Dusted Off!

From yesterday we came home early from the dig site because of a severe sand storm hitting the region. This morning we awoke to what looked like a good old fashioned Southland pea-soup fog, with visibility about 200 metres. It wasn't fog, it was the sand storm. It's not sand like at the beach where in comparison the grains are like boulders, but a fine dust of sand particles that gets everywhere, all the way from the Sahara. In our room 3rd floor room we have glass tops on the tables - covered with dust as is my laptop screen I'm noticing. Getting on the bus this morning I noticed three or four people wearing glasses who hadn't been up until now. Apparently they were in agony yesterday with contact lenses when the storm hit. Sultan, our regular bus driver said vehicles catch asthma in this sort of weather. So off we to the dig with the sun a perfectly round bright disk in the sky you could directly look at. We were back in the hotel by 9.30am. When we got down to the dig it was blowing a gale and visibilty was worse than in Amman. We were given surgical masks to wear, loaded the tools in the utes ready to go to our squares while a couple of the bosses went to survey the dig sites. They came back saying the sand storm was bad enough but the wind was really whipping up the local dust and it wasn't good for digging. By that time I could feel the dust in my eyes and the mask had already turned yellow after about 30 minutes.

So its been a day off of sorts. The dig directors have been doing pottery reading down stairs all day, that's where they look at the diagnostic pieces and try to work out their age by comparing them with what they know and these books full of pictures of ancient pottery. When they are "pretty sure" they have got it right the piece is recorded on a database including all the measurement data of where they we found, dig square, position and depth etc. That bit of it seemed to me like watching paint dry very slowly. I ended up helping the dig photographer photograph the "objects" - the non pottery finds. Today this included sling shot stones, an altar stone from a shrine, and dozens of flint cutting tools. Even in the Iron Age flint was the main source of cutting edges. Bronze and Iron were very expensive and were used mostly for the military, temples etc - and the very rich of course. Most of the flint is still very sharp - good stuff.

Helen and I went out to lunch at the mall and looked around the shops. In the food Mall confronted with 9/10 foods we didn't know, we chose the one we did - McD's. All we can say from the experience is that the meat was halel. Next time we will try a food we don't know, at least we we won't be able to tell if it was good or bad. But on the postive side, we do have a McD's receipt in Arabic.

Back at the hotel I had a snooze while Helen has spent the afternoon down at the pottery reading listening in while knitting. She is knitting a shawl for our new grandchild that daughter-in-law Caroline and son Ben are expecting. Helen is much better although she has that deep husky voice you get when getting over a bad flu.

The photo for today illustrates the effects of the sand storm. I woke up to the sound of a heavy shower of rain on our third floor window. The photo is of a car on the street below showing the rain mixing with the dust of the day. It is interesting that our street doesn't have gutters and is concave in shape with all the water directed to the centre of the street. A couple of minutes later there was a lahar rushing down the street with people making valiant attempts to jump it. The temperature is 6C (feels colder than 6 with the kind of wind that cuts through you) outside with the weather forcast for two more days of this as a depression from up north passes down country. It snowed in Istanbul and Damascus today. Glad Helen packed our thermals! Not sure if we will be digging tomorrow either.