11.March-13.March.10

Freaking out again

My work takes over my life

Breathe Breathe Breathe Breathe Breathe

10.March.10

Cold water dances

Spring sunlight fills me with joy

Holland is transformed

The man becomes one

With the rabbit at his feet

I am changing forms

Ok, I'm sort of proud of this one. There are layers of meaning that only Egyptologists will get! Whoo! It's not perfect, but oh, it's close. I won't explain, fully, but it has to do with hieratic script, and the "verb" (the quotation marks are quite deliberate) for 'to be'. Mmm.

9.March.10

Demotic is hard

I like it despite this but

It's all just squiggles

Back to the graveyard

Taking a break in the sun

Finding peace again

8.March.10: Two for Today

Saw the tea master

In the library today

Talked about Zeshin

The Tea Master is a Surinamese guy I met a week or so ago at a Zen Open House. The local Zen temple had a day of interesting classes and invited everyone to come. So I went! The Tea Master was there to teach us about traditional tea ceremonies. He's a very cool guy, very funny and laid back, and so when I saw him in the library today, I just had to say hi. It turned into a very cool, and rather long conversation. He told me that Zeshin, the monk I met at the Open House, just decided one day to leave his home in Katwijk and go to Japan. He sat on the steps of a monastery there, and just kept sitting there, even after the monks tried to run him off, until they let him in. :-) The last line of today's first haiku was almost Talked about his beard because the Tea Master speaks excellent Chinese, and looks Chinese enough that when he's with Chinese speakers they think he is Chinese. However, once he really gets to talking, his grammar often falls apart, and Chinese people think he's sort of crazy. He says once he grew a beard, they all just assume he's a foreigner, and are thus VERY impressed with his Chinese skills. :-)

In wintertime here

We all wear too much clothing

No one has a neck

Cold and cloudy today, and I observed that most people have to turn their whole bodies just to look around. Who's ready for Spring? Only 12 more days....

Sunday 7.March.10

Talking to the dead

Sunlight pointing out their names

Spring brings life to all

Beautiful day so I decided to go Walkabout. Hung out in the cemetery nearby. The Dutch have one of the coolest relationships to the dead that I've ever seen. Their tombstones are amazing. The newer ones are all unique, and personalized. You often even find pictures of the deceased. The families also leave behind the coolest stuff. Only the really old plots are bare. The rest are filled will little candles and flowers, and adorable statues of birds and other critters. You often find feathers and beads too, and the infant graves are filled with amazing toys, shells, even a windchime now and then. People also sometimes leave letters for the dead. I saw one yesterday, that was a framed picture of a little girl, and the letter was addressed to the deceased, and talked about the little girl (the granddaughter of the dead) and how the mother wishes her mother could be there to see her. Incredible!

Update about Updates

It's been over a month since last I posted. I've been hesitant to write because I feel my life is simply too dull these days. Here's what every entry for the past month would have looked like: "Sat in the library today and translated. Drank a lot of coffee. Listened to some cool podcasts about psychology. Translated some more. Ate food (almost certainly apples and peanut butter.) Went to class. Translated some more. Watched Buffy. Sleep."

I'm having a pretty good time with it, but it's frankly, rather dull. When learning ancient languages, most of your time is spent memorizing verb forms and prepositions, and so it's quite possible to spend HOURS and HOURS working on a text, and only end up with a couple of sentences sort of roughly more or less translated.

And yet, I feel that by not mentioning the various little things that happen in my day to day life, I'm letting a big part of my time in Holland go unrecorded. So, I've come up with a way to battle the boring entries. It mostly means I'm going to write really short entries explaining only the best (or worst, I guess) bits of my days. And I'm gonna do it haiku format as often as possible, just because it's much more fun that way. :-p

Ancient Squiggles

Back on this side of the pond, and this side of the keyboard! I was nervous to come back to Holland. I've spent some pretty radically horrible days and nights in this place. But as it turns out the Amy who left back in October is not the same Amy who showed up in January. And I swear this isn't the same place. I am finally getting to where I can easily see the awesomeness of this place! I win! I win!

Though it helps immensely, I'm sure, that I wintered in Egypt, and won't have to winter in Holland EVER AGAIN MWAHAHAHAHA! (Inshallah!)

So, here I am, and here Holland is. The week since I've been back has been interesting, weather-wise, from the tradtional rainy-dreary-yuck, to snow, to SUN. I'd say the sun has shone for the majority of the time I've been back (and that it hasn't been night), and that alone has raised my spirits higher. Add to that the fact that I am now certain that I rock the Egyptological world, or at least have the ability to translate ancient texts constantly, and I'm feeling pretty good about being back.

There's also a Starbucks in the train station now, and while I'm typically sort of blasé at best about the Bucks, I am thrilled. Mostly because I miss American style coffee shop (read: cafés) immensely. The hustle, the noise, the hanging out all day. Dutch cafés don't really have any of that. They have coffee, and people sit in little clumps with their friends, and drink their coffee, chat until the coffee's gone, and then leave. There's no hanging out with a computer or a book for hours. No $.50 refills either. Sigh.

So, the coming semester promises to be once again filled with entirely too much work. The master only requires that I take one course: Demotic. I learned in the first course that Demotic script is derived from Hieratic script and is grammatically between Late Egyptian and Coptic. The professor, a very scholarly American, said something like "Well, since you've all had Late Egyptian and Hieratic, Demotic won't be entirely impossible." Point of fact: I have had neither Late Egyptian nor Hieratic. Problem. And as you can see from this lovely picture, Demotic is mostly scribbles.

So I decided to take Late Egyptian and Hieratic in addition to Demotic. Give myself a chance to possibly understand. Besides, Late Egyptian and Hieratic are sorta important for an Egyptologist, and I would feel a bit left out if I didn't grasp the basics at least.

Add to these two languages (New Egyptian and Demotic) and two scripts (Hieratic and Demotic) a 60 page, single spaced masters thesis, and I really don't know that it matters whether the sun shines or doesn't.... But I'm feeling good about it all. :-)

(The picture below is Hieratic. Which is also mostly scribbles, but which is more like hieroglyphs than Demotic, and thus MUCH more legible.)