Not much goin on the past couple days. Just school and hanging around town. Still strapped for cash since Alex’s card came but can not be activated due to TD and their many failures. I think I’ve figured out what the name stands for now though. TeDious. Americas most convenient bank. Convenient is such a relative word, who exactly is it convenient for?
Last week we went out to our first party out here and got to meet a lot of cool people. I learned that Belizeans dont fuck around with drinking games. Its not like you play quarters for a shot like back home, you’re playing for half a glass of rum. Then again that makes things much more interesting :P
The state of things at this poor excuse for a school have only degraded further. My field studies class now involves no field work at all. Its quite pathetic. We need to do an group research project now but the amount of time/resources we have to accomplish the project makes it meaningless. Like yes there are things we COULD do, but to me it seems like an utter waste of time running some experiment thats been done before and that I can find the answer to my questions in about 5 min of Internet time. Its exercises in futility.
Our favorite restaurant in town is now under new ownership. The guy who used to own the place was the first person we met that we really became better friends with, unfortunately some things have come up back in the states so he needs to move back to handle them. Luckily the people who he sold the place to,Jack and Nancy, are both very nice as well. Jack is absolutely brilliant so I very much enjoy talking to him. Right now he is what he considers to be retired but he still owns some businesses. When he was younger though he was a nuclear engineer. He still does consolation work in that field though. Last night for example he got a phone call from Japan regarding the nuclear plant out there and they were asking his opinion about what to do with something.
We also met another extremely smart self taught man named Abdul. If you ask him ANYTHING about medicine or the body he can give you an answer more in depth than you ever dreamed of. Its really quite amazing how much he knows about the body and how it all works. The American medical system could learn a lot from him. Sad thing is actually its all probably already known just hidden from the masses back home so pharmaceutical companies can profit more. Health $care as he put it. Its quite fitting.
I also recently tried my first Cuban Cigar. I figured for 6.50 I had to try one. For all the hype all I can say is meh. I mean it was good but it wasn’t anything near what I expected, I’ve had American cigars that tasted better. I did however get a Columbian cigar recently too from a friend that was really good. Still not a cigar person but they are nice and relaxing for sitting around on a warm night talking with friends.
The most fun thing though thats happened was the archaeological finds. I mentioned last week sometime that they were digging up a street in town and found some Mayan artifacts well the amount of time they had to dig was up since road work had to continue. Now it was time to clean an analyze what was found. The lady running the dig is a professor here at Galen so we all got to help with this(hooray for the one good thing to come from this school).
There were mostly pots and some shells but they also found a body in the fetal position which is a way they were sometimes buried. Some of the pots were still whole but it was mostly a lot of shards. We got to clean up these shards and then try and figure out where they all came from. It was determined that these pots were somewhere between 2000-2500 years old. They also found some charcol at the site so carbon dating will be able to tell us for sure.
I know I’ve held older fossilized things before but I don’t think I’ve ever actually held and handled anything that old that was man made before. It was kinda cool just thinking about what the world had to have been like when this pot was formed. Well I think thats about all I got for now… below is a link to some video I took when we were cleaning everything.
http://s488.photobucket.com/albums/rr250/Uberbatman/unBELIZEable/?action=view¤t=100_0104.mp4
