KERNAVE - I've always thought that the level of difficulty of the job depends only on the specific tasks you have to maintain. The harder these tasks are, the harder your job gets. This is why physical activities are considered to be harder than the mental ones. I'd say that an average construction worker gets more tired by the end of the day than say, a sales manager or a journalist. This is the part where you would disagree and mention the level of responsibility, tension and stress. But stress is one thing, whereas tiredness is another, despite the fact that they often come together. The number of arguments in favor of one or another is endless which is why there is no point in arguing.
But I've got it all figured out. The people that get the most tired are the people who hate their jobs. If you were an active sales guru and you were forced to translate all of the contracts with your clients from English to Chinese you'd be more tired than a World Champion in solving the Rubik's cube forced to enter a weight-lifting competition after a couple of beers. And there's not only the task itself, but also the working environment. A loudmouth like myself is very likely to commit suicide when he has to spend his whole day in a room full of IT-guys who don't talk at all and perceive the world around them in binary codes, people with emotional deficit in its worst display.
There's no problem at all in working alone in an empty room. You can concentrate better and you don't have to worry about your appearance. You can also play your own music, sing along and drink cold coffee as loud as you like. When there's nobody around you don't feel the necessity to talk. But things change and it gets a lot worse as soon as there are other people, lots of them in fact, and you'd very much enjoy to share some stories or opinions, but establishing a contact is as hard as making square sushi-rolls while falling out of an aeroplane.
So for every profession there's a special kind of person. Some require attention to detail and accuracy, like if you work for Rolls-Royce, some require availability of one good hand if you're a SsangYong designer. Being an astronaut requires physical durability and a fair amount of courage, while a florist only has to have no allergies and some idea of the concept of beauty.
What does it take then, to be an archaeologist? An occupation that enables you to tell a potential Nobel Prize from a dead rat. Of course they have all those fancy bulldozers, but I've never heard of a Bobcat that was awarded a Nobel Prize for its achievements in archaeology. The things that we know about our ancestors are only available to the broad public thanks to the men and women in round glasses, ridiculous white shorts and a brush in their hand. If it wasn't for them we would never have seen a picture of a dinosaur, or Jurassic Park for that matter. Darwin wouldn't have come up with evolution. People manufacturing those white shorts wouldn't have a business.
But most importantly we would have never known about thousands of the most interesting places on the planet, one of which is the State Cultural reserve of Kernave in Lithuania. It is an archaeological site on the ruins of the first Lithuanian capital city. Nearly 30 years of thorough research have shown that the first inhabitants appeared in this particular part of the world in the 9th-8th millennium BC. Since then it was continuously inhabited up until the end of the 14th century when it was burnt down by the Crusaders. It is the only complex of five hill forts along the whole coast of the Baltic Sea and it reflects the very essence of the local life of a different times, because there are thousands of different hill forts in the Baltics but this complex is the biggest and the most important one. One of these forts was the estate of the Great Dukes of Lithuania in the 13th century and thanks to the thick layer of alluvial deposit, the so called 'Lithuanian Troy' remained untouched for more than 700 years for the archaeologists to find.
The site also features a museum, which is unfortunately closed for renovation, but guided tours are still available for booking so if you're interested in history or you know that your ancestors used to live in Kernave, I honestly think that it is worth your time visiting this incredible place before it's all covered with snow.
