Monday, October 11, 2010

what have you been up to?

in class we have been working on density. dish soap, rubbing alcohol, olive oil, detergent concentrate, and vinegar organized so that they create seperate layers in a 25 ml graduated cylinder. one of my favorite labs.
Eleftheria's parents' house in the village. Eleftheria designed the house by herself.
Bella
patuna: aka big foot
so, these are actually backwards, but its cool. this is what i have been up to. i helped eleftheria's family harvest olives over a weekend a little bit ago. this is me dumping a load of olives into the sorting machine.
the sorting machine in action. there are different categories of olives dependent upon size and quality.
that is eleftheria's mom picking out spoiled olives that make it through.
olive trees are super cool. and there are massive amounts of olives. the family owns two fields of 150 and 300 trees. the weekend before i worked the the larger field was harvested: 10 tons of olives.
getting into it.
eleftheria's father in retired but he does this as a hobby.
the neighbors are the ones who collect all the olives from the village to sell to the distributors. pretty convenient.
protests. i am always impressed with my camera.
illustrating the significance of protests. this man is selling coulouri (a local bread) in the middle of the street as the protest passes him.
cool random pic.
cool random pic.
petralona cave. a massive cave system (6 km long) in chalkidiki. an early hominid was found here. it is considered to be middle species between homo erectus and early sapians. there is a super interesting back story to the whole thing full of theological cover-ups, scientific mis-calculations, exaggeration, hit squads and ethnocentric foolery. fun stuff.

5 comments:

K said...

Glad you're alive. The density lab is always fun. Don't forget that on top of it all floats the air in the classroom. And the ceiling must be least dense 'cause it's even above the air!

Karen and Pat said...

Ian - great pictures! Fun to see Eleftheria's parents and the house. That is a serious amount of olives! Miss talking to you - maybe thursday? Love you:-)

Karen and Pat said...

ok keith - even i know that the ceiling thing isn't right! Did you see the video on LeAnna's blog? Pretty funny!

Adam said...

AWESOME pictures Ian!!! Thanks for the update. I especially like the one of you picking the olives with the basket. That's neat how the basket attaches to your earholes. I never would've thought to do that.

P.S. The word verification for this comment was "sucks"! Probably true.

Sarah said...

Wow, it looks like you were a substitute host for Mike Rowe on Dirty Jobs! Well, it doesn't look TOO dirty, just like something he would do, and your outfit is similar. FUN! Any Christmas plans yet? I am going to have to work a shift some point over this break :( but it should be more towards new years. It will be here before we know it.
Thanks for posting! I have been hoping for one for a while ;)