Well, this week wasn't all that exciting, but it had a few fun points. Plus I settled on a dissertation topic, so that's exciting! Monday was class as usual and our statistics paper was finally due. Its nice to have that completely out of my hands now. Tuesday we were suppose to see a butchery demonstration during our applied zooarch class but the demonstrator couldn't make it so we're doing it next week instead. (I'll explain more about it then.) So instead we got our bone assemblages that we'll be working with for the rest of the term. For now we just have to do a preliminary sort and see what we generally have in our box. Then we have to write up a paper about the potential of the assemblage to produce results if further work is done on it. We each only got one box out of an assemblage that our professors worked on a few years ago and is really huge. My box is pretty full and has about 6 or 8 contexts in it. The context is the area of the site that was being dug that the bones came from. For example some of the stuff came from roads, some from areas that were filled in by the people living on the site and some from sandy areas. Sometimes you get different amounts or types of bones in different contexts to its important to look at that kind of stuff. It was pretty exciting to actually get to start a project that's related to real world work.
Wednesday I had to run to the pharmacy for calamine lotion for my flatmate who has come down with chickenpox. Apparently in Indian it isn't endemic so not everyone has had them. I kind of would have thought that the British government would have insisted on a vaccination for it before coming, but I guess not. So she has locked herself in her room and refuses to come out. Everyone else in my flat has had it so she can't infect us, but she doesn't come out anyway. At first she was making us just leave things outside her door, but at least now she'll open the door and take things from me when I'm there. But her parents are freaking out too, so that doesn't help anything. Oh well, hopefully she feels better soon. Then later on Wednesday I went to campus to work on my assemblage. I got almost all of it sorted, so that was good. I also had my first appointment with the National Health Service. And it was great. Actually I had gone in the day before because I needed my prescription refilled and they could have gotten me an appointment 2 hours later. No 3 month crap like everyone is always saying in the states. But because my prescription is from the US they didn't really know what it was so I had to bring in the info packet about it so they could look it up. They didn't have it, so they gave me something else instead. But when I was there I was talking to the nurse and she was asking me about American health care. She told me that after they started the NHS people in Britain actually got healthier because they started going to the doctor. They still have problems with obesity and smoking, but overall they are healthier than they were. I don't know when the NHS started, but she was an older lady so I guess she has probably seen some of that happen over the years. I was telling her that my prescription is $200 for 3 months with no insurance and she was shocked. Here prescriptions are either free or about 7 pounds a month depending on what it is. So there is my rant. I realize taxes here are crazy high, but at least they go to something useful.
Thursday I didn't do much of anything. I read some stuff to clarify what I wanted to do for my dissertation and then went shopping. I mostly wanted some new tights but ended up with a really cool necklace too. Then on Friday I met with my adviser and hashed out my topic. I'm going to do a survey of the sheep metapodial awl/gouges from sites from the Iron Age in Southwest Britain. One report that I read categorized the ones from their site into 5 categories so I'm going to use those categories and find all the similar tools from other sites and try to fit them in to their system. It will be mostly a literature based project, but hopefully I'll get to go and see some of the actual tools in some of the museums around the area. Mark knows some of the museum people and I think Ellie does too so hopefully they'll let me in. I would like to actually get to touch some of them after all the research about them I'll be doing. So yeah, it should be cool and Mark said he thinks its a good topic and not just a waste of time as most people don't do overall surveys they just talk about what is at one particular site. So it will be interesting to see if similarities and differences can be seen across sites. Friday night a few of us went to see Nine. The show numbers were awesome, but the movie as a whole was a bit confusing and weird. At least it was something to do though.
Saturday I went with Melissa to Westbourne, another little subcity in the area. We go by it on the bus when we go into Bournemouth and always see some cute looking shops. There actually weren't as many shops there as I imagined, but there were a lot of restaurants and cafes. We went into one that was called chocol8. They only had 4 tables, but we got one and got some delicious hot chocolates and really good cake. They make those fancy cakes that you see on tv that look like handbags and shoes and stuff like that and they also make chocolates. Our cake wasn't the fancy kind, but it was very tasty. And on the foam of the hot chocolates they made a heart out of hot chocolate mix. It was really cute. We want to take all the girls back there sometime so they told us that if we called ahead we could reserve a table for all of us. So that should be a fun trip some weekend. Then Saturday night Sytske and I went to the Lighthouse for a concert of John Williams songs by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. It was really good. But it was really weird at the end because I think we applauded for about 10 or 15 minutes. But this was just seated applause, no standing ovation. But we clapped and the orchestra stood up and then the director left, then he came back and each individual section stood up and we clapped some more and then he left and then he came back again and they all stood up again and we just kept clapping. I thought for sure there would be an encore with all his coming back but there wasn't and finally we all stopped clapping and left. Me and Sytske gave up clapping eventually because our hands hurt. It was really weird.
Today I'm going to buy a swimsuit so that I can start using the pool at the gym. They have some water workout classes so I might try out one of those, but mostly I just want to swim laps I think. Running is good, but it gets boring after awhile. So I guess that's all I have for this week. Here's a link the the couple pics I took in Ashley Cross last week that I didn't get up then. Have a good week and I hope to hear from you soon.
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