Bon Azewa!

So Val and I finally gave up on the pit of death Monday. We worked there in the morning but it was starting to dry up, so we handed it over to some other people :) Still managed to find some nice pieces of pottery before we passed it along though. Found a fairly large piece of a basin in another trench, too.
Tuesday we got caught by big rainstorms TWICE so that whole day was mostly a bust, and then Wednesday afternoon was also a big storm, so we stayed up at camp washing pottery. It's really fun when people are washing pottery and get excited about a particularly large or interesting piece and you look over, only to realize you had found it a few days ago. I found a couple of the really nice pieces so I was VERY proud of that. My next mission is to finally find a coin. So far the Romanian's are beating us, 4 coins to 3.
Today we finally started digging into what the Romanian director is certain is a tomb. Unfortunately, he showed up after the American co-director gave us the go-ahead and was not happy that we had started digging in. There isn't a whole lot of evidence that it's actually a tomb, but Alexandru is so certain it is that he was planning to have a camera crew onsite to film the uncovering of the tomb. He made us stop before we had gotten very far... hopefully I'll be able to continue with it tomorrow because we're all anxious to see what it actually is.

Although there hasn't been much else happening on site, we've had an adventure or two in the afternoons, after the "work day." The most recent of these, and to date one of the best, was an adventure down near the spring where we explored an abandoned, and reportedly haunted, house. Ashley, Bridget, Dara, Johnathan and I all hopped the gate (which was locked...and had rusty hinges...oops!) and headed up the steps to try the door...as we were heading up we heard funny noises coming from behind us... Sean was stuck on the gate. Naturally, we laughed at him for a while and then finally went to help him over. For some reason I was at the front of our line and went to check the door handle...locked. As I walked forward to check another gate I hear the door handle start to rattle. A bit freaked out I jump and turn around really quickly, only to see Bridget was also trying to open the door. We continued forward trying every door on every shed and every window but sadly everything was locked. BORING! Until, that is, we notice some fresh wood chippings in front of the shed... and some cups and jars in the kitchen window... and some fresh flowers in another window! But EVERY hinge was completely rusted. Slightly creeped out by all of this we decide to look around the other side of the house. We turn around and walk past the shed and what do we see? A half-unstuffed bunny NAILED to the wall. CREEPY! Naturally, we stopped and took a picture with it. It's probably cursed but we figured we had already hopped the fence, and picked some apples and peaches, so taking one picture wasn't going to curse us any more than the rest of that...
Our adventure pretty much ended there though... to get to the other side of the house we would have had to walk through a VERY overgrown garden and none of us were too excited to try avoiding all the nettles that were probably growing.

Other than that life at Porolissum is pretty low-key. We've been making a story line for a movie we want to film... basically a murder mystery... we have such an amazing setting it seems silly not to! And then this weekend we're taking a trip to Maramures county. We'll be going to a city called Baia Mare, where they have some nice museums, and some other small towns that are very traditional. I'm really excited for that! And then next weekend we're going to either Shimleu Days which celebrates a nearby archaeological site, or some of us might try to make it to Budapest. It's a bit of a trip but should be exciting!

I'll have tons to say about Maramures next week i'm sure.

XOXO
Lauren