Done for a Week

Hello everyone! The week is over, and now begins our break for Passover. We have all of next week off, coming back on Tuesday the 22nd. It should be a nice break from the early mornings and the hard work.

The end of the past week was dedicated to stone material and conservation. We had lectures Tuesday and Thursday with a workshop in the Hospitaller Fortress on Wednesday. The lecture started by discussing the different types of rock (igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary) and then went into their properties and uses in building construction. Then we discussed the types of problems that can affect stone walls, and the different methods of conservation for the different problems. We discussed a lot about the issues of water and salts, since these are the major problems on the coast that cause deterioration of the stone. We also discussed the problems of prior conservation attempts and the deterioration and destruction that older methods can cause when the materials are not understood. While part of the lecture was a repeat of what we have learned before, it also went more in depth and gave us a better understanding of the problems that face conservation of stone.

The workshop in the Hospitaller Fortress involved mostly cleaning stone objects. We did power washing, cleaning with scalpels and brushes, and cleaning with an ammonium bicarbonate poultice. The ammonium bicarbonate is a white and blobby material that we applied to the surface so it could clean the ash and dirt off the surface of the objects. As it dries it kind of looks like salt crystallization. We were stationed in the courtyard outside the entrance to the Hospitaller Fortress, which meant we were again in the perfect spot to be interrupted by tourists. The most frequent question we got was if the objects we were working on were from the sea, since the ammonium bicarbonate poultice looked like salt encrustation. After lunch there was less to do with the objects that were being cleaned, so they sent me into the inner courtyard to clean the columns and trebuchet balls in the courtyard using a power washer. It wasn't exactly the type of work that I expected to do in the workshop, but it was work that needed to be done and it gave us experience working with those materials.

Our Local Culture for the week was visiting the Student Village in the old city. The student village is an area where university students live while they study, while also doing community work in the city. There are fourteen student villages around the Negev and the Galilee, and they are pegged as the new kibbutzim.

I am writing this blog post from the train, and it is almost my stop. I will post again either later in the week or when I am back in Akko. Everyone have a good weekend and a good Passover!