. Before then I will be analyzing the pottery that we found on Thursday! (Those are the only pottery sherds that I have yet to analyze, besides the ones we found today and the ones we will find for the rest of the week!) Anyway, have a good day and I will update you more tomorrow!

(the picture on the left is one of the beautiful sunsets here over the Sea of Galille!)
...peace...

(the picture on the left is a few of the bags of pottery that I analyzed and bagged; the picture on the right is me during one of the many times I analyzed pottery.)