elanya

First off, I keep wanting to call this my Grand Bahamian Adventure, but I thik that would be a bit misleading, since Grand Bahama is one of the islands, and I doubt I'll be getting out there. I have a secret thought of taking a local flight out to Eleuthera or Harbour Island on my last weekend here, maybe. We'll see.

There are no clocks in the rooms here. i was paranoid about oversleeping, so i kept waking up in the night, turning on my computer to check the time, and then going back to sleep. I finally got up for real around 8, and went out to check the free breakfast here. Yeah. you get what
you pay for I supose. There were kind of dried out orange sections, some crappy bread for toast, an empty tray of muffins (the lady in front of me took the last one), some hard boiled eggs, and chese slices. Also coffee, hot water for tea, and some 'juice' that was suspiciously reminiscent of tang. I think I will pick up some tea of my own. I had a piece of toast and some orange sections, plus tang. I sorted things out at the front desk, and paid for my stay (I think?). The fallout is that I lost my holding fee, since, you know, I never showed up in may when I'd booked for. Guh, I'm still not sure how that happened, exactly. And I'm paying 85$/night instead of 67, which is still not a bad rate for Nassau. And it will be reimbursed. Well except for my holding fee, *sigh*.

That got sorted by 9, and I was trying to decide how to run the rest of my day - the archives are open from 10 until 4:45. I came up to my new room and decided I'd watch some tv and chill for a bit before setting out - I wasn't sure how long it would take me to walk. Then i decided what the hell - I'll just go and take some time to poke around. I estimate that it took me between 30 and 45 min in the end. I stopped and poked around an old graveyard, and startled some little lizards. Should have made for the camera, but i couldn't remember which pocket it was in! Ahh well.

I got to the archives almost at en on the nose, and there were already people in the research room. I signed in and tried to figure out exactly what I was doing. I also managed to track bright white/grey mud allll over the carpet as I'd stepped in some on my trek in and it hadn't dried enough to wipe off. On their nice dark blue carpet... also one of the chairs >_< That really impresed the archivists, I'm sure. Ahh well, c'est la vie. I didn't notice until it was waaay too late to do anything about either.

So, I went through the archives guide and picked out things I think I can use. I started looking for archaeology stuf on the islands I'm most interested in. There were two books listed. One was on Eleuthera pre-history, and it had a little bit of useful stuff, talking about where pre-historic sites are located, what the soils are like, and so forth. Much like the European colonists, the Lucayans/Arawaks who lived on Eleuthera lived on the western coast - the lee side. in fact, modern (and I'm not sure how the author was defining modern... just existant during his survey, I suspect) tended to be on old arawak sites because there was more organic soil built up there from previous human occupation. The Bahamas are mostly limestone, and there isn't much good soil.

The second book, entitled "An Archaeological Survey of Spanish Wells and Northern Eleuthera" was, of course, missing. This is a bit of a bitch, because Spanish Wells is one of the communities *I* was hoping to suervey. Now, chances are this was another prehistoric survey, but nevertheless, it would be nice to know where people have already dug! I am going to see if I can track down the author, one Robert Carr. And ask my contact here with the archaeology branch, of course.

My last area of investigation for today were the wills. I went through a guide to to wills in 3 volumes, and uncovered about 50 names of people who lived before the final Spanish occupation of the Islands in the 1770's-80's. Then i started going through the wills. I'm not sure exactly what I was hoping to find, really... The collection is on microfilm, first off, and of course the oldest ones are the most illegible. There is also just not much useful data - most of the wills are from New Providence, and they are all like "I leave one negro to each of my children and my belioved spouse, and the kids can divide the land evenly." So i got through the first 15 or so (this is hunting through the microfilm which is *supposed* to be in alphabetical order but aren't, and some of the ones they claim are there I simply couldn't find, let alone read...) and decided it was not really helpful. By that time it was just about 3:30 and I decided that was enough for the day. I hadn't stopped for lunch. The microfilm room was dark and I kept almost nodding off, and I was starving. Tomorrow I will go back and look at things that are hopefully more interesting if not more *useful*.

I walked back a different (more sidewalky, less muddy!) route, stopped in at a random crap store and bought some water and a cheap alarm clock. Then I stopped at another store and bought a bigger thing of water and some snacks - salt craving after walking out in the sun! And then I stopped at Subway to grab my much belated lunch. I didn't see any great looking/cheap local places that were open :p

I got back, ate half my veggie sub, and crashed for about an hour. Then I put away clothes in the dresser - I figure I'm here for two weeks so I may as well not just live out of a suitcase if I don't have to. And then I wrote this! now I am going downstairs to post and check email, etc, and then I'm going out to investigate the internet cafe I saw earlier. I hope it isn't too pricey - i was one sign (not the same place I hope) that was adversiting 20c/min D: If that's all I can find, I'm going to have to bow out of my games these next coupe of weeks afterall :/

I did find a cafe with decent rates, alas they are only open until 8:45, so I can't play any games that start late or run late :p Booo! I'll look around some more, maybe, but I think this may be it :/