How to Become an Intolerant, Racist Asshole in One Easy Step

Step One: Work in Qatar.


I would make a joke about how tired my arms were after flying in from Doha, but I wouldn't be joking.  It took almost three days after I landed in Denmark to stop feeling like I had just spent 48 hours on spin cycle.

I was due to fly out in the wee hours of the 20th, and the 19th was one of those days that will go down in infamy as "If It Can Go Horribly Wrong, It Will and the Timing Will Be Impeccable."

First, the internet went on holiday, which is why the resulting events of the day took 3 times as long.

We discovered late late late on the 18th/in the wee hours of the morning of the 19th that people needing to leave Qatar needed an exit visa.  This can only be gotten via the Qatar Moron Authority's man-who-deals-with-visas-but-apparently-has-never-seen-one-before-in-his-life-which-is-why-we'd-all-been-issued-the-wrong-freaking-visas-even-though-he-was-in-charge-of-getting-us-visas-LAST-YEAR-so-how-could-it-be-a-completely-foreign-concept-to-him who ended up being on vacation IN SUDAN.  Since it was a holiday in Qatar, just trying to figure out WHO needs to get us exit-visas, WHAT do we need to get an exit-visa, WHERE is the man who will get us exit-visas, and WHEN IS HE GETTING BACK took ALL DAY.  Remember, myself and two others were getting on a plane at 2:55 AM, aka less than 24 hours from when all this was happening, so we were justifiably apprehensive.  The poor guy who was supposed to be on a flight on the morning of the 19th who was not allowed to leave Qatar (and thus the reason we discovered about this exit visa thing) was LIVID.  He's trying to get back to the UK for Christmas and as the airports were shutting one by one he was sitting in a hotel waiting to get his exit visa watching his chances of getting home vanish before his eyes.

We drove to Doha at 6 PM with the idea that maybe we might be able at some point to leave the country.  We were then in a car accident, because what is better than having to deal with one bureaucratic nightmare than TWO!  The Nissan Exterra was undamaged (well, we did get hit by a Ford Escort, which I know from experience are horrible little cars), we were only bumped, but we had to go to the police station and stand around for a while, during which the Qatari tried to blame us for being in the way when he crossed 3 lanes of traffic to exit the round about.  Yes, you horrible fat man, so sorry for being in your way, I am SO AWARE my position in the pecking order is below you and that it is my job to improve your country without disturbing you in any way, especially by getting in your way when you drive your little crap car like it's the freaking Indy 500!  My job was to look pregnant and American (HA HA! You need us to buy your gas and protect you from Iran, you fool, so don't piss off the hormonal chick in the maternity gear), which must have worked because we were let go without incident.  We all wished we could go and get rip-roaring drunk at that point, but we couldn't.  I was ready to get a pet pig, name it Mohammed, dress it in a burka and parade it through Doha before ritually sacrificing it to the God of Abraham, bathing in it's blood and having me a bacon sandwich.  Hormones, remember?

So we went to the souk to eat Indian food.  Just as our food came (at 10 PM because of the accident palaver), we got the call to go to the Qatar Moron Authority main building (newly finished, which means 50% of the building is non-functional, including some of the ladies' loos) because the vacationing visa man had come back to Qatar and was going to go into the office and get us exit visas.  I have never eaten Indian so fast in my life.  I had the worst acid reflux for hours afterwards.  Pregnancy, Indian, and speed eating do not mix (you can have two of the three, but not all three).  Eventually we made it to the airport in time with exit visas in hand.  Because Al (the poor Brit) had to reschedule his flight, he still had several hours to wait while we got through with no problems.  (He did make it back to England and had a lovely Christmas with family and friends.)

By the time the Danish Boy picked me up in the rental car, I'd been awake for 38 hours (I'd even worked a full day that day, moving finds crates and objects around the compound and had gotten no afternoon nap).  I'd gotten some cat naps in on the flights, but I also needed to keep getting up to pee, keep the circulation in my legs going, eat, drink water, stretch, get off my bum so that I don't get hemorrhoids again (too much information? sorry), etc.

The DB took me back to his brother's Copenhagen apartment to sleep while he ran around delivering Christmas presents.  I slept 8 hours, was woken for dinner, slept another 8 hours, was awoken to run out and buy a new old Volvo (more on that in a second).  I then drove the new old Volvo in the snowy and icy conditions back to Ærø where I pretty much collapsed and slept another 8 hours, according to the DB I didn't move once I laid down.  He even managed to vacuum and I didn't so much as budge.  I remember none of this, being asleep at the time.

I got up on the 22nd and began to run around like a loon - I bought the DB's Christmas present, food (seriously, the man had eaten us out of everything in the house - but then again, he had been busy WREAKING THE CAR - see below), and made it to a midwife appointment before everyone (BIL and GF, SIL, MIL and MIL's dog) arrived for Christmas.

MEANWHILE IN DENMARK

Before I left Qatar, I got a call from the DB that began with "I'm fine.  I'm not at all hurt.  And I'm really sorry."  He was driving back from an interview on Thursday, the 16th, when he lost control of the Volvo in the slush and ice and spun into a clump of trees.  The Volvo did exactly what it was supposed to do and which is why we will never buy anything but Volvos ever again and he walked away without scratches or even bruises.  Even the trees were fine.  But the car was a total loss.  It could have been fixed, but it would have cost far more than it was worth and almost as much as the cost of a newer Volvo station wagon in better condition.  We know because we just bought one.  The DB also pointed out that our old Volvo was due for a major re-haul this spring, which also would have cost more than the car (we were really not looking forward to that bill), so in the end the accident may have saved us some money.  I don't particularly care - I'm just so thankful that the Volvo did what it was supposed to do and saved the father of my unborn child from harm.  That's why we bough a Volvo (although HE insists it is the for the huge powerful engine), it's impeccable safety record.  I would have been heartbroken to have to sell it for scrap just because we couldn't afford to overhaul the engine or something, but to have it go out in a blaze of glory and validate it's very purpose of being was a death anyone would be proud of.

So we drove out from Copenhagen yesterday to a farm where a mechanic who's got a degenerative bone disease was selling his Volvo (he couldn't get in or out of the car comfortably any more, but had kept his Volvo in pretty good condition for a 15 year old car).  It's back to stick-shift, I'm afraid, but it's nice to know that we have a newer Volvo to protect us as we drive around Denmark.

