"Cheers to the breezes...and the treeses"

Yay for finally being caught up, about time right? Well we finally finished up all the work in the field, it has been a painful and yet very incredible past five weeks of work-I don't know if I ever really explained what we were doing out in the field and I'm too lazy to read through my novels so here it goes: I know I explained the fact we had two 5X5 meter sites, one of them for midden deposits (we look at the material in each of the 25 squares created in one of the 5X5m sites) and the other for special features such as hearths, burials, postholes (where the wooden poles would have stood in a building/housing structure), etc. By the end, we had found a few postholes in the one site, indicating there had been a circular house there years ago. In the other site, we dug 10 cm down, excavating items like pottery pieces, shells, nerrites (ie, shell of the Devil), fish bones, animal bones, even human bones (I think in all we found two burials-pretty cool, although we've been told most people would freak out to find human remains..archaeologists are a different breed!), beads, spacers, adzes (tools), etc. We left squares 7, 9, 17, and 19 to be processed through a wet screen-this system involved dumping buckets onto 1/4 in. and 1/16 in. screens that were poured down with water to find the smaller stuff throughout the layers. These squares were known as sample squares. After this process, we would excavate another 10 cm. and repeat the process until we hit a sterile layer. We got down 40 cm. before we hit a layer with barely anything in it and collected quite a bit of material! Just to give you an image, as we were processing finds into the computer yesterday, we came up with about 350lbs of pottery pieces found in our 5X5m site-that should be fun to send home!

So today is our last day on the island, it's definitely amazing how quickly things come to an end. I'm still very torn between wanting to stay here forever and excitement that in just over 24 hrs. I'll be back home! I did not expect to look forward to going home as much as I have, but I think that by this point our group is on edge from having been around each other for so long-there have been no tiffs or arguments but everyone is definitely emotionally and physically exhausted-I blame it on the heat! I think the thing that set me off in my wanting to come back home was the manager of Hurricane Cove Bungalows...I could go on for hours about this woman, trust me. Long story short, she has called Fitzpatrick at multiple times at 5am complaining about us...usually if our group had been a disaster case I would be very understanding and I did give her the benefit of the doubt for the longest time, but this past week she has gone a bit too far-we were suppose to be able to stay here until the weekend but she suddenly, and without any particular reason, decided we had to leave by the 4th. Therefore, I'll be heading home tomorrow instead of Saturday-I can honestly say I can't complain though.

Other than that, last week was as usual a wonderful week-Fitzpatrick had a slide show set up for us during class on Wednesday so we were able to see a bunch of pictures he and the other directors had taken-it was weird to see five weeks of work summed up in a 30 min. video! Thursday night Rachel, Kirsten, and I stopped by Sunshine's to get the much talked about Killer Bee...it's a wonderful rum punch, with a sting ;) waka waka-I got a great fish dinner and hung out with the girls and talked with a few locals for a bit. Afterwards we ran into some of our med-student friends and they gave us a ride to Rumours for karaoke night...apparently Mr. Vegas, a popular singer from Jamaica was there and I didn't get to see him! I probably heard him though, I was going to try to be an annoying fan and steal a picture with him but I got too tiered and went home early with a few people. By the way, I love the open container policy here-Rachel, Kirsten and I took a KillerBee to go, went back to Oualie and got Kirsten's bottle of rum and took shots in the back of the car...if only we could get away with that in the States! It would make car rides so much more fun....!


Friday night was more of the same, we started off by Oualie as usual and a couple of our guy friends had created superlatives for us! I was awarded "Bubbly McBubble Pants"..I thought it was really cute. More Culturama fun times after that, and the rest of the weekend was spent soaking up the sun and studying for the exam on Monday. Saturday night was a complete bust, I decided to say in and get some extra studying to do so I could relax part of the day on Sunday but I ended up getting so hot I sat down on the tile and passed our for a bit...and then decided it was my bed time and that I wasn't getting anything done that night. So much for a crazy last weekend! All in all I think the exam went pretty well, there were a few questions I felt as though I should have known but I think I may have done alright! Let's hope so at least, I need at least a high C or a B to complete my minor in Anthro!

It felt amazing finishing the exam, we had to put in another hour of work throughout the day to finish processing the finds but the rest of the day was spent by the beach and enjoying the last two days of freedom! It definitely felt much better to have all of the studying, readings, work, lab, etc. out of the day and have a couple of days to enjoy the beach (and work on this awesome farmers tan) before heading home. Last night the group decided to go to Sunshine's for dinner (I was finally going to get my lobster dinner!) because we had heard a band was playing there...what we didn't know was the Culturama festival down town had decided to go to the area around Sunshine's, Chevy's and Lime, so by the time we got there, there were hundreds of people dancing around to the music, food and drinks everywhere, it was unexpected and crazy fun! Although last night was the first night I've experienced true tourist racism on the island since I've been here...one girl got her camera stolen and then was told she could get it back for $100EC, another guy was turned down to get food when he had been waiting in line for 20 min, and the people at the bar didn't appear overly concerned to get meals out to people unless they were obvious locals (I got my meal maybe two hours later? It was worth the wait though, delicious wings!). It was kind of disappointing but I'm glad I experienced that at the end of the trip rather than the beginning.

Well, after a long day of enjoying the beach, hanging out with everyone before we leave, and drinking to celebrate our last night here, I can honestly say I'm alot more upset about leaving than I thought I would be. Last I checked with my emotions, I was extremely excited to get home but this last night has been an emotional rollarcoaster! Unexpected but well deserved-we had a great night at Oualie's hanging out with our local friends before we head on, it was great to say goodbye to everyone but it made me realize how wonderful this trip was and fortunate I have been to have met the people I met and experienced the things I experienced. Besides a few minor bumps, this trip, as every study abroad program will tell you, has been a life changing experience. Cheers to you Nevis!