I apollogize for not having written in a while. I was very busy travelling around Italy, then doing nothing, then digging at an Archaeological dig. As you may have assumed, I have stories, and pictures. I will get around to typing the stories sometime this week and posting them.
A very basic synopsis of Italy: We stayed in Rome for the first five days. For the first two, we stayed in a mediocre hostel a few blocks away from the central train station. We visited ancient Rome the first day, and celebrated Shabbat on the second. The next few days, we stayed in a very nice appartment (better than Beit Nativ) near Trevi Fountain (a few blocks south of the central train station). We saw the Vatican, the Spanish Steppes, the Pantheon, and a few churches and fountains.
On New Year's Day, we moved to Florence, and stayed at a hostel near the Duomo, with a receptionist whose grandmother was Jewish. We took two day trips: one to Pisa, and one to Venice. We celebrated shabbat, and had meals at the Chabad house in Florence. On our last day, I went to the Uffizi with another person from our group.
A week after we got back was "Israel experience week," where we had the option to go to Poland (1st timers only), do Gadna (a 5-day IDF experience which I did last year on Seminar), go to Haifa and volunteer, or do an archaeologica dig (which is what I did). We stayed at Kibbutz Hanaton (in the North), and dug at a site called Yifta'el. Most of what we found was flint and rocks (since the area we were working on was in the pre-pottery stone age). On our second-to-last day of digging, I noticed that the dirt I was brushing began getting harder and had black patches. I pointed this out to our guide, and he told me to keep brushing to see how far back it went. Because the area next to where I was digging was the location of an oven, they believe I was digging another one. The entire area of the foundation that we found was half of the 5x5 meter square, and it extended beyond our area. Other than that, the dig wasn't very interesting (stone age people are boring).
The photos section has been updated with photos from the trip, and will soon include photos from the dig.