It was very useful, for example, when I braved the Blizzard on the 23rd to pick up our free-range duck from the butchers.  But that's a Christmas story for another post...

And all that was heard was the whine of the mosquitos

So you are possibly wondering what happened to me.  No posts, no comments on your blog posts, heck, I'm not even showing up on your stats, obviously I've decided you are all horrible people and I'm never speaking to you again.

Kidding!

I have the world's most terrible internet connection.  It's rarely strong enough to check email and when it is, all eight people living in my house jump onto the shared network to try to Skype home.

As you can imagine, it slows the connection down considerably.

[Insert pity-fiddle here]

Today most of them ran off to the big city and I stayed here because I'm a fat pregnant lady who can't bear to be parted from the refrigerator and it's goodies for longer than 1/2 hour.  And look at this - INTERNET!!

I've got 10 more days in the land of camels and sand before returning to Planet Iceball, at which point I'll have internet on demand.  I'm afraid this trip hasn't resulted in oodles of pictures.  I haven't gone anywhere, so it's pretty much the house I'm staying in, which is a cement box with holes for mosquitos and cats to enter at will.  Not photogenic.  My work has mostly been the rebagging and retagging of numerous finds objects and cataloguing the odd find that makes it's way to my desk.  I have filled my bedroom with boxes of finds, so at least I feel like I'm on an excavation.  Otherwise it feels like I'm working in some sweatshop stuffing cards into dime bags along with little treats for rich spoiled men and women to gloat over in the comfort of their air conditioned offices.  Oh, wait, that *is* what I'm doing.... drat.

I'm spending a lot more of this trip with my feet up - those swollen ankles finally arrived and I'm doing my best to keep them in line.  This involves lying on the bed with my legs elevated, eating tubs of ice cream and watching Battlestar Galactica.  (Don't tell me how it ends - I've never seen it before!!)  When I get back home I'm going to have to organize some way of getting a sofa into the dining room so that I can keep an eye on the fire and keep my feet up at the same time.  I'll then switch to copious amounts of hot chocolate.  But I don't think the rocking chair is going to cut it any more.

So ladies and gentlemen, if you have a blog that I normally read, I haven't cut you out of my life - I just haven't had the bandwidth.  And readers, I'll try to return you to your regularly scheduled program as soon as possible.

Hugs and kisses to you all!

And suddenly after working only a week, we got a week's vacation

Uh, Eid Mubarak folks!

It's a holiday in Islam where you eat a lot of stuff.  I think there's some religious reason behind it and I would TOTALLY wiki the crap out of it for you and maybe even give you a link, but the Archaeospawn is stretching in a weird way and at any moment I may leap from my bed into the bathroom to either pee, pass gas, or possibly have a nice sit on the toilet for no good reason whatsoever.  Or I may get half way there and decide I need juice.  Since I'm an adult, I can drink juice when I want juice.

It's nice being a grown up sometimes.

I mean, the upside to being an adult is that you get to do what you want most of the time, the downside is that sometimes you can actually do all the things that might possibly jump into your head to do and the only drawback is that you don't have enough hours in the day and some of the things you want to do are stupid, like peeing, and no one is proud of you any more for peeing in the toilet and not all over yourself, but then at the end of the day when people are like "what did you do today" and I say "I watched a couple of episodes of Supernatural, I made French Toast for something like 8 people (maybe more, they just kept coming and I was enjoying myself), I tried to catch up on the internets, but then I got bored, I peed a lot, I had some awesome gas, I poked the baby because THE BABY STARTED IT Y'ALL, and generally lolled about the house" and then people are all "dude that sounds so dull" and I'm all "It rocked!  I did what I wanted to do!" and people are like "you wanted the awesome gas?" and I'm all "fo' shizzle" because it takes about 5 years for Denmark to get American pop culture references and I was never quick on the uptake.

But like I was saying, we only just started working and then Eid happened.  And while last year we got treated to three days of gluttony and sloth, this year we got jack because we live in run-down cinder block houses that are apparently a step up from living in tents and so we don't deserve three days in a 5 star resort spa.  I'd love to be back in a tent.  I mean, I like only having to walk 10 steps to go to the toilet and I don't have any tourists oggling me or wandering into my tent, but it is really hot inside a cinder block house that absorbs the sun like a brick oven and what with the walls around the house we don't exactly get a cross breeze.  I was originally supposed to be sharing a flat with a couple and their small daughter (age 3 or maybe 5 - who can tell, really, she's small and doesn't ever stop talking, not that I can understand her accent - where have her consonants gone to? she asked me "ca' oi 'ach a dee-eee-dee on 'or co'u'er?" and I was all "whut?" but at least I get her when she says "oor iz moi mum'ee?"- but no one gets my joke when I say "are you my mummy?" because we don't have serious Dr. Who fans this year - and I've suddenly had to child-proof my office which I wasn't planning on doing for a few years yet, but I may end up duct-taping her to the wall if she tries to help me work on my Mac again).  The flat had high-speed internet and air conditioning and a separate bathroom all for me.  So of course I begged to be moved to the cinder block palaces, with no AC, volunteered my computer to be the internet router, and said I would totally share space with anyone and everyone but please let me be in the house with my office space and near to all the folks from last year who are the main reason I wanted to come back here again and please don't make me commute, even a little bit.  I got my way.  Eight people and one toilet is not that bad, really.  And I still got my own room, strangely enough.

Anyway, so suddenly I have this week of vacation because Eid falls in the middle of the week and it's a three day holiday and the workmen realized that if they took Thursday off they'd have a whole week to go home and visit their families (and by "home" I do mean Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, etc.) and had we all known this in advance, it's possible we could have gone home ourselves, or more likely, organized a mass trip to Oman or Dubai or Bahrain, since we don't get paid until the end of the month and can't really afford to fly all the way home.  I could have gone to Cairo or Damascus!  But instead I'm going to lounge around in my own sweat here.  I am not exposing the unsuspecting expat community to my huge belly at the swimming pool (I don't care what anyone says, I'm totally grossed out by pregnant bellies and so I'm not going to show off to my veiny, hairy belly) and I can't really enjoy the expat bars, so there's not much point in me paying money to go stay in a hotel in Doha.

