Hey everyone! I know, I know.... You have all been waiting patiently with anticipation for this next blog post. So sorry to keep you hanging for the past 2 weeks! There has just been so much going on, with so little time. I actually feel like I won't get any proper sleep until I get back to New Zealand. Or better yet, maybe until I actually get to swan dive in my own bed, own pillow, and minus 2 obnoxious snorers (nothing against them...bless their hearts). But enough of that. I'm definitely getting ahead of myself. Soooo.... where to start?
I'm sure you all have been wondering about the wildlife situation down here at Mactown. I bet you think I'm constantly being chased by giant, leech looking seals and playing patty-cake with the penguins. Well, sorry to disappoint, but it is quite the opposite. So far I have seen 3 penguins from a distance. And when I say "distance", I mean they looked like black toothpicks popping out of the ice - they were so far away. They have, however, been spotted next to the galley out at the Ice Runway town. I just was never there to see them. There have been quite a few seals lounging around on the ice. What they do is somehow break through the ice and just sunbathe. But, nothing so grand to take a photo of. Well, scratch that, there was one wicked photo opportunity the other day of a seal floppin its way along on the Ice Runway ramp, that I had to drive around, but of course my camera broke the day before. Just my luck. I would say the closest encounter I've had so far with any wildlife is with the Skua Bird. You might have heard of the skua bird? If not, consider yourself lucky. I had the unfortunate opportunity of meeting the skua bird on a one on one basis. See, if I had to guess, I would say that skua birds are the result of a seagull and vulture mating. They are very ugly birds and look like seagulls on steroids. And, worst of all, they are not afraid of humans... AT ALL! What happened was I was minding my own business, leaving the galley to walk back to work, and I had a plate of cookies to bring to the night crew. (Wednesday is cookie day and its a real drag if you miss it, so I volunteered to bring the night crew some). Anyways, I walked outside, headed up the hill, and BAM! A skua bird sneak attacked me from behind, hitting me right in the dome. I scurried back inside building 155 to get control of the situation and to wrap my scarf around the plate. Putting my brave face on I walked back outside to find another girl trying to pick up her dropped plate and scattered food off the ground and the same skua trying to snatch whatever he/she could grab. Poor girl definitely got it worse than I did. And of course any passing bystander feels obliged to laugh since it's very likely they have been there a time or two once before. Needless to say.... Lesson learned!
Hmmm... So maybe ya'll are wondering what has been occupying my time so much, besides the 54 hour work weeks, that I just have not had the time to blog. I think since the last time I've sat down to do this there have been a few parties and/or events that you just don't miss. Along with that, my free time is consumed with hiking, gerbil gym, soiree practice (the shuttle ladies are dancing in the annual Women's Soiree in December), or searching for a quiet place of solitude to have at least an hour to myself (so much easier said than done), before making the attempt of swan diving into my bed.
One party I attended was the Shuttles Party in Hut 10. Hut 10 is pretty awesome. It's like a mini house that you can rent for the night. It has a few bedrooms, kitchen, bathrooms, and a living room. My supervisor rented it out one night for a "shuttles" party. This party consisted of homemade pizza, homemade ice cream, and homemade lemon lime off brand kool-aid (kool-aid was courtesy of moi) Oh, and did I mention some intense Catch Phrase. Definitely can't have a party without Catch Phrase.
But, the party that kicks off the season for parties was the Halloween party. This Halloween party was probably one of the best Halloween parties I've ever been too. First of all, its amazing how creative people are down here. Unless you thought ahead of time and brought/sent down a costume, you had very little resources to work off of. Most people made their costumes in the craft room out of various things that you would never think to make a costume out of. Or the other option was going to skua or gear issue. Skua (named after the bird) is like Mactown's own little, free Goodwill. In each dorm their is a skua cubby
Last weekend was Phatass Bluegrass night at Gallaghers (1 of 2 bars here). This night was probably the most fun I've had so far. Phatass Bluegrass is a band that was put together here. It was straight bluegrass all night with lots and lots of dancing. My friend Will taught me how to 2 step and after that I don't think any of us left the dance floor for the rest of night. He and his friends are from Canada, down here working for Kenn Boreck Air. And, wow--who would've thought? Those Canadians sure know how 2 step.
What else... Oh yes. I conquered another hike. Well, most of it at least. This one was on the other side of base called Hut Point Ridge Loop. Although, I didn't really make it all the way around the loop because at one point when I was close to the end, I feared I was in Arrival Heights Territory. See, the trail walks along the edge of Arrival Heights. Well, that is what I know from the route mapped out on paper, but I couldn't see the red trail markers anywhere so I had no idea whether I was in it or not. Arrival Heights is an off limits area of the base where they do some radio wave testing? Something of the sort anyhoo. Because of this there is a certain area that you can't go in and if you do you will be fined a very big chunk of money. Therefore, you can understand my reason for panic forcing me to turn around. Regardless, the majority of the hike that I completed was pretty good. A bit steep at points, but worth it.
One thing that's pretty cool down here is the obtube. The obtube is a very claustrophobic tube that was put in to view whats under the ice. You climb down this tube like, what do I know, 10-12 feet under the ice, into a tiny chamber of windows. In this chamber you can look up at the ice, all around at the wildlife, and down to the ocean floor. You can't really see the ocean floor from what I remember, but you can see pretty far down. When I was there, there wasn't really much to look at. There was a lot of little white fish and that's about it. But, it was pretty cool to see all the ice crystals and what not. Some people have been really lucky to see seals swimming around. Once again, I have yet to be that lucky to see cool stuff like that.
