This past Sunday, the University of Cadiz organized a trip to go to Bolonia for the day and to get a semi-behind-the-scenes tour of the old Roman city of Baelo Claudia. In the morning, the archaeologist who was directing the current excavation going on at Baelo Claudia gave us a tour of the ruins, but also showed us the excavation he was overseeing. This tour was all in Spanish like the bodega tour, but this time the only group getting the tour was our small group and, thankfully, Juan Carlos translated what the archaeologist said.

The city used to be home to 2000 people and was an important fishing port due to its location on the Mediterranean, situated very close to Africa. I was surprised by how much of the city still had to be excavated. We got to see a lot of the city, but it seemed like the majority of the city was still buried under the ground and the archaeologists were just waiting to get funding to start digging. My camera ran out of batteries as soon as I got there (I forgot to recharge the battery after La Alhambra), so I don't have many good pictures. But here are a few I do have.

That's me standing on the side of the theater.

Juan Carlos (with camera) translating what the archaeologist (with sunglasses) was saying.

The group under a classic Roman arch.

The ruins with the beach in the background.

Last Thursday, I started running a fraction of mine through an HPLC machine we have in the allelopathy lab. It's the same one my mentor used when he was going for his PhD. It took two hours to stabilize, but we eventually got it to work and started running samples. Three pure compounds were collected and I will run them through the NMR tomorrow. The other peaks, from which I got more than one compound, will be run through the HPLC again, this time using a different solvent to try and get the elution times to spread out more.