But honestly, lying here in my sweat?  AWESOME!  I love it.  Baby loves it.  We are enjoying not having numb bits or getting teary at the prospect of getting naked (I don't know if the spawn cries, but I'm sure spawn prefers Mommy *not* to be miserable).  And if I'm awake in the middle of the night because Someone thinks midnight somersaults are The Win, I'm not trying to stuff my sausage legs into sweats and wool socks and piling on extra wool sweaters so I can huddle downstairs in a blanket, I'm turning on the lights and sprawling half nude on the bed and reading random books.  And poking baby.  Fair's fair.  If it's exceptionally hot, I take myself out to the porch and lounge out there.  So far being hot and pregnant is winning hands down over being cold and pregnant.

So you've all gathered then that the baby is moving?  I mean, it MOVES.  I went from going "is that it?" to "sweet Jesus, I'm trying to sleep here" in less than a week.  And I can see baby moving under my skin.  In a word: creepy.  I swear to god on a stack of latinate bibles that I'm not having twins.  But I may be having a gymnast or a marathon runner (Daddy is SO proud of his little powerhouse).  It's not really interfering with work, although sometimes mid-sentence I make a random weird face because THERE'S SOMETHING IN MY BELLY (read that as Shatner's infamous line "there's something on the wing" and you'll enjoy the moment that much more).

Now I've got to toddle off and find me some more food.  We've run out of gas (damn it, why do we have the funky contraption that means we need a special gas canister instead of what everyone else is using?) and so I've been taking ingredients 'round to the other houses looking for a place to cook.  It's a good way for others to get fed, too, if I make more than I can eat, which is not really all that often, because sometimes I can really put the food away.

On the road again...

So in a week I'll be winging my way through the air back to the Q-Zone.  That would be Qatar, for all of you who don't live in my brain and know all the shortcuts.  I've managed to convince the dig director that I can work for seven weeks (I tried to convince him that I could work for longer but he seems to be very leery of the idea) and finally it looks like I'm just about on my way!

I lack dig maternity wear.  I lack maternity wear that is appropriate for warm weather.  I lack maternity wear that is light enough to be worn in warm weather, covers enough to be decent by Qatari standards, and is sturdy enough to handle finds processing which usually involves rusty nails, broken pottery, and a lot of dirt and crumbling plaster.

My camera is dead and so's the iPod.

I'm 4 and a half months pregnant, I can only touch my toes because I'm very bendy in certain spots.  For example, that ability of mine to put my feet behind my head?  It's because of talent like that that I can still clip my toenails.  But I see the day in the not to distant future when I'm going to need help tying my shoes.  Or I'll just switch to flip flops because I'll be living in the desert.

It's going to be AWESOME!!

There are those who wonder why on earth a pregnant woman would go off a do such a thing?  I mean, shouldn't I be home taking care of myself?  Shouldn't I be there to share with my husband the joys of every painful bowel movement and exciting gas bubble?  I mean, it's not like I'm just working a 9-5 in an office - I don't get to go home to my husband at the end of the day.

For those who wonder, yes, my husband will miss me, but he would much rather that I go and do what I love to do than sit around not doing it.  He knew what he got into when he took up with an archaeologist.  He also knows that my last husband disapproved of me going off to digs without him and I left him and moved to another continent AND I'M NOT ABOVE DOING IT AGAIN.

Still a bit confused?  Okay, although I know it is in no way similar, it might help to think about archaeology as kinda like the military.  We aren't shot at (usually, but I've friends who excavate in Iraq and parts of Central America are really hairy), we aren't defending the innocent or freedom or democracy or our homeland, we don't risk death every day, and we are certainly not heroes.  But we do often work far from home for extended periods of time and form strong team bonds that are really hard to explain to the layman.  We also see our job as something more like a calling or vocation.  You don't just do it from 9-5.   You may only dig from 9-5 (or from 7-3), but you do paperwork for several hours and talk about what you did and plan for the next day right until you go to bed.  "Bed" often happens to be on location.  Yeah, of course we sit back and relax.  But give us the opportunity and we'll often volunteer to work longer, harder, and on our days off.  We're sick, we know.

So even though I'm pregnant, *not* going would be very upsetting.  I'm rather frustrated that I have to leave after only 7 weeks.  My team will still be in the field!!!  These are not my co-workers I'm talking about, these are my comrades.  Go ask someone in the military about their unit.  I can't say archaeologists share the same strong bond, but it's sort of similar.

Alas, I'm sort of on track to give birth before they're out of the field... bad timing on my part.

Strangely, if I was in the military, I'd have a better chance at continuing my career even with maternity leave.  Archaeology is really backwards in some ways.  No one really wants to hire a pregnant woman, even for a short duration.  Most archaeology jobs are currently short contract anyway, so there is no maternity leave.  Get knocked up, get knocked out.  And once you've given birth, there is a great amount of pressure to stay out of the field.  I know only a very few female archaeologists who have had a child and then returned to fieldwork.  They are far outnumbered by the women who "retired" to have families.    Some female archaeologists have pointed out that they felt they had no choice but to give up the idea of having a family in order to have a career.  I do expect to face a problem getting back to work.  Women without children and, obviously, men will be chosen over me because there is less risk of them getting homesick or having to fly home for a family emergency (at least in the eyes of the director).  But I'll persevere.

In the meantime, I'm going to waddle around the camp, eat enormous amounts of curry (there's a local Indian restaurant for the men who work the fishing trade and it's FANTASTIC), and continue to scare the living daylights out of any tourist (native or foreign) that sticks their head into my tent.

Holy Easter Eggs, Batman, it’s April!!

How did that happen?  Anyone?  Hello?  Anyone still reading?

Boy does the time fly.  The last four weeks of the dig were completely and utterly mad.  The end of a season is always mad; on a four-week project the last week is non-stop mayhem, on a five-month project… well, let’s just say it was a blessing that we learned to brew our own refreshment.  That and the generosity of ex-pats.  Bless those ex-pats!  Gin is a wonderful thing, don't you agree?

At the end of the project I’d catalogued 802 objects.  There are still more stones to catalogue.  But I’m not really enthusiastic about possible hammer-stones.  I mean, it's a rock.  Maybe someone used it to hit something once or twice, but does that mean it's a cultural implement worthy of my time?  Or architectural fragments.  At what point, exactly, do you stop cataloguing architectural fragments?  Do you only catalogue the really pretty pieces?  What about the pieces that aren’t pretty but are interesting because they show construction methods? What about the random crap that comes up that I’m supposed to store but would rather accidently drop down the loo?  (This is the vast majority of plaster artifacts that come out of the field.  I look down at them and think, why, god, did you give me this chunk of plaster doorframe?  We know they had doors.)

