Party Weekend

After the events of the last post, we all went to Pizza King, a favourite dining spot for us Porolissum folks. It was tasty as usual. From there, we headed to Diesel for drinks and to kill time until we could meet up with Ioana - a Romanian friend from last year - at the new club Level. It was a lovely reunion, and we hope to see her again soon. She had promised to visit Porolissum for the Fourth of July but her brother was ill.

Speaking of Independence Day, I had expect mici and beer but instead I went to a wedding. That's right, a wedding. Alexandru's son Cristian was marrying and I decided to join Lauren, Neville and Eric for the ceremony. It was a lovely ceremony, held in a heavily-painted church in early afternoon. We thought that would be all we got to see and we'd have to head back to camp, but instead, Eric took us all to the reception and we spent several hours there.

It was an amazing time. Lots of delicious food, open bar, carafes of palinca sitting on the tables. Midway through the evening, Eric got called by someone at Porolissum who asked him to find a grill, and he disappeared for three hours. We later learned he got sucked into helping out. But he returned at about 9:00 to take us back. I'm fairly certain we're going to be in the wedding video for being the only ones to dance to Jailhouse Rock.

Back at camp, the rest of the group was getting along just fine without us, and several were already pretty drunk. Hilarity ensued until Sean and I had to be the responsible ones and try to get people either to bed or leave the camp for being too loud. Three people ended up sleeping in the castrum until early morning.

Monday and Tuesday proceeded as usual. On Monday, I cleaned some trenches, filled out some context sheets (a page detailing the information of a particular layer of a particular trench). On Tuesday, Kelci and I helped Alexandria do a rough sketch plan of a trench, then I helped Rob and Kelci with their sketches of a different trench by giving them the measurements. That was the misty morning, when we saw fog settling into the nearby (and lower) towns; it was a really neat visual.

Wednesday July 7th, the weather got really ugly. It was raining in the morning, and Eric told everyone to go back to sleep for another hour. When we all got up, there was no trench work done. Some people cleaned pottery, and others (including myself) sorted older bags by categoring them into newer bags of pottery, bones and bronze. The rest of the day was spent napping and reading, so I got that Bill Bryson book finished.

Today, once more, the weather wasn't cooperative enough for trench work, so this time my day was spent drawing worked bone and bronze artifacts, practicing the sort of sketches that go into artifacts collection books. At least it wasn't as rainy as yesterday, and even managed to be somewhat sunny and warm for an hour.

Right now I'm in the Internet cafe in Zalau with some others, and we'll have dinner together downtown. I'll probably do a bit of grocery shopping as well, get some snacks for camp. Hopefully tomorrow will be more pleasant and we can get back into the field.