Today is my last day in Peru and we have to wait in the airport for 12 hours. The last few days have been some of the best. We spent two days in Lima shopping and eating. We ate at the buffet at the Marriott which cost about 100 soles or $30. It was totally worth the money because the food was delicious and it was everyone else's last day. After Lima we took a plane to Cusco and explored the city until our bus left. Cusco was very cool I wish we had spent more time there. We then took the train to Machu Picchu pueblo and spent the night there. We woke up really early in the morning and hiked up to Machu Picchu. I really enjoyed the hike and we got some awesome pictures. We then went back to cusco and struggled to find a hostel. After only a couple hours of sleep we got on a plane back to Lima and now we are in the airport. I am really glad we decided to go to Machu Picchu on our own because the highlands were very pretty and a big contrast the Nasca. I am now very excited to go home and get a shower and sleep in my own bed.

Today was our last day of lab work! Honestly everyone is a little glad to be do e the last couple of days in the lab have been a little rough. We will clean our rooms tomorrow and then they have a exercise for us in the evening and then we are free to do whatever. We will take the bus back to Lima after that which will be a pretty long ride but I'm sure we will all relax. I am almost ready to go home but one more week until I'm back in the States. I hope to post some more pictures soon!

After we closed out my unit they moved me to unit 3 because one of the other girls was not feeling well. We got to 188 cm down into the joke before we ht the base of a huarango post and had to finish excavations because of safety hazards. We mapped that unit today and then took final pictures of the unit. We are officially done and tomorrow is the last day in the field. Today we back filled all of the units. The operation of hints that included both of the units I worked in took the longest to fill in. Backfilling is definitely not my favorite thing to do. It was a lot of work and some people could not handle the load which meant more work for the rest of us. On the bright side I got a good workout and even worked up a good sweat. Alison and I have been running everyday so I have been sleeping very well and been very hungry. The food at the restaurant we eat at every night The Huarango is very good and I generally finish the whole plate. Dinner is a little bit late because we get up at 5 in the morning but that is the culture here. Dinner is not until at least 7 but usually it is worth the wait. I am kind of missing Mexican food though. Tomorrow we will do surface collections and it will be our final day in the field. After that we will have one week left in Nasca where we will try and finish up lab work and then we will be headed back to Lima. Hopefully I will be able to post some pictures soon. Until next time.

We had to stop excavating in our unit today which was very sad. The walls would not hold up which is the difficulty of dealing with loose sand. By the end of the day we just had two walls that made a perfect v in the middle kind of like and inside out triangle. The worst part is we had finally gotten down low enough to where we could make walls but the sand from the top kept falling inside. We had just come down on a surface that kind of looked like a floor but it doesn't seem to carry into the other units so we may never know. Tomorrow is kind of up in the air because they also had to close out unit 2. That means that some people will have to stay home and work in the lab tomorrow or they may send some people to do surface collections. I hope I get to continue excavations on unit 3 because I would really like to find something soon. I will post some pictures of the unit when I get back to the US there is limited wifi and it is often very slow.

This week we started excavations in the field. We are about 80 cm into our unit. We are working with Dr. Walen and we haven't found much if anything yet. Most of what is in our unit is just sand. Unit 3, which is right next to our unit, they found two perfectly intact pots with a whole perfectly preserved gourd underneath it. That was extremely exciting because we had to remove the pots from the wall before the wall collapsed because the sand does not hold it's shape. I do enjoy excavating but I do not really like pulling buckets which is the consensus for most of the group. The dinners at El Huarango is very good. This week we had a dish called milanesa which is fried chicken breast with rice and avocado which most of us really enjoyed and I don't really care for meat. This week we should be switching and working with the graves which will be more exciting. The internet is hard to come by but I will post pictures of excavations when I get a chance.

This week we started field work in Nasca. The first day was good because we just surveyed the site and did a short mapping activity. The rest of the week we worked on contrasting 2m by 2m units and mapping the units. Honestly by Friday we were all tired of mapping but it does take a lt of practice to get it right. Yesterday we did transects and collected a lot of bones. The site is very pretty. It is located in Las Trancas valley and the site itself is a sand dune. The valley below is very green and we have to drive through a large farm to et to the site.

Saturday is lab day. The first thing I did this morning was clean pottery. After lunch I went to help Stevie analyze bones. I liked that much better. We had to look at the bones and identify what bones they were. The site has been looted extensively so context from a historical context is not as important. The sand is a challenge but after we stopped mapping I started enjoying myself much more. This week we will start excavations 

Recently we spent two days in Ica. The hotel we stayed at was very nice. The first day we just decompressed and hung out. The second day we went to the museum. They had very cool displays especially the bioanthro displays.

This is a picture from outside the museum. I did not care for Ica as much as Lima even though there were less people in Ica. They don't see very many tourists in Ica so it is not exactly as safe as Lima. The second day we went to Huacachina which is an oasis in the middle of large sand dunes it looks super cool. 

It was fun to look at and you could paddle boat or ride down on the sand dunes of a surf board. The next day we took a bus ride to Nasca. Nasca is a smaller town and the people are super nice. Our house is really nice and clean. Each of us has our own bathrooms in the rooms and we are paired in groups of two. This had been an pleasant experience so far and tomorrow we are going into the field. I will add more photos when I get a chance the internet is in and out.

Here are two pictures from the roof of the group house in Nasca. The view of the mountains around the town are amazing.