Apart from cataloguing, there was also the matter of storage.  Over 300 crates were packed.  Each crate needed a tag and a list had to be made that indicated what was in each crate so that we knew a) what we had and b) where it was.  MSExcel and anal-retentiveness are our friends.  Once packed we then had to move all of these crates.  Half went to the fort and half went to our house in town.  Using our hired workmen, we moved everything in two days. While the goddesses of registration were doing this (that would be me and Miss H) everything else, including my office, was packed up and put away for next year.  I can tell you where the ceramics from locus 1215 are, but not where you can find a ball-point pen.

The last day we were in camp, we got up at 6 am and were out of the tents by 7 am.  This is vital, because the tents started to come down at 7:30 and if you weren’t out with your stuff, you were likely to be surprised when the whole thing came crashing down like an unwieldy umbrella.  By breakfast at 10 am, the entire camp was dismantled and packed up.  We left camp at 2 pm for Doha.

I don’t think I’ve ever been part of such a smooth breakdown and pack up of a site - ever.  Especially considering how much stuff had to be moved and cleaned and boxed and moved and packed and moved.  I think it really shows what a great group of people I spent five months of my life with - no one had to ask for help, people did what needed to be done and then asked if they could help someone else.  It was smooth and easy and really stress-free.  How stress-free?  So stress-free that I finished typing up the last of the lists, walked out of the office and discovered that all I needed to do was get my bags and get in a vehicle.  There was this amazing double-take - "wait, what, we're done??" followed by "yeah, okay, I'll get in the car, no complaints, I'm ready."

I still can’t believe it’s over.  Where did five months go? 

I also can’t believe I’m not going to get up in the morning and hear AW and TR in the kitchen, meet KC in the bathroom and trip over the doorframe going into my office.  I don’t have to shake my shoes out before putting them on… in fact I don’t have to put on my shoes to go get coffee anymore!  I certainly do not miss the public toilets, but I sure do miss the people.  Thankfully, they don’t live too far away.  (Odd, isn’t it, England now qualifies as “not that far away”?) Many of them are even trying to get jobs or into university here in Denmark, which would be Very Convenient as far as I am concerned.

But after five months of seeing the same people day after day?  All day.  Well into the night, every night, in fact.  To suddenly not have these people in your life, right at your fingertips, is very jarring.  Especially since I really really like them.  

A moment while I get all maudlin and melancholy. 

This post wraps up the general boring posts from Qatar.  There’s a few random stories to tell, but I really must post about What Happened While the Archaeogoddess Was Not in Denmark, because my husband got a job and moved us to a small island and I only just started to unpack in my new huge house when I was swept into the car and back to the big city to camp in a caravan for a week so he can finish a school project (so as of this moment I am still freaking camping!!) and then we’re flying off to Spain for a week before another week of camping back in Denmark and *then* I might be able to go back to my GORGEOUS house and finally unpack from Qatar and the move, but only if we can buy a new washing machine so that I will be able to wash my clothes properly for the first time in five months (now going on six).  But for the moment I need to see if I can post this, er, post before I run out of battery, because I’m using mobile internet in a café and there’s no damn power sockets.  WTF??*

*Note: still couldn't post this in the cafe because the internet crashed and I had to go back to the caravan for power.  This is attempt to post take #2.

Hugs to all and hope to post more frequently in the near future!

BY THE WAY FOR ALL THE PHOTO NUTS OUT THERE... THERE ARE PHOTOS (not mine, but taken by a lovely woman who will let me post some of them) AND I STUPIDLY LEFT THEM ON MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WHICH I CANNOT PLUG IN WHILE I HAVE MOBILE INTERNET ON!!  I'M SORRY!!  I'll try to get you some soon.

Boredom leads to mayhem

Just over four months in, with only a few weeks to go, and we're slowly going mad.

Actually, we've probably all been mad for a long time.  I mean, we are *here* after all and we are archaeologists, which requires a good healthy dose of madness to begin with.

But let's just say we are going madder than normal.

Part of this is boredom.  There is not a lot to do 'round here that we haven't done before and that doesn't require a massive amount of effort.

So what did it lead to tonight?

Chat roulette.

There's a website for this, which I'm not going to link to, because you can google it at your own peril.  But it led to an amusing half hour.  During that time most people hit "next" on their page to get away from the waving and shouting archaeologists.  Obviously, people who are looking to chat with random strangers are not interested in meeting us.  Do we really look that crazy?  Okay, maybe the stuffed shiite hawk with the red glowing eyes that we have hooting at the screen is a little odd, but come on, you logged onto a site that hooks you up with random strangers with web-cams... we are not the worst you could get.

We know the worst.

We did have the obligatory penis appearing at one point.  It wasn't OUR penis, thank you very much.  But it goes to show that flashers are everywhere and really like the freedom that the web can give you.  Just think, he managed to flash us in Qatar.  From wherever his mom's basement happens to be!  The power of the web, man.

Then a group of us drove madly to the beach to splash in the water after one of our number called to say that there was phosphorescence a-happening.*  This turned out to be way less spectacular than previous reports had led us to believe... but as the water warms up, we hope for a better show.  Gives us something to look forward to, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, the last few days are upon us and boredom will be punctuated with frantic bouts of intense labor.  Like crating up all of the finds.  Because we finally, after four months, have crates.  One hundred crates.  We expect to use them all in the next day or so and then we'll have to order more.  Sigh.  The other question will be "where do we then store all these crates?" To which I must reply, "I don't know" and "I'm not going to worry about that right now" and "It's not my problem" and "I don't care."  I have other problems, like database malfunctions... or more correctly, Access is being overly helpful and rounding up my data.  Fine, I can handle losing some of the box numbers and having to type that in again, but should it decide to round up the global positioning coordinates of the finds, this will be a serious problem.

But right now, it's late and the most pressing question I have at the moment is: is anyone going to eat that last piece of French toast?  Because I'm totally going to eat it, if no one speaks up.

*I can't seem to do a spell check - but Blogger does tell me if I spell something wrong, so I want you all to be amazed that I spelled phosphorescence correctly.  Eventually, that is.

I'm not dead...

But Blogger is trying to kill me.

Can't sign in 99% of the time.  Can't read the private blogs because I suddenly don't exist.  Can't leave comments because I don't exist.

