Most of our excursions start with breakfast at a little bakery in al-Nabk, the town near the monastery. Here the team are enjoying "little boat-shaped cheesy pizza things" (I really need to find out the Arabic term for those things). Our objective on this day was actually work, we were to visit a newly opened museum at the nearby town of Deir Atiyeh, to see how it would compare with the museum we intend to build for the monastery. It is a very large complex of buildings, architecturally influenced by the work at Deir Mar Musa, using traditional techniques of building with stone, so it would be a close parallel to our own building. It was a fascinating exhibit inside, but they seemed to have gone into the "open storage" type of exhibit, essentially indiscriminatly putting out everything they have. My favourite was the dsiplay of plough-shares, which looked like someone had alarmed a flock of starlings!
It was a long hard day, and after a while museum fatigue completely overwhelmed us. We totally lost the ability to discern what was worth looking at, and what wasn't. Here the team are mesmerised by a display of gun cartridges in the military exhibit.
On the whole it was very informative, and gave us some ideas for the Deir Mar Musa exhibition building.
Robert
