You may have noticed there was something of a blank here at Lucid Ephemera for a few weeks while I went off and did festive things and had a holiday. More details on Italians in puffy jackets and wild boar salami follow in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I hope all of you [...]
Archive for the ‘archaeology’ Category
2010 and 2011, thank you and hello
Posted in Aleppo, archaeology, architecture, Australia, autumn, Berlin, bread, British colonial mansions, cathedrals, chocolate, Christmas, churches, Crete, Cretins, Cyprus, Damascus, day trips, deer, Dodgy taxi drivers, driving, elbow, England, expat, fleas, food, Germany, Greece, history, Italy, Liverpool, manor houses, markets, Morocco, mosques, museums, odd hotels, Ottomans, Phillipine overseas domestic workers, post offices, Recalcitrant stereos, rowing, shopping, singing, smuggling, summer, Sunday, Syria, The Cyprus Question, The Mediterranean Middle Lane, tombs, tourism, travel, Turkey, Uncategorized, Venetians, Volkswagens, Volkswagons, weather, winter, wordless, work, working from home, Xania on January 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Cretans, Cretins and Aphrodisiac Crustaceans
Posted in archaeology, Crete, Cretins, driving, Greece, Recalcitrant stereos, The Mediterranean Middle Lane, Volkswagens on August 27, 2009 | 2 Comments »
This morning we went to visit an archaeological site in east Crete currently being dug by a local research institute. This summer I’ve had tours of lots of trenches containing the foundations of lots of buildings, and after a while they do start to look like a lot of dusty, stony holes in the ground. [...]
How do you say ‘football’ in Arabic?
Posted in Aleppo, archaeology, Syria on August 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
You can take the Beloved out of England, but you can’t take English football out of him. We’d just returned to Syria and I was so excited about exploring Aleppo that I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. But the Beloved had other things on his mind, namely Liverpool FC’s first match of [...]
The Diggers’ Retreat
Posted in archaeology, Cyprus, fleas on July 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
At the end of the dig we spent a day cleaning and packing what had been our home for five weeks. We transferred fifteen or sixteen car loads of digging equipment, students and luggage to the archaeological field station in the nearest city. The field station is a not for profit entity that serves as [...]
Unearthing People
Posted in archaeology, Cyprus, history on July 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Yesterday I had a mind-blowing run-in with Cyprus’s history. We went for a stroll at dusk around a medieval church that is surrounded by parts of walls, ruins and foundations of former buildings. They had been digging a hole beside the church to bury a pipe and there were also mounds of dirt suggesting other [...]
Cooking for the Diggers
Posted in archaeology, Cyprus, food on July 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
On the whole, it wasn’t a bad first attempt. I had twenty-odd hungry archaeologists waiting expectantly for a meal and I’d never cooked for that many people at once before, not that they knew that. I ended up with a mountain of pasta that was mostly coated in enough tuna, tomatoes, lemon, parsley and garlic [...]
Honourary Archaeologist
Posted in archaeology, Cyprus, manor houses, summer on July 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I haven’t posted here for several weeks because I’m in rural Cyprus doing the cooking for an archaeological dig. The cooking is going well, despite the often intense heat and rudimentary facilities. Our accommodation is a medieval building set around a large courtyard, and with all the mod cons of the thirteenth century; there is [...]
