Day 3

Today was an interesting day. Bill and I and went to the museum to check out the artifact situation. (See his blog on Artifacts in the Museum). After doing that, we went up to the ancient site of Idalion. Our main purpose was to visit Dr. Maria Hadjicosti who is finishing up her excavations at Idalion. We met with her for about 15-20 minutes and talked about many of our concerns/questions/requests/etc. As usual she was very helpful and offered many good suggestions. She also, even though she was very busy with her work, took time to walk us around the site and give us a guided tour. I have to admit that the site was pretty fabulous. There was one area that had an olive oil processing section that had all the components, including 16 press weights. Bill and I both remarked on how a former PKAP volunteer who was fascinated with olive oil production would have gone crazy on seeing all of this. After this, we came back to the hotel for lunch and caught up on email.

Later this afternoon we went to the airport to pick up a colleague of mine, Dr. Nick Karatjas, from the airport. Nick teaches in the Economics department at IUP and, as I found out several years ago, his father was Cypriot and Nick still has relatives on the island. We have been talking about Cyprus for the last four years and he finally took me up on my suggestion that he come out and check out PKAP and visit his relatives. I will be interested to see what he thinks of PKAP. As I write this, Nick, Bill, and myself are having a discussion about many very different subjects (IUP versus UND, hiring practices, global phones, faculty and staff hiring, etc.). Nick remarked that Bill and I must have known each other for a while based on our interaction, mainly Bill's comments to me which in my opinion are sarcastic, in Bill's opinion - witty. Anyway, when I counted it up, I realized that I have known Bill for 14 years, which added to my feeling of being old. So, that's it for today.

RSM