A Life of Adventure and Excitement
Well, mere weeks remain of my thraldom to the state of Finland, and after that, an uncertain future awaits!
The tail end of my indenture has been nothing if not eventful though, in these past few weeks. Aside of my duties concerning fish scales, I've snuck off to Turkey for a week, been engaged in excavating a medieval-ish parsonage, built a museum exhibition, and (oddly enough) programmed an iPad music player for said museum exhibition. Well, I shouldn't complain - part of the reason why I wanted to do my time in a small museum in the first place was that I had a hunch that I'd get to see different sides of the organisation. In this respect the last month certainly didn't disappoint. It might even be educational! It did, at any rate, mean that I was obliged to take the time to learn how to develop and deploy software for iOS devices on what's essentially government time and money, and while it could be argued that this is a skill with minimal relevance to my actual field and therefore a huge waste of my time, I'll be damned if it wasn't an interesting waste of time!
Once that was done, however, came time to finally spend some of my relatively hard-earned vacation days - in Turkey, since my former thesis supervisor had asked me to take part on an field trip to various archaeological sites of interest. There is something slightly unnerving about this, since when you think about it, it's like taking vacation days from your job so you can go do your other job - kind of defeats the purpose of going on a vacation, doesn't it? But, nonetheless, there I was, and so last week was spent largely on a minibus driving from Ankara through Cappadocia and Cilicia to Antakya, stopping by all sorts of museums and archaeological sites on the way.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just me who has a love-hate relationship with traveling. I mean, I spend a lot of time bragging about my various trips (gotta flaunt what you've got), but practically speaking, I keep wondering if it's really something strictly worth envying. I mean, yeah - traveling is cool, certainly on a theoretical level, but the actual practice of traveling is, in many ways, distasteful - I kind of resent all the fuss, getting up at two in the morning to catch flights, standing in lines in airfields and then having to run through the buildings to make it on the plane, spending nights in impersonal, clinical hotel rooms and so forth. At the same time, even though things like this always make me dread new trips a little bit, I know already that once I'm actually on my way, I really like it - not just all the sights and sounds and tastes (though all those are nice, too), but all the conversations, team-building and so forth that inevitably takes place on a student excursion. Exhausting as it might be, I guess I wouldn't exchange it for anything.
Well, of course, this particular trip was particularly fruitful for me in that we were not just visiting mere sites of interest, but more to the point, places and objects that I've spent the past three years or so studying. This meant that I had the opportunity to sample places like Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire, Alacahöyük and Alalakh - places that I'd read about before but never seen with my own eyes, all of which is strictly useful for me. Of course, with that came also the chance to test out how well my previous scholarship of such places matched the reality of them. So, it's like... well, it's like that thing that Raistlin does in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, where he leads the party through the ruins of Xak Tsaroth based on the books he read? It turns out you can actually do that, and it's a great deal of fun.
Of course, it wasn't all that serious all the time either, and there was plenty of things other than strict archaeology to do on the way. So, along with my compatriots, gorged inordinately large amounts of delicious Turkish food, contemplated deeply this Phrygian doodle of a boar (?) and a gryphon with a very nice hat, discovered the Moomin, no doubt the most huggable of all the ancient stone lions in Anatolia, went through this mysterious tunnel in Alacahöyük, took many, many photographs of the Erciyes Mountain with a hat on, visited Göreme with its rock-hewn churches, found out that the trollface was invented already in the Bronze Age, ate this cookie imprinted with the image of an early Bronze Age ceremonial standard, saw some delightfully goofy Early Christian animal mosaics, bothered this turtle, searched these sepulchres that look discomfortingly like something from Dark Souls, and went to this place that seriously demonstrates that the Romans were utterly crazy.
I guess it would be foolish to argue that it wasn't a lot of fun, all things considered? More to the point, though, it's as my thesis advisor pointed out a few days into the trip - doing things like this, she had already lost her sense of time: it felt like the day we arrived might have been weeks ago, not just a mere day or two. It's really this strange aberration of relativity that I think makes traveling appealing to me - and, for that matter, archaeology too. For good or ill, whether it's being really fun or nearly insufferable (that happens too), the actual activity of archaeological fieldwork and traveling are alike in that it really feels like you're really present, taking in each and every moment, actually doing things, not just drifting from day to day.