What have I been up to the last month?

Changing taps on the sink (oodles more fun when you can't turn off the water running to the sink).  Chasing people out of our tents - honestly people, I FREAKING LIVE HERE AND THATS MY HOME YOU ARE INVADING!  Answering stupid questions, usually "Yes, I live here" and "No, you cannot look into my tent," but the best was the one our computer guy had to answer "Is this the way to Saudi Arabia?"  Um, we're on the north coast of a peninsula.  You have to drive hours in the wrong direction to end up out here.  You have to be unable to read a map SO BADLY that you fail to notice that the signs for the towns you are passing are putting you farther and farther away from where you want to be.  You have to be so stupid that you can't remember the simple fact that the sun ALWAYS rises in the east and sets in the west and therefore north is this way and south is that way and when on a peninsula that rises NORTH out of Saudi Arabia, one must therefore drive SOUTH to reach it.

We've also had the Tour of Qatar bicycle thingy come through.  The women's run started from our car park and the next week we stood on the side of the road to cheer the men as they raced by.  Then we almost got ran over by a truck because he took BOTH HANDS OFF THE WHEEL TO WAVE AT US WHILE GOING AROUND THE BEND.

We've had the boy scouts of the middle east camped in our backyard.

We've continued Adventures in Cooking Over a Campfire.  This weekend we'll be trying to roast a goat.

We've had porto-potties show up, finally.  But they empty out of a pipe shoved under the toilet (and held up to the hole by a rock, no less) just a few feet away from the porto-potty so we've kept the locks on the doors, because yes, the tourists did try to use them when they first arrived, despite the fact that they didn't have the holes for the toilets cut in the floor yet.

We've had something die in the ceiling of the office.  It's raining maggots.  No, really, I mean it.  Maggots were dropping on my desk from above.  Thank god I'm on vacation!

Which brings me to my big announcement of the month - my husband is arriving in... 6 hours!!  I'm taking a couple of days off to enjoy his visit.  He's like, so you'll show me the country, and I'm like, how about the inside of a hotel room, because, let's face it, four months is a really long time.  But we'll have plenty of time to see the country.  It really won't take that long.  This country isn't very large and there isn't much in it.  You realize this when you become The Tourist Attraction of the year.  If my tent is the coolest stuff you've seen in a while and you take a picture of yourself standing outside of it because it is just that darn exciting ("oh look, honey, TENTS!")?  Then, damn, this place is dull.

The Archaeogoddess takes no prisoners...

Oops, that's a typo... should read "the Archaeogoddess takes no pictures"!

This is a photo free blog until the end of March.

Why?

Because I am finally having a day off and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend it editing, resizing, and uploading images.  Add to that the time I put into making sure that any image I want to post is not going to upset the museums authority, various persons that appear in photos, or infringe on copyrights.  All in all, it is a VERY LONG TIME INDEED.

I'm only getting a chance to post this now because I'm in a hotel with sturdy internet.  Camp is not the place to try to post.  That last post took forever to load and if I hadn't typed it up first and then cut and pasted into Blogger, I would have lost it for sure.  Our internet connection does like to come and go like camels in the fog.  One minute it's free sailing and I'm reading an email, the next I've got my email server telling me that no, really, I can't see the next email as the connection is lost, please try again later.

So, instead of finding myself cringing whenever I go to read the comments and then neglecting to post things because "oh I don't have any pictures to post, my readers are going to be so mad at me"- I'm going to try to write more and not worry about photos.  At the end of the season, when I am back at home with FAST and RELIABLE internet, I will try to post photos.  Maybe I'll do a flickr page or something and link that in.  But for now I'm not going to stress about it.

So don't comment about it anymore or I'm going to send you an angry email and stop posting all together.

This week was a trying week.  We lost power in the bathroom which means no hot water, no washing machine and no lights to pee by.  If we are lucky we might get an electrician out some time this week.  The kitchen septic tank is full and overflowing and we've been told that we don't need to have it emptied, we should just dig a ditch through the middle of the camp out into the desert where it can drain.  We are also having a cash flow problem where we need to have more cash than the accounting office can keep up with.

Vacation time, once seeming so full of potential, is now proving to be more difficulty than it's worth.  Anyone going to the UK comes back with a cold that they then pass around camp.  Thanks guys, thanks a lot.  Meanwhile, three people in our group want to go to India... they've spent the last two weeks playing a run around game with the Indian Embassy.  Now they need an official letter saying that they will not be doing research while they are there for 5 days.  Eh???

Is it something about this place that means that nothing can actually ever happen or get done?  We haven't been able to even enjoy a day off at the camp because we keep getting overrun by tourists and so lounging around is right out.

This weekend our field director enforced a two day weekend.  He cancelled our workmen and told us to go away.  Myself and my co-registrar and another archaeologist (all of us are in the same tent) booked ourselves into the Ritz.  It was fabulous.  Being away from camp means no one can ask us about stuff or when we'll be done with the internet so they can have a go and you can have food not covered in flies and take long hot showers and wear tank-tops and skirts and not be stared at by passers-by.  Someone else can spend today throwing tourists out of our camp.  We have been the watch-dogs for long enough!

Thankfully, everyone is back from vacation and new people arrived so the camp is buzzing with activity again.  For a while it was just a few of us and then we couldn't go away because it needed to be defended.  Talk about cabin fever!  All day, every day, in the same 40 meter by 40 meter compound.  Stared at by visitors (who drive by slowly with the windows down and STARE at us).  Showering in the public toilet....

The three of us think we should Ritz it EVERY WEEKEND.  It's not like we really have the time to take all that vacation we've built up by working six day weeks.  But if one morning a week we could get out of bed and not shake out our shoes for small crawlies, we'd be happier people all around.

And if it means I can finally start writing emails to all the people who have emailed me, I know I'd stop feeling guilty every time I looked at a computer (I look at a computer all day... imagine the ulcer I must have)!

If it weren't for the fantastic weather we are having (did I mention the tank tops and skirts?) and the fact that I really like all the people I work with quite a lot (I'm going to adopt our computer specialist and I think the illustrator and I were separated at birth) I'd be completely miserable here.    If you've got to be stuck in an insane country, tilting windmills, make sure you can do it in light cotton clothing surrounded by good people.

My tour of Qatar hotels continues.

The Ramada wins top marks due to it's internet connection.  Very fast and reliable.  I can finally post some pictures.

