For our travel plans to work, we decided that we'd need convertible backpack/coats. They had to be waterproof (or at least water resistant). We didn't worry too much about warmth, considering that it was summer (though now I now how bitterly cold summers nights in the desert can be).

We had plans to travel from Israel to Cyprus to Turkey, continuing west by land until we reached the western coast of Europe, at which point we would part ways (he to England for school, me back to the New World).

B- left for Israel a week before me.

I didn't go to graduation or prom because they coincided with the beginning of my trip. I probably wouldn't have gone to prom anyway. I probably wouldn't have gone to my graduation anyway. I remember going to the prom 'show-off' in the parking lot of FDU in years past and standing amongst the unadorned hoard, gazing over the fence set up between us and that year's partygoers. How bizarre. I remember being told that Z- went to graduation (outside) barefoot. My good friend H- was valedictorian; well did she deserve it. I kind of wish I had been within the top one or two of my class, but alas, 5.

Do Serious Archaeologists do all the assigned reading?

I went to Israel in the summer of 2009 with the purpose of aiding my partner at the time, B-, in fulfilling his dying grandmother's last wish of publishing her late husband's poetry. This was a man who wrote multiple poems each day, every day, for years. He wrote them in a muddle of language that sashayed from English to Hebrew depending on...his mood? One presumes. He wrote them stream-of-consciousness style, in neat stanzas, as extended stories. He wrote them on sheaves and sheaves of thin paper on his typewriter, which ended up in fat folders on the shelf above the grandmother's computer. Each spine was branded with a year past in thick black.

Memories of my journey

Coursework:

Archaeology before the bible
Precolumbian histories of America
Food writing
Languages of the Americas

In Archaeology before the bible (from now on ABB) Prof. B- went through slides of sites in the levant (Israel and Jordan, for the most part) that could have been from my own camera. He flipped through places I had forgotten with names that used to come as quickly as my few words of Hebrew but that are now buried deeper than I had realized, if not gone from me entirely. For the next few months, absent as I'll be from any archaeological fieldwork, instead of taking a moment each day to record the doings of serious archaeologists, I'm going to take a moment to record memories of my travels in the levant. This may not be of any interest to anyone else; I'm using this blog now as a journal of sorts for myself. I want to set aside some of my memories of Israel, whether they be main events or just the way unripe carob beans taste from the tree. All are, in their own way, precious to me.