Lovingly Trowelling

We had another person at the breakfast table this morning. He's about our age and his name is Keith. He's a very clean-cut sort of fellow, but very nice. Chris keeps making jokes about cricket to Keith, I think he's happy to have another English person who will understand them, but when he leaves the room and we ask Keith, he has no more a clue than we do. Betty and Chris were confused as to how we got lost yesterday morning, so Chris drew us a very nice map to show us how to walk to the site. The walk is very nice and scenic. The countryside is lush and green and there are animals.

We brought our raincoats today since it was raining when we left the house. Mine is very yellow and not terribly stylish, but it should do the job. As soon as we made it out of the village and started down the road to the church, it started raining harder, and we were a bit worried at the thought of digging in the rain. The rest of the day was warm and bright and windy, and much time was spent rubbing the dirt out of our eyes.

The area I'm working on has a large burnt-looking surface, but is mostly demolition material(which means it must be pulled out). I'm moving a phenomenal amount of earth with my trowel. Clive hands out lollipops to us if we do good work. I inform him that Americans respond very well to food-based reward systems. I am easily larger than any other female I've seen since arriving, and realize that I am the fat American stereotype. We are accumulating massive piles of mortar and tile, and we're not sure what we're meant to do with it. Our Marshalltown trowels are the envy of the staff, and I'm pretty proud to have custom-shaped them on Desi's doubleband saw(which Clive states is an alpha-male sounding activity and therefor nothing he'd ever do, to which I replied that during said trowel-grinding I was wearing a dress, heels, and pearls. And safety goggles, of course). I showed him one of the Marshalltowns that hadn't been ground down and he scoffed at the size. They are pretty unwieldy.

Our nice finds tray, with a bit of pottery, some shells, some painted plaster, a piece of vitrified clay, and some animal innominates.

The bit in the lower corner is the painted plaster, the bit at the top is pottery, and the thing that looks like a bone is just that.

I had a little caterpillar buddy in my area, and I took the opportunity to play with him a bit before removing him to a safer area.

We took a taxi to Lewes to do some grocery shopping so we would have food for lunch. There is a deli truck that comes to the site that we can buy food from, but I don't know if I can exist on cheese sandwiches every day. We went to Waitrose, which is apparently a higher-end kind of grocery store. They had some good vegetarian stuff, and Alice found some good things, too. We both enjoyed the candy aisle. Everything that is grape-flavored in the U.S. is blackcurrant flavored here. Starburst, Skittles, jam, etc. It reminds me of what Dr. Z was telling me in China, about how different cultures have flavor sets, and sometimes you're really surprised by what is considered a good flavor for chips or candy or toothpaste. I fell in love with the orange Kit Kats, which isn't really going to help dispell my fat American image.

We had dinner in Lewes at Pizza Express, where I got a pizza with a hole in the middle, which is filled with salad. I liked it and might have to make it for myself when I get home. Alice teased me about being on a diet. The staff was a bit brusque, and I don't know if they were actually being rude to us or if it's a cultural difference thing.