Here are some camels.  We see a lot of camels wandering around.  You can also see the mobile phone tower - the generator for this runs constantly.

However, without it, we'd have no cell phones.

But the constant humming may drive us insane.

Is connectivity all that important? Really?

This is my tent.  Well, the left hand third is mine.  I enter through the left-most door.

See how the upper edge of this photo is purple?  My camera is dying.  It just keeps getting worse and worse and now most of my photos are just purple blurs.

This is the inside of my tent.  (Actually, the layout has changed since I developed a leak in the corner right above the pillow.  But now my camera is refusing to talk to me.)

It *IS* usually cleaner, but I was packing for the Eid trip when I remembered I needed to take photos.  That's my clothing on the bed.  It then took me how many weeks to figure out how to shrink my photos down to the size where they might be able to be posted on-line?  Hush, I don't want to talk about it.

Our toilet block.  We share it with all the visitors to the fort.

What fort? you ask.

This is the fort - if you haven't seen it yet.

It looks all big and impressive, but that canon sitting out in front is a regular sized canon sitting right in front of it.  The door is rather small, most tourists duck when they go through it.  It is NOT a big fort.



WARNING: POSSIBLY DISTASTEFUL PHOTO AHEAD
The inside of that toilet block pictured above.  You put your used toilet paper in the trash can.  Not down the toilet.  This is the old toilet - there was no u-bend so the water would rush back into the pipes after we flushed and the smell was profound.  We now have a new toilet.  Which looks exactly the same.  But doesn't smell!  Yay!  You can't see in this photo, but there is a pipe sticking out of the wall that is our shower.  Yes, we shower in the loo.

You have no idea how nice it is to have the toilet fixed so it doesn't smell.








Then we go and stay somewhere like the Sharq....

The bedroom and the bathtub in the bathroom were very nice.








But I'm typing this up from the best internet connection I've had so far - in the Ramada Hotel.  The Ramada also has the REAL swim up bar (which my roommate and I discovered almost immediately after jumping into the water an hour after we arrived).  And although the rooms are rather 80's styled, we've decided this is the best hotel we've stayed in.  The water in the pool is 31 C/ 87 F!  Of course, it's only 24 C/ 75 F outside, so you really do need the heated water...





My 80's room.






So we spent Christmas lounging by the pool, drinking beer and opening presents.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a late check out so that I can get a few more hours in by the pool...

"Qatar is a country of extremes..."

said one of the archaeologists here.  And boy was she spot on.

For Eid we were given two nights in a very swanky resort.  Very swanky.  My roommate, the girl who intoned the quote above in reverent tones as we pondered our existence on the balcony, was later rather ill from overeating lobster for lunch.  This after we'd stuffed ourselves on fois gras (spelling anyone?) the lunch before.  We seriously over ate.  And did not drink a single drop of alcohol, even though there was a happy hour every night.  Too busy trying to digest while lying on feather beds trying to gear up to take ANOTHER BATH.

I managed to bathe three times in one day, one of those I did in milk and honey.  In the biggest bath tub EVER!  I was able to float on my back in it.  FLOAT.  On my BACK.  In MILK and HONEY and BUBBLES and ROSE PETALS.

It's a lot easier to float, by the way, if you've eaten ridiculous amounts of fattening goose liver.

The week after this luxurious weekend found us frantically digging a trench in the pouring rain trying to divert water from the parking lot, which was channelling directly into the tents, back out into the desert.  We were wet for days.  I had a leak in the corner of my tent and had to rearrange the room so that nothing was getting dripped on.  I've now added the extra blankets to my bed, the nights are rather cold.

This does not mean we haven't had a camel spider sighting in a while.  Oh no, one of the guys had one crawling up his leg while he was in BED.  But, as the guys in the tent point out, they've had Qataris, Japanese, scorpions and cats wander into their tent, why not camel spiders?

Fridays are great for tourists to come out and photograph themselves by our tents.  "And this is me standing by the Pakistani army tent in the desert in Qatar, because I've stupidly come to the conclusion that tents = bedouin and I'm not going to ask permission of the white people sitting over there staring at me because they are obviously only tourists too even if they come over and yell at me for going in and having a look around."

I don't know how many times I'm going to have to march up to someone and say "excuse me but this is my HOME and you can't go into it!"

I WAS going to upload some images, but the internet is too slow.  Our hotel you'll have to look up online: Sharq Hotel Doha and I'll have to find some other solution for the images I've taken of the camp.

Till then!

The romance of archaeology...

You sit around a campfire at night, every now and then checking the ground because there may be a scorpion or a camel spider.

Both have been seen and killed at our camp.

Do not give me your bleeding heart "oh but that poor creature has the right to live - you could have just moved it - it was probably more scared of you than you of it" because you don't have to get up at 2 in the morning to pee and need to keep your flashlight close at hand so that you can check the floor for poisonous things and then you get your shoes which you shake vigorously to again check for the creepy crawlies before going out with your flashlight, again watching for things that RUN at you from the dark!

It is said that the camel spider only runs at you when it feels threatened... apparently people playing poker in the courtyard is threatening.  And while not venomous, they do leave a VERY NASTY BITE, so we'll be killing them dead, thank you very much.

Quick blurb...

Sitting in the Museum Authorities, getting some Internet done.  

So I have some time to give you some more info - particularly about the finds Jennie asked about (since I did just pick up last years finds for cataloguing, this is a relevant question).

The site we're digging was abandoned within living memory.  By abandoned, I mean, most people moved away or at least out of the houses.  There are several people living in tents and campers on the beach, but they are mostly weekenders or squatters or we-don't-ask kinds of people who are not living IN the city.  Over time the city has filled with sand and wind-blown deposits, but walls remain up to a good height.  Most of the finds we've collected so far date to the 19th or early 20th century.  How long the site was settled is not known exactly and is one of the reasons we're digging.  Since it was one of the most important cities in Qatar when the economy was still based on pearls and not oil, it *should* date back quite a ways.  I put "should" in stars because, in archaeology, whenever something *should* be something, it generally isn't.  It's sort of the Murphy's Law of archaeology.  Right up there with, "if you are looking for something big and important that will take at least three days to excavate, you will only find it on the last day of excavation."  And my own personal law, "if the Archaeogoddess finds a wall in her square, it will go into the baulk (the soil left standing between two squares) and will NOT come out the other side."  I think I mentioned that law earlier this year.