Or is it even an aberration? It occurs to me that this might be what life is actually supposed to be like!
The tail end of my indenture has been nothing if not eventful though, in these past few weeks. Aside of my duties concerning fish scales, I've snuck off to Turkey for a week, been engaged in excavating a medieval-ish parsonage, built a museum exhibition, and (oddly enough) programmed an iPad music player for said museum exhibition. Well, I shouldn't complain - part of the reason why I wanted to do my time in a small museum in the first place was that I had a hunch that I'd get to see different sides of the organisation. In this respect the last month certainly didn't disappoint. It might even be educational! It did, at any rate, mean that I was obliged to take the time to learn how to develop and deploy software for iOS devices on what's essentially government time and money, and while it could be argued that this is a skill with minimal relevance to my actual field and therefore a huge waste of my time, I'll be damned if it wasn't an interesting waste of time!
Once that was done, however, came time to finally spend some of my relatively hard-earned vacation days - in Turkey, since my former thesis supervisor had asked me to take part on an field trip to various archaeological sites of interest. There is something slightly unnerving about this, since when you think about it, it's like taking vacation days from your job so you can go do your other job - kind of defeats the purpose of going on a vacation, doesn't it? But, nonetheless, there I was, and so last week was spent largely on a minibus driving from Ankara through Cappadocia and Cilicia to Antakya, stopping by all sorts of museums and archaeological sites on the way.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just me who has a love-hate relationship with traveling. I mean, I spend a lot of time bragging about my various trips (gotta flaunt what you've got), but practically speaking, I keep wondering if it's really something strictly worth envying. I mean, yeah - traveling is cool, certainly on a theoretical level, but the actual practice of traveling is, in many ways, distasteful - I kind of resent all the fuss, getting up at two in the morning to catch flights, standing in lines in airfields and then having to run through the buildings to make it on the plane, spending nights in impersonal, clinical hotel rooms and so forth. At the same time, even though things like this always make me dread new trips a little bit, I know already that once I'm actually on my way, I really like it - not just all the sights and sounds and tastes (though all those are nice, too), but all the conversations, team-building and so forth that inevitably takes place on a student excursion. Exhausting as it might be, I guess I wouldn't exchange it for anything.
Well, of course, this particular trip was particularly fruitful for me in that we were not just visiting mere sites of interest, but more to the point, places and objects that I've spent the past three years or so studying. This meant that I had the opportunity to sample places like Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire, Alacahöyük and Alalakh - places that I'd read about before but never seen with my own eyes, all of which is strictly useful for me. Of course, with that came also the chance to test out how well my previous scholarship of such places matched the reality of them. So, it's like... well, it's like that thing that Raistlin does in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, where he leads the party through the ruins of Xak Tsaroth based on the books he read? It turns out you can actually do that, and it's a great deal of fun.
Of course, it wasn't all that serious all the time either, and there was plenty of things other than strict archaeology to do on the way. So, along with my compatriots, gorged inordinately large amounts of delicious Turkish food, contemplated deeply this Phrygian doodle of a boar (?) and a gryphon with a very nice hat, discovered the Moomin, no doubt the most huggable of all the ancient stone lions in Anatolia, went through this mysterious tunnel in Alacahöyük, took many, many photographs of the Erciyes Mountain with a hat on, visited Göreme with its rock-hewn churches, found out that the trollface was invented already in the Bronze Age, ate this cookie imprinted with the image of an early Bronze Age ceremonial standard, saw some delightfully goofy Early Christian animal mosaics, bothered this turtle, searched these sepulchres that look discomfortingly like something from Dark Souls, and went to this place that seriously demonstrates that the Romans were utterly crazy.
I guess it would be foolish to argue that it wasn't a lot of fun, all things considered? More to the point, though, it's as my thesis advisor pointed out a few days into the trip - doing things like this, she had already lost her sense of time: it felt like the day we arrived might have been weeks ago, not just a mere day or two. It's really this strange aberration of relativity that I think makes traveling appealing to me - and, for that matter, archaeology too. For good or ill, whether it's being really fun or nearly insufferable (that happens too), the actual activity of archaeological fieldwork and traveling are alike in that it really feels like you're really present, taking in each and every moment, actually doing things, not just drifting from day to day.
Or is it even an aberration? It occurs to me that this might be what life is actually supposed to be like!