Busy in Pucon

This past week marked our first full work week in the entire project! The trench we are working on now has produced more artifacts than the last two trenches put together. Every day we have been pulling out ceramic after ceramic. In the area we are working in now there are these huge horse flies all over the place. They fly right into your face and buzz really loudly, which is annoying, but then one of them bite me and it was on! My goal before we leave is to kill as many of those flies as I can! I have devised a system in which I knock them to the ground and then stomp them with my boots. One of the guys working for us, Julio, is able to catch them. His fly to death ratio is higher than mine, but I hope to catch up. The flies don’t really bother the workers very much but they were just going after Jake and me. Jake’s advisor from Vandy, Tom, has been in Chile for the past month working on various projects and he came out to the site today and he said that the flies were attracted to our sun screen. He said he just stopped using it because the flies wouldn’t leave him alone when he had it on. Do I not wear sunscreen and get a terrible sun burn, or do I wear it and then get eaten alive by these huge flies? We will just have to see what the future holds but I do not take melanoma lightly.

We had a great visit with Tom. There was a triathlon in Pucon today and all the roads in downtown and leading into downtown were closed off for the race so we weren’t able to get to Church this morning and we had to walk into town to meet Tom. I have never seen Pucon so packed! People were everywhere! Tom and Jake talked about the ceramics that we had been pulling out and looked at a few of the artifacts. He treated us to lunch at our favorite restaurant in town; I enjoyed my Pumpkin ravioli and Jake his three-peppered steak. We then drove out to the site after the roads were reopened. Tom was pleased with the work Jake had done and gave him some advice and then Tom headed back to Temuco.

Not much else to report other than we will never leave home without a supply of ground black pepper. We brought some McCormick black pepper with us this trip and it has already made a world of difference in the food we have been able to cook. The spaghetti, the springtime dinner, the fajitas have all been so much better with it. I also made some vegetable stir fry for dinner one night this past week and it was GOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!! We bought some Kikkoman Soy Sauce and I made some fried rice. I then cooked some carrots, zucchini, onions, green and red peppers, and cashews in the soy sauce with some garlic and peach jam. It was so good we are going to have it for dinner again tonight.

We hope everyone at home is doing well.

Mandy and Jake