Anyway, we have a curious collection of ceramics, some locally made, some imports from nearby, all pretty grungy, and then some really fantastic Chinese imported ware.

We also have a lot of boat nails because we are digging a harbor town whose economy was based on pearl diving, NOT finding boat nails would be weird.

There are a good enough number of coins and beads, and enough fish, goat, and camel bones to keep me busy.

But everything is salt encrusted and corroding.  Even the tool handles get a nice salty sheen to them.  Many of the metal finds are probably not that old, but in this environment, they don't last all that long.

So now I have lots to do, but a sever lack of storage space is going to make things rather messy about my office.  Not to mention the rust, dust, sand, and salt that already lends my office a shabby chic that you just can't buy anywhere.

Anyone know an office supply store in Doha?  One that sells cheap or used office furniture?  

*Grin*

Won't be able to sleep for all the caffeine!

So here I am again, this time writing a post in a cafe.  Too much late night coffee!  Oh the horrors of trying to sleep tonight.

Anyway, some updates:

I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered MS Access, but it is no longer mastering me!  And I have things to register, always good.  We’ve finally commenced digging - the backfill from the previous season is mostly removed and some squares have started work.  Speaking of work, the workmen arrived so things are moving along at a much faster clip. 

The wind is up.  Everything I own is covered in a light layer of very fine dust.  Not much we can do about that.  I’m more worried that the tent is going to blow down on me.  This isn’t even the worst we’ll get, either.  The sand storms that we’ll be getting in a few months are supposed to make this weather look like a light spring breeze.

We’ve also had some rain!  Not much, but just enough to send our poker game scrambling for shelter.  The rain was less wet than one night when the water was just condensing out of the air onto everything.  It was running off the roof and the sky was clear.  WEIRD!

Today we had 6 buses of visitors show up for the fort-museum we're camped next to.  The tourists (probably workers for a company, maybe an oil refinery, getting a "cultural trip") rode 1.5 hrs in a bus for a half hour stop and then 1.5 hrs "home."  Mostly they just used our bathroom.  The director sat and watched to make sure they stayed out of the ladies room.  Then they came and wandered into our housing complex.  Peering into our tents.  One of our archaeologists tried being nice and explaining what we were doing etc etc but when it kept happening I finally just told them "this is our home, please leave."  I'd be more polite and visitor friendly if they didn't just wander into the middle of our courtyard where we are sitting and walk straight up to the tent doors and look in.  HELLO!?  We're sitting right here, how about you ask us what's up or say hi or something, don't just try to go into our tents!

GAH!

Oh, and before I forget.  Replies to comments:

@ Corrine: I always end up getting up to pee in the middle of the night.  I am NOT looking forward to my first sand storm-bathroom trip.  But it is inevitable.

@ Jennie: Right now I'm cataloging iron nails.  But there will be other stuff, like beads, rings, spindle whorls, weights, and coins.  And before you ask, no, I can't take pictures.  :-(

@ Jacki: If I feel like shaving, which I might once a week until it gets too cold to wear capris (which will probably be next week), I use shaving cream and a bit of water.  I can shave with less than a cup of water.  But mostly I'm not worried about shaving.  Who am I trying to impress?  Not even my dear Dane minds if I don't shave for months at a time, so I normally don't shave in the winter anyway.

Was that Too Much Information?  Just keepin' it real folks!

Speaking of shaving, the men have discovered the local barber.  Once a week or so the guys come back with amazingly smooth faces.  Softer than my skin, for sure!

BTW, can anyone tell me WHY I need to wait 6 hours to download 700 MB of data?  Don't tell me about bandwidth, processing speed, and metasourcing (I just made that one up, but doesn't it sound clever?), it's because the internet hates me, right?  This means I might, just might, some day soon, spend the night in a hotel so that I can have LONG TERM access to internet.

YES DAVID TENNANT IS THAT IMPORTANT.

Ahem.

Also I'd like some privacy, since I'd like to skype my husband and I don't need all of Doha looking over my shoulder.  Yes, buddy, I saw you looking....

That's about all from here.  Think of me the next time you vacuum.

Hugs all!

A rare update! Don't go holding your breath for the next one...

There’s no internet at the site, so don’t give me your bellyaching!  If you are reading this I’m probably dead I’ve made it to an internet café (or a café with internet, oooh baby!) to upload this.

The things I do!

I mean, if this were the good old days, I’d have just vanished and you wouldn’t expect to see or hear from me for five months.  Instead I’m typing up a blog post and taking my computer to a football (soccer for the Americans) game so that if I pass an internet café you can all read about my life in the desert.

(Pause for lunch.)

Back again.  So I’ll start by telling you about meals.

First breakfast is between 6:30 and 7 am, before we go out to work.  I’m pretty much all about the coffee and digestives, but some do have cereal or other stuff.  Proper breakfast is at 10 am, when the restaurant in the nearby town brings by food for the ravaging hoard of archaeologists.  Lunch is at 3-3:30, depending on when the restaurant brings it by and that’s the big meal of the day.  The sun sets at 4:45, so dinner is leftovers, cereal, scrounge up something whenever you get peckish.  I suppose we should call “first breakfast” just breakfast and then the last meal is dinner, not lunch, but it just seems odd to think that you have dinner at tea time!  One of the archaeologists is very clever with building things and he made a banana-toffee pie the other night.  Oh, it was good!  Since food is coming from the restaurant, we’re eating well.  It is high in oil content, though, so we’ll be dying of clogged arteries before the end of season.

Living accommodations are… well… have you seen M*A*S*H?  Movie or tv series, doesn’t matter.   Army tents with mats, but we do have proper beds with metal frames and mattresses instead of cots.  It gets cold at night so I’m already using my blanket.  We have run electricity to the tents, so we can turn on lights and have fans or heaters when it gets really cold.  The fancy built accommodations will arrive… later.  In Qatar it seems that nothing really happens until it becomes an emergency, so I’m not holding my breath waiting for the housing to be built.  It works fine enough, I have my own room with a wardrobe for my clothes and I’ve scrounged some drift-junk for a table.

“Drift-junk” - whatever washes up on the beach.  We beach comb for furniture.  Or rather, junk that we can turn into furniture. 

