"No, not at all," Indy said, waving her concern off. "Research might not be as glamorous as field work, but you can't have the latter without the former. And yes, I've had some interesting finds in my day--I go on at least a couple of expeditions a year, and I usually come up with something interesting." Although he didn't come away with anything interesting, as often as not.

Indy considered briefly what artifacts to mention--claiming to have found the Holy Grail would earn him strange looks, even here. Better play it safe, tell her about something exciting but not far-fetched. "My latest piece is a gold crucifix that's supposed to contain a fragment of the original Cross. It's from the sixteenth-century; the conquistador Cortés gave it to a fellow Spanish explorer." There, that should be interesting enough.

"I can't say I've heard of that spice, though," he added. "It sounds a little like a marketing line, but I guess it's always possible."

He'd been right about Japan, but that seemed like an unusual model for a school to Indy. "How long have you been studying there?" he asked with interest. A system like that had both a lot of potential merits and a lot of potential drawbacks; he was a little curious as to how the students felt about it.