Johannesburg

After a few days in Pretoria, I traveled south to Johannesburg to work at the University of Witswaters- rand. Luckily, I took the advise of fellow UI grad student Dan Proctor and stayed with Alison Groves and her family in the suburb of Melville. While Johannesburg is generally widely recognized as one of the less safe places in the world, Melville is really nice with tons of bars and restaurants to choose from, and I never once felt uncomfortable while there. While at Wits I split time working in the P.V. Tobias Fossil Lab and the Raymond Dart Collection. Wits curates some of the most famous fossils in the world, including the Taung child, which I was allowed to see (albeit under constant surveillance). The Dart collection is one of the most extensive collections of African skeletal remains in the world, and the new curator, Brandon Billings, is steadily turning the collection to a first-class research facility (he is also one of the coolest people I've ever met). Wits also turned out to be a great place to meet fellow anthropologists from around the world. While working with the Dart collection I met fellow researchers from Scotland and Croatia, and even had the opportunity to meet Dr. Liu Wu, with whom I had previously made all my arrangements to visit IVPP in Beijing, China (scheduled for December). Over the weekend Alison was nice enough to take me out to Sterkfontein so that I could see the caves, it was an absolutely unreal experience to be somewhere I had read so much about! I had a great time in Johannesburg, and hope I can return again in the future.

Pretoria

After an incredibly long 30 hour journey, including a 16.5 hour flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg (I watched 5 movies in a row) I arrived in South Africa on the night of November 15th. I began work at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria on the 16th, where I had the opportunity to work with the 1.5 million year old SK847 Homo erectus cranium. While I was there I also had the opportunity to study the famous Sts 5 (Mrs Ples) australopithicine dated to about 2.5 million years ago and Sk 48, one of the most complete specimens of Paranthropus robustus. A real perk to working at the Transvaal is the on-site dormitories the museum provides for a tiny fee, which allows researchers to work late even after the staff have gone home for the night. The museum's reverence for the illustrious Robert Broom is fairly obvious, especially when you work in a room full of Broom memorabilia and retrieve specimens from a large walk-in safe filled with fossils affectionately known as the "Broom Room." The displays in the museum were also lots of fun, I couldn't help but laugh at finally getting to see the display of the Australopithecine being drug away by a leopard, something that I will forever associate with Russ Ciochon. Everyone at the museum was incredibly nice, from the curator Stephany Potze to the lady in the cafeteria that served me lunch everyday (which was probably the best I've ever eaten for less than $5).

New York City

I arrived in New York in mid-October to begin work at the American Museum of Natural History where I studied the museum's cranial collection looking at European, Eskimo, and Australian skulls. The curator, Gisselle Garcia-Pack, was incredibly helpful and I had a lot of fun overhearing some of the ridiculous phone calls she had to deal with. My personal favorite was lady who wanted to know if Gisselle (a skeletal biologist) could tell her if the pot she just found was Native American over the phone (only slightly better than the guy who called saying he had figured out the "secret" behind racial skin color). My very humble Upper West Side lodgings on 94th and Broadway provided me with a really enjoyable walk everyday to the museum on 77th and Columbus, and the weather cooperated most of the time too. As with D.C., Tressa was able to spend a weekend visiting and we managed to see most of the major sites such as Central Park, Grand Central Station, Ground Zero, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Statue of Liberty.

Washington, D.C.

After only a couple of brief weeks back home in Iowa City (mostly spent frantically planning the rest of my trip), I headed to Washington, D.C. to work at the National Museum of Natural History again to study their collection of fossil casts and Eskimo, Mongolian, and Australian Aborigine skulls. Having spent time at the NMNH in 2007, it was great to go back and see everyone at the museum again. Even better, since Kurt and Tara Lewis had recently moved there, I got to stay with some great friends during my time in the nation's capital, making my 3 weeks away from Tressa easier to handle. Thankfully, Tressa was able to come out and spend a weekend in D.C. and so we got some sight-seeing in as well as spending some quality time with Kurt, Tara, Olaiya, and Naomi. Having been to D.C. several times now, Tressa and I were less concerned with hitting the major attractions and instead focused on some of our favorite stops. Tressa, of course, had to visit the Corcoran gallery, her favorite art museum. I really wanted to see the American History Museum again since it had been recently renovated. As before, it displayed possibly my favorite historical statue: the original Washington Monument, a statue of George Washington wearing a toga. Tressa, however, was really excited about one of the new exhibits: a full scale reconstruction of Julia Child's kitchen (Tressa watches her show on PBS every Saturday morning).

Home

Tressa and I finally got home to Iowa City on Monday, August 31st after a less than smooth trip back from Vienna involving a long delay in London and an extra night spent in Chicago. Hannah Marsh picked us up at the Cedar Rapids airport and brought us home, where we anticipated the usual shenanigans played on us after a long absence... the gang put forth a pretty solid effort this time.

Greece

Tressa and I rolled into Thessalonica (Thessaloniki), Greece in the early hours of August 26th after a 17 hours train ride from Bucharest, Romania (complete with a 2 hour layover in Sofia, Bulgaria and a couple of fun 3 am passport control stops along the Buglaria-Greece border). While riding through Bulgaria I couldn't help but notice the hundreds (maybe thousands) of rock shelters littering the mountainsides along the train tracks. I could only wonder how many Neandertals used to live in those valleys. After waiting in the Thessalonica train station for a few hours (we watched CNN at a cafe, Ted Kennedy died while we waited) we headed to George Koufos' lab at Aristotle University so I could study the Petralona cranium. I had saved Petralona for last, primarily because of the geographic difficulties in getting to Thessalonica, but also because it gave me something to look forwards to the entire trip. It was everything I had hoped for and more. Having previously studied a number of Petralona casts, this is definitely one specimen where nothing compares to the original, there's all sorts of little epigenetic features that casts just don't pick-up. After taking all my measurements and pages of copious notes, I finally had to acknowledge that it was time to get my very patient wife to a shower, and we headed off to our hotel.

Our hotel was exactly what we needed, a small relaxing place right on the Mediterranean. After enjoying a long awaited shower, Tressa and I headed out to the beach for a drink and some fresh seafood. We lounged on the beach for as long as we could, enjoying the sunset before crawling into bed to get some much needed sleep before our ridiculously early flight back to Vienna (you can read Tressa's blog to hear about this airline adventure).

Romania

Tressa and I rolled into Bucharest, Romania on Sunday, August 23rd after enduring a grueling 19 hour train ride from Vienna. I had feared that the worst was yet to come, as I had heard some real horror stories about Bucharest hotels, but our hotel turned out to be one of the best we stayed at in Europe. It was incredibly clean, air- conditioned, had super friendly staff, and about $30 a night...it was exactly what we needed after 3 months of traveling on a shoestring. On Monday one of the staff at the the Institutul de Speologie arrived at our hotel and walked us to the institute. Erik Trinkaus had warned me that we would never find the institute on our own, and he was right, it was truly in the backstreets of Bucharest. For lunch, the guys at the institute took us to a fun local restaurant where we got to enjoy a Romanian specialty, Modovian Stew, a unique mix of unidentifiable internal organs, polenta and a fried egg. After getting over the initial idea of it, i actually found it to be really good. Back at the institute I worked with the Oase 2 cranium and Oase 1 mandible, likely the oldest H. sapiens fossils in Europe. It was just another one of those fantastically surreal experiences of working with fossils that I never thought I'd ever actually get to see. At the end of the day, the director, Dr. Silviu Constantin, walked us back to our hotel, where we spent the night anxiously watching the news (the room even came with a TV with english stations!) about the forest fires in Greece... our next destination.