The bathroom accommodations are a bit primitive to western eyes.  Have you ever seen/heard of a Turkish toilet?  It’s a porciline basin with two raised foot stands and a hole in between.  You squat.  Oh yes.  There’s a little spray hose next to it to spray yourself and the basin clean.  We do have toilet paper and if you use it, you must put it in the trash can (it has a lid) and not down the hole.  This style of toilet is considered more hygienic than western toilets, because you don’t sit down or touch anything.  It works, but does hurt the knees a bit.  My legs are either going to get very strong or I’m going to have to rig up a couple of handle bars for myself.  The shower is in the same stall.  Hot and cold water.  It runs down the toilet, giving it an extra flush, if you will.  Right now there are only four girls in the tents, so we have no problems getting our daily wash.  It might be more of an issue later when a few more come.  The toilets are public, so from time to time the local fishermen come and use them.  If only they’d look at the door where we’ve put up a picture of a woman.  But no, sometimes there are men in our bathroom.  Sigh.

It’s pretty hot during the day and fairly chilly at night.  It feels colder because of how hot it gets.  My office gets quite toasty by around 10 and by 2 it’s roasting. 

Everyone here is a proper archaeologist.  That is, they have years of field experience and many have lived in quite squalid housing arrangements on dig sites.  These are probably the most adaptable people on the planet.  And the most inventive.  Our resident building genius not only makes pie, he also built a light table - we use it for copying plans and drawings that are larger than the scanner we have in the office.

The last few days have been removing backfill.  At the end of the season the open areas were covered with a rough material called “hessian” and then sand was poured over it.  This protects the exposed layers from rain and any sand blown into the site doesn’t get mixed with the archaeology.  It’s a hard job to remove, and it would go faster if we had workmen, but since the building material used on the site is so fragile, it must be done.  I, however, am not in the field, but in the registration office.  My job is to record the finds from the field and store them.  It’s one of the better uses of my OCD-tendencies.  So while I’m waiting for the finds to roll in, I’m designing a database in MS Access.  Do I know Access?  Uh, I do now!  I’m still having some difficulties, but by tomorrow I should have a fully working database designed to fulfill everyone’s needs and organized to my specifications.  It is a lovely thing.  And another skill to add to my resume.

In our down time we play a lot of cribbage. There’s no alcohol (or porn or pigs, but really, what would I do with those?), so our cribbage games, while savage, are not “drunken savage.”  We watch movies or tv shows on our computers - soon we should get a projector and we can have movie night.  Bed time is fairly early.  Ten is fairly common, though after a hard day of labor some of the team retire earlier.  I’m still adjusting to nights in the tent town and curse my small bladder I usually have to make a midnight trek to the toilet.  Thankfully I purchased a flashlight with a magnet that sticks to my bed so at night I can check for scorpions, snakes, and large beetles before I put on my shoes and when I walk the path to the loo.  I had a rather large beetle in my flip-flop last night when I got up.  He was not that thrilled when I chucked him out of my tent door.

So that’s my life in the field.  Unless those permanent accommodations are set up, it will be my life for the next five months. 

Now you’ll have to excuse me, it’s time for my shower before the mosquitoes come out!

In the Q-Zone

Qatar is weird.

Just want to get that out there.

I'm still in the hotel, there's been a bit of madness surrounding vehicles. From what I understand we got permission to have cars but no cars were set-aside for us. So we wait for transportation. Slowly the rest of the staff are moved out to site, those of us who do mapping or survey or registration are still sitting by the pool, drinking water and wondering if our bank accounts can handle one more shopping trip to the souk. Not much has happened apart from deciding that Doha is like Las Vegas. Without the alcohol. Or volcano. Or pirate battle. Or gambling. In fact, if you took everything that makes Las Vegas 'Las Vegas,' you'd have Doha. It's hot, there are palm trees, and big flashy cars and all the buildings are lit up at night.  And as you can see from the picture, there is a pyramid.  Most people siesta during the hot, so shops are open until late at night.

I've been scribbling in my calendar a sort of short diary so that when I got around to posting (can't cut into the pool time, you know, we could be desert bound at any time!) I'd have something to write about.

Heh.

I give you: The Diary of the Archaeogoddess....

1 November: Arrived in Doha at 2:30 AM, while checking in, found out we'd be out by noon and there was a roof top pool. Went straight to pool with the other archaeologists checking in and dipped feet in water until 4 AM. Found out about 3 AM we were not leaving today. Yay!

2 November: Begin exploring Doha. City Center Mall is big. But not as big as the other mall that has a river with gondolas in it. City Center does boast an ice rink on the ground floor and a fun park on the roof. Spent the rest of the day by the pool. Several archaeologists bought snorkels and are trying them out.

3 November: Another pool day. Back to the mall. We then hit the souk (it's reconstructed, so the nicest cleanest souk EVER) and bought tickets to the England v. Brazil game on the 14th. Volunteered to go live in a tent on site instead of in a house. Still didn't get me out of the hotel.

What my hotel room looks like.  Sorta.  Without all the mess.

4 November: Got one car, so they are taking people out to the site. Sat by the pool. Hit the souk. Pondered buying a parrot. Plan on having pirate v ninja battles one night. Plot avoiding anyone with a phone so a couple of us can stay by the pool.

5 November: Wonder where we can get fireworks. Guy Fawkes day, you know. Back to the souk. Check out the Islamic Culture Center. Realize I haven't been to the Islamic Art museum. Oh, well, there's always the weekend. Complete acclimatization and get cold at night when the temperature drops below 30 C. The pool at 27 C (80 F) is just too cold to swim in. Freak out every time someone comes up to the pool. Five of us plan on jumping into the pool and holding our breath until whoever it is that has come up to tell us to pack goes away. We make it another day. At dinner we're told we'll all be leaving on Friday.

6 November: Breakfast. I'm packed and ready to go. Told, no, you aren't, you're here until probably Sunday. But they are taking two of our little hotel club. That leaves five of us. Five lonely souls in this massive hotel. And I'm going to have to unpack again. Drat. At this rate we'll be in the hotel until the football match! And we're all going to get fat from the buffet meals. Three a day. They'll need a forklift to get us out. I finally agree to housekeeping. I need to have my instant coffee restocked.

So that's it. That's what I've been doing. Alternating between getting antsy to get out there and desperate to stay. Boredom is slowly setting in and so is poverty, but being well fed and clean for so long, as well as sleeping in a massive room! Well... hard to argue with that. The muzak in the dinning room will eventually drive us out, but not before we all gain 5 kg from the rampant dessert table!