The beginnings of an international correspondent

In tradition of being a writer, I find comfort in those that share my passion. I enjoy writing about a variety of things because they bring challenge to my job, and educate me about things I didn't know before. But the biggest challenge for me would be to take away the language I know so much about (most of the time), and have an assignment to write about a completely different one.
Vanessa Veiock, a senior at the University of Iowa, was a student in Spanish and journalism when she combined the two in a semester in Spain. "Lost in translation" is a literal description of what happened to Vanessa in her study abroad experience.

Vanessa wrote for CafeAbroad.com, a social networking site for study abroad students, in the fall of 2006, and continues to write and edit for their new print additions. Knowing Spanish, and majoring in it, Vanessa said was still not able to completely prepare her for this internship. CafeAbroad.com has postings on the restaurants, dance clubs, festivals and other local specialties written by students in the area for other or future students. She wrote about an article per week, and some reviews of local bars and bands. For this, Vanessa said she would have to interview patrons and business owners, which was not the same as she would when she wrote the The Daily Iowan.
"Email is not as popular," she said. "There it could take up to five weeks for someone to get back to you."
She also struggled with the words themselves, having to translate as she wrote. Vanessa studied in San Sebastian, a region in northern Spain called Basque where local dialect is more similar to Italian, she said.
Without the fallback of email, which many journalists and laypeople alike take for granted, Vanessa began to enjoy face time with her sources. She would develop relationships with them, "instead of relying on a machine."
She interviewed the owner of a cider house, which was owned by the same family for generations. By talking in the best Basque she could, she saw for herself the tradition involved in a cider mill.

As Vanessa and I are talking, she describes her rings, of which she has eight, coming from different places and people. She gives off a graceful air, which we both agree to atribute to her travel experience. Traveling gives you a sort of confidence, she said, especially to a country with a foreign language. Trying new things, like local foods, requires an adventurous spirit. Unpleasantries aside, which are going to be common in unfamilar places, developing as a stronger person, and in Vanessa's case, a stronger writer, follows you your whole life.

Vanessa definitely still has her travel bug inside of her - while abroad the first time she also traveled to Scotland, Portugal, Italy, and even a spontaneous individual trip to Dublin. She will also be traveling to India over winter break for more hands-on experience, this time learning business planning for non-profits.

What is she talking about?

As a late introduction, I should tell you all what I will be writing about.

I abhor cliches, but when it comes to study abroad, they kind of are all right. Best experience of my life, changed my life, worth all the pennies. Blah blah blah.
Traveling is one of life's greatest adventures, often wildly unpredictable and at times confusing. Take my first day in the Netherlands: I waited an hour and a half for my ride to the house I was staying at, outside the train station, in a country where I did not speak the language. Close to a panic attack, I realized I needed to suck it up and work it out for myself. And wouldn't you know it, that taxi driver spoke English.

The willingness to put yourself out in the unknown, to risk money and time, is a rare ability. As students, now is the time to risk it all. After all, you're still on your parent's insurance right?

I have shared the best of my study abroad experiences; next time I will share someone else's unique experience and the lessons learned.

How to be an archaeologist

View of the dig site from a giant crane.

Me and my fellow trenchie, Laura, digging what turned out to be a medieval trash pit, on top of a Roman walkway.

First, have unending patience. Expect to find one artifact of value every 20 days. But usually, that one item will be paired with several others - especially if the pot was broken. And I swear I found it like that.

For one month this summer, I participated in an excavation in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Nijmegen, located near the border of Germany about two hours south of Amsterdam by train, is a typical university town in Europe - which coincidentally is very similar to university towns in America. It is even complete with wannabe-punk students and many who speak English better than some freshmen.

I, for the record, have no patience. I am what you might call a "fair-weather archaeologist." When I found something of value, that one day, it was the greatest day I had yet. All other days were, politely said, learning experiences. Boring ones.

I need to squash this myth right now: archaologists are not Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. They are usually bureaucratic-looking men in their 50s who spend most of the time in their office, writing papers about their organization's digs, and driving their Jaguars to the dig site once a week or so to check on progress.

This description is not meant to demean or ridicule the archaologist. But every job, every organization or business has to have the office boss-man, and the Bureau Archeologie Gemeente (municipality) Nijmegen had Kees Brok. Kees (pronouced kays) worked his way up from a field worker to archaeologist, through university degrees and excavations, to be Gemeente Nijmegen's head archaeologist. The ones in the site, digging and planning, getting dirty for several hours a day, are either field technicians or field directors.

My boss, Jerone, was a very young field director. In fact, he was actually a field technician assistant - the field director left Jerone much of the responsibility, unofficially. At 28, he was running his own site, located in a residential neighborhood near the River Waal. I would mostly see him in a construction jacket (brightly colored so not to get run over by the cranes) and a hard hat, walking with various field workers, discussing the problems of pipes or time constraints.
You see, Nijmegen is old. Two-thousand-years-old to be exact. They just celebrated their birthday in 2005. The Romans built a military camp along the river in the 1st century, and the city has been added upon by Batavians, Charlemagne, and various Germans. About five feet below the ground surface, I found artifacts from the 1950s, medieval times, and even a few Roman building bricks.

Since there is such history in this city, new developments are carefully handled. The site I worked on was a former housing block where the city wanted to put up new condos. Somewhere in legal clauses it states that before any new building project, the city must conduct an environmental impact survey, one of which is archaeological. This site began in March, and when I left in early August, they were fighting their timeline of September.

This is where I discovered the most disheartening thing about archaeology. You don't get to save everything. Willingly. After a day or so, Jerone had to make the call whether a pit was worth the manpower (the site is divided into several pits, usually depending on age and type of artifacts). Many times they would come across a virtual field of (sometimes broken) pottery from a Roman trash heap, but wouldn't have enough time to comb through it all, and so left it to move onto another site. The head of my pit, Martijn, said this was sometimes a shame they had to leave artifacts they knew were there because there was no time.

However, giving me renewed hope as well as an overwhelming headache was the warehouse. Comparing just one site to the abundence of artifacts still needing cleaning and processing in the warehouse put it into perspective that perhaps we didn't need to get those last bits of broken pottery, so tiny I usually thought they were rocks. The storage capabilities of these types of warehouses make it seem like there should be a thousand more museums in the world, just for Roman artifacts in upper Europe, and if only just for me (I did visit several archaeological museums in the Netherlands and Germany, and became excited to see artifacts similar to what I had handled myself).

While I can never picture myself being a field technician or an archaeologist, I appreciate the work they do to bring history alive for the rest of the world, and relished in my part in that.
There is something oddly satisfying about shaving away the centuries of muck, which to me looked like chocolate shavings. Also bragging about knowing a little Dutch, when in fact most of those words are work phrases. Pauze! (break-time)

One of Nijmegen's city squares, or platz. It's really something to be in a town with a deeper history than my entire country.