Maybe you would like to know a little bit about McMurdo station? The best way for me to describe McMurdo is that it is like living in a very industrialized setting (that is a simile) or mining town. Not that I've ever lived in a mining town, but it is what I would imagine living in a mining town would be like. It is very dirty/muddy and there are loads of hills since we are living on a little mountain of volcanic rock. The buildings are very dull and quite the opposite of anything modern. The weather here has been pretty awesome. I expected that by living on the harshest continent in the world would mean I would be constantly freezing, but that's not the case at all. I find myself wearing thermals, jeans, a fleece with hiking boots and gloves. If I'm going to be walking outside I will throw on the Northface. Yesterday it was 28 degrees, sunny with no wind. I actually saw people walking around in shorts and lounging outside in chairs trying to get a.......tan? I don't know. Maybe they were just enjoying the weather, but regardless you would have thought it was 70 degrees down here by the reactions of certain people.
Oh! One major thing I forgot about was my Happy Camper experience. Finding out I was going to happy camper was a bit of a shock to me and I can't say I was extremely "happy" about going from what I had heard about it. I find out the afternoon before that I was going with my co-worker Blake. Happy Camper, like I've stated in a previous blog, is a 1 1/2 day survival training just off the base. We started at 8:15 a.m in a classroom talking about our goals of the training and weather injuries. Then we were picked up in a Delta (the big red vehicles) and dropped off at the training site. From there we went into a make-shift classroom for lunch and a briefing. After that we had stove training. The stoves we were trained on were little camping stoves that could use multiple types of fuels. Once that was completed we gathered up our sleeping gear, which was provided, tents, shovels, axes, saws, stoves, and our ECW gear and headed to the "campsite". There we were taught how to put up the tents by digging holes, anchoring them in, and tying them down with some crazy type of knot, which turns out I'm really good at doing. Once that was complete, we then moved onto building our snow wind wall. By using our saws and shovel we were able to cut blocks of snow out of the ground and then stack them into a wall. Of course you want to build your wall in between your tents and the direction of the wind flow to block the wind. At this point the best description of our "camp" is that it looked like an Indian village in the middle of nowhere in the snow. We were then taught, in our dug out make-shift kitchen, how to use the stoves and snow to make water. We ended up having to melt snow for a good 6 or more hours to make enough water to eat our dehydrated meals (YUM! in the most sarcastic tone you can imagine me saying), to drink, and fill up hot water bottles to sleep with. During this time, the instructors left and most people who were not designated or taking their turn monitoring the "kitchen" were building their trenches. The trench, which very much resembled a grave, was an optional place beside the tents, that you could sleep in if you wanted to take the 2 + hours time to dig it out. As tempting as digging my own grave sounded, I opted for the tent for the simple reason that in order to keep warm at night and trap the heat you had to come up with some type of "ceiling" to put over the trench (the majority is made out of thick blocks of snow). Now I don't know about you but the thought of sleeping in a deep trench (most were at least 5 ft deep), covered with thick snow blocks, borderline gave me a panic attack thinking that at any moment in my sleep it could collapse and I would be smothered to death by snow, therefore justifying my decision to sleep in a tent. I can't say that it was much better though. My sleeping bag was made to fit the size of a 5 year old child causing me to be stuffed in there sleeping like a mummy with my hands crossed over my chest (another simile), with 2 hot water bottles stuffed in socks to make sure I would not freeze to death, causing me to repeat over and over in my head to "just breathe, just breathe" as a way for me to forget that I couldn't move. Therefore, helping to move along the sleep process . At 3a.m. I awoke in a panic not being able to move, sweating like no other, ditching the the water bottles, unzipping the sleeping bag and ditching the thick down mittens I was wearing. After that, with the help of my Qantas eye mask (24 hour sunlight...remember?) I slept like a baby and woke up to people shaking our tent. When Blake and I finally got up and out of the tent to pack up, we realized that we had slept through the take down of both tents on either side of us. I'm still not sure how that happened. Once camp was down the instructors picked us up, we put away all the gear and returned to the "classroom" for radio training and learning about all the things that come in a survival pack on a plane. A little fun fact: the survival kits provide you with a fictional book to read, just in case you get bored while stranded in the middle of nowhere in Antarctica. Once that was done we slipped into two groups to practice what you would do in two different scenarios; an airplane crash and finding someone who was lost in a white out on the way to the out house. Both of which were quite interesting. To emphasize the "white out" conditions we had to put buckets over our heads in order to not see. And finally at 2 o'clock the delta came to pick us up. I must say that was the "happiest" part about happy camper :) Now don't get me wrong, happy camper was a great experience and I did have a semi-good time. On top of that I did learn a lot. If by chance I get stranded in a snow storm in Michigan I now know how to make a wind wall and to make shelter (assuming that in the aforementioned snow storm I "happen" to have a shovel, ax, saw, and stove). Happy Camper is something that I prefer to only experience once :)
My friends, dinner time has arrived and I prefer not to miss it :) You should know that I truly am loving life down here on the ice. I've made some good friends and am constantly meeting new, fascinating people everyday, and learning the most interesting and random things. I've definitely had to do some adjusting to the lack of privacy and alone time, but it is worth it. I find myself running off to the local library for a bit of peace and quiet from time to time :) I hope this blog reaches everyone doing well... Much Love!
P.S so sorry for not posting any pictures this time. Unfortunately, my camera R.I.P-ed at happy camper and I have no way of uploading the pictures at the moment. No worries though, a new camera is on the way. And if you are interested I do have an album started on my facebook page http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/album.php?aid=2501546&id=21704017
