Heat. My hometown of Grand Marais, Minnesota could never have prepared me for this heat. Grand Marais is a place where I have seen snow every month of the year except July. It is alway cool, mild, chilled, like a bottle of water pulled from the middle of the lake. Here, the heat follows you. It stalks you everywhere; the shade, inside, the car. The only escape is my air conditioned dorm room. It’s 10:42 in the morning and I’m two liters in, something the adorable luke-warmth of Minnesota would never ask of me. The Mediterranean is less like a cool drink of lake water and more like the cloying and sticky taste of anise flavored Turkish raki. This heat is indescribable.
We finished digging early on Thursday, thanks to the end of Ramazan. After a lunch in the shade, we all piled into the bus to travel down the cliffs to the secret pirate cove next door. With a hot day of digging done, jumping into the Mediterranean is likely the most refreshing thing I have experienced. With cliffs aplenty to jump from, and a freshwater spring to rinse off with, looking into the deep blue of the cove is to view an oasis of cool in this scorched land