London visits have offered opportunities for heuristic incubation and illumination, leading to a creative synthesis phase as i have been writing the Findings chapter of my thesis. Here is an extract of my research diary, in relation to this short travels and what occured as a result:

“Over a period of a couple of months, over which I have been trying to complete a draft of this chapter in order to give to my supervisor I visited London twice. Going to London as my destination, starting from another city in the UK always felt to me like going to another country; London feels like it is not England, although so many British cultural features of architecture and other local features are gathered there. But, the air of London is different, I rarely hear any English when walking in London Streets and I came up with calling the place ‘Blondon’ instead, due to the amount of blonde ladies (mainly from Eastern Europe as my Slovak immigrant friend has explained) I have seen there, amongst so many other ‘colours’. This chapter has not been easy to manoeuvre as I dived into my transcripts and created a mess of scattered paper all over my desk, as if I have ‘colonised’ the space at the shared study room at the University in order to have enough territory for all the material…and I got stuck so many times, in making decisions about how to present the data, what meaning does in carry and so on. During those visits to London, besides offering me opportunities for heuristic incubation and illumination, the repetitive phrase of ‘mind the gap’ in the tube prompted me into seeking for the gaps that needed acknowledging in my writing this chapter. As the doors were opening and closing at each station and I was listening to the ‘mind the gap’ alert from the automatic operator, I was finding myself in that liminal space again in relation to my thesis where I did not actually have to ‘mind the gap’ but step into it instead…and as I came back from London, the writing continued, through a further jump into what I have left behind on the desk waiting for my return. This last time I visited once again the British museum and spent a whole afternoon just at the Greek section, where ‘our marbles’ are…and…together with feelings of anger that those parts of my heritage, maybe the most important ones, are in exile, away from where they belong, the image of the ‘creative synthesis’ of my research became more crystallised…its setting is the Theatre of Dionysus, at the South foot of the Athenian Acropolis…I cant wait to take the train back to my desk…and write, what is revealed in front of my eyes, through taking the fragmented pieces and creating the whole, the archaeologist in me in is on call…it is a story of departure, discovery and homecoming, experienced and now to be told by myself and the fellow travellers of my research… the chorus of this plot – I invite the audience: may you be seated now, the play is about to start”