Thursday began with our usual pep talk and assignments from Jamie. I am really grateful that Jamie, Andrew and Andrea are really good teachers. They're patient and good, good at motivating us and always giving us encouragements as well as commendations on good work. It really makes the experience of paying to do manual labor in 40 degree weather rewarding. (I kn ow that other students from our group aren't having a good experience and I know that some of that hinges on their trench supervisors so I'm happy to really like mine

First I was assigned to pick-axe an area of the trench where it looked like a wall was supposed to be in the trench extension. (area C has many walls, most of which are confusion inducing, from various periods and with various orientations) after the first pick pass I found nothing but the second one revealed a tufo block at which point I started trowelling. some hours of scraping and stabbing later I had a nice little defined wall segment which disappeared into the baulk wall.
My second task for the day was working on defining the edges of the floor preparation which we had revealed yesterday when cleaning the surface of the trench extension.

before I had a chance to do anything it was time for site tours which were done on Thursday instead of Friday this week because Area B was finding cool things and they were ready to take them up.

So back to my floor defining; at first I didn't quite know what I was looking for as I was given a sort of vague description of "when you start hitting the red" which is sort of worrisome because I don't want to screw something up and dig through the layer I'm looking for. After some questioning and helpful hints from Andrew (like trowel from known to unknown by following the contours of the surface you're trying to define with the flat edge of your trowel) and some deonstrations from Jamie I managed to make a large part of the floor visible by the end of the afternoon.

After work we met Parin at the tram stop and made plans to have dinner with a big group. We went to a nice little place in Trastevere by one of the girls' apartment and ordered a ridiculous amount of food, salads, calamari, pizza, pasta, delicious!
after supper we went for drinks at a bar across the street. the drinks were cheap (by Rome standards) but they also tasted horrible. The Margaritas we had tasted like tequila and salt water or as Shannon described it - "the Mediterranean ocean in a glass"

drinks and supper over, it was midnight and we had to wake up in 6 hours so it was a 2 block walk home and to bed with us.