this summer, in a nutshell

for those of you just tuning in, i'm currently in sweden. i'm here on a national science foundation grant for research experiences for undergraduates, or an reu. this summer has been a whirlwind, so i might as well recap. after finals, i drove back to austin to leave my car for my brother ian to use for his summer job. i stayed in austin for a few days during dead week before flying back for graduation - which i missed because the school moved it to the rain site off campus and, well, i no longer had a car. stayed with karoline and billy over the next few days before realizing that i flew to albania on the 13th, not the 15th. frantically moved all my stuff to karoline's and packed for the next seven weeks, putting my life on my back. long day and a half of connections and then two days in tirana with mike, kailey, and sylvia before heading up north to shkodra where we would be working. we did intensive survey work during the day and cleaned, numbered, and archived artifacts, entered gps and gis data, along with various other translation and data entry regarding tracts, suitability, and land features or finds.

if you want to know agricultural or archaeological terms in albanian, i'm your girl. three weeks later, the albanian students left and the remaining american team members and the albanian professors stayed to wrap up. more field work to analysis and prioritize the tumuli we found in the survey area in terms of feasibility for future excavation and then did lab work and broke everything down for the end of the first season of the pash project. went up to theth, a small village in the shala valley area of northern albania, for three days.

 

after that,mike and sylvia dropped me and kailey back off in shkodra to start our backpacking trip. took a taxi to ulcinj, montenegro then made our way around eastern europe over the next two and a half weeks. we went to these places -

ulcinj, montenegro

dubrovnik, croatia

split, croatia

sarajevo, bosnia and herzegovina

belgrade, serbia

 

bucharest, romania

brasov, romania

bran, romania

sofia, bulgaria

skopje, macedonia  

tirana, albania

flew back to jackson on june 28th and took it easy for a little while before flying back to austin on july 9th. celebrated my brother chris' 21st birthday and packed for sweden, spending lots of time with my family in between. oh, and a lot of my time in jackson was spent putting together research for my independent project here in sweden. flew to stockholm on july 17th and landed on the 18th, drove to jönköping and i've been on the island of visingsö ever since. 

so basically, nine countries and two states later, i have been traveling for fourteen weeks and i still have three(ish) weeks to go. two transatlantic flights, two international, eight domestic, and twenty hours by car in the us, all by august 23rd. let's not even count buses and trains - at least three legs of the backpacking trip were over ten hours each. welcome to my life, everything in transit.