Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Courses Offered at the Australian University of Anna
I've been busy learning lots of things during my visit here in Australia. So far I've taken:How to Speak Australian: "G'day, sorry to cut your lunch, but you're a poxy boyfriend, so I'm shouting your missus dinner." I know what that means now.
Guitar 101: Anna's boyfriend Carl gave me my first lesson in guitar today. I can play a scale, two chords, and "When the Saints Go Marching In" already.
Cricket, History and Rules: Nothing a trip to the Bradman Museum can't teach you.
Driving On the Wrong Side of the Road: I've driven a few times here. Anna says I'm doing well, but I'm still practicing. I haven't mastered city driving or the round-abouts yet.
Australian Gardening: Watch for snakes, wear your gaiters (see things around my legs in photo below) so snakes can't bite you, and drink lots of water (leave it to me to almost pass out from dehydration).
Sailing on Sydney Harbour
View from the sailboat:
Me and Anna on the boat:
The trip was not for one prone to seasickness!
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
A Few Weeks In Oz
For some reason, most of the computers I use in New Zealand and Australia will not let me log on to update my weblog. So, my apologies for the very few updates you're getting.I arrived in Sydney on Thursday last week. I waited in a ridiculously long line to declare some beef jerkey (it made it through New Zealand customs so I figured it wouldn't be a problem in Oz), only to have some guy rip it out of my hands and chuck it on the ground as I got to the front of the line. I could've tossed it in the garbage can before wasting all that time in line. Anna, the first Aussie I was to visit, asked me if it would be possible for me to take the train to a city near where she lived so we wouldn't have to sit in traffic. No problem. Hopped the train, and arrived in Campbelltown earlier than Anna expected. They were only two minutes away when I called them.
We have been spending the last 5 days catching up on the last two and a half years, visiting her family at Mundrakoona, lounging around at her new place Tarlo Cottage near Burrawang, and celebrating her new job at a tree nursery down the road. Her family was invited to spend Saturday on a sailboat in Sydney Harbor, and since her brothers couldn't make it, I got to go along with! The people who owned the sailboat had asked Anna's family if they could use a logo from one of their wine labels, Artemis, because the boat was named Artemis after the guy's wife. So as a treat to the family, they were invited to sail about for the day. I was so lucky to get to go along!
My Aussie knowledge is improving greatly. I've learned quite a few new words and phrases, and my goal to learn the rules of cricket is slowly being reached. Yesterday, Anna took me to the Bradman Museum in Bowral. The museum includes history on the game of cricket, and highlights the life of Sir Don Bradman, the greatest batsmen of all time.
Only two more days lounging here in Burrawang, and we've got a list of things to do. Movie night tonight watching an Aussie comedy classic, The Castle. Tomorrow we're having dinner at the local pub as a send-off of sorts.
Thursday I will arrive in Melbourne and meet up with Mark, my traveling buddy for the month of April. We'll be surfing at the beachhouse in Anglesea and studying maps of Azerbaijan and making all kinds of crazy travel plans for the future (even the most impossible of plans... we like to daydream).
I'll be home a week from today!! Sorry no photos to include as I can't seem to find the USB port on this laptop.
Missing those Ben Bonnet hugs! How's the Ice? Are you guys just holding it together or living it up? Can't wait to hear from you!
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Jacob: Next Year
Hey, kiddo... I'm thinking I will probably keep this for next year, and of course I'm still not done updating for this year so there will be plenty of more updates before I'm finished.Why do you need to know?? See you soon!!
Off the Ice
I'm off the Ice! We boarded the C-17 at Pegasus around 5pm or 5:30 and arrived in Christchurch around 10:30. At the beginning of the flight we could see snow-covered mountains and icebergs! I spent the first couple hours chatting with my friend Erik in the back of the plane so I wouldn't disturb the people I was sitting next to that were trying to sleep.After we landed in Christchurch we were loaded onto a few buses and driven to the international arrivals. I was so excited to be standing on pavement, I kept jumping up and down until we boarded the bus. The first store we walked past as we entered the airport was a perfume store, a little overwhelming for my sense of smell. If you didn't already know this, there aren't very many things to smell in Antarctica, and the longer you're there, the more sensitive it becomes. We went through immigration, where Ralph was stopped because of the similarity between his last name and some fugitive or something. I made it through customs, and then Ralph and I had cart races on the walk to the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center). As I was about to go into the room to turn in all of my gear, I realized that I was so excited to get luggage on the conveyor belt, that I forgot a small duffel bag. Luckily, one of the CDC guys had just brought it over. I handed in all of my gear, and then I caught a shuttle to my hostel.
After checking in and dropping off my stuff, I went to Cathedral Square to meet up with Ralph and Erik (who were staying in much nicer hotels) for some late night dinner and drinks. Bailey's, a pub with lots of Antarctic memorabilia, stayed open late when they heard our flight was coming in after most places were closed. We got a couple of pizzas and some draught beer and just relaxed a bit. The boys walked me home... such gentlemen.
I was walking to my room on the 3rd floor of the building and a big bug flew in front of me and scared me half to death. I forgot bugs existed, I guess. And that they were so big here.
The next day my friend Adriana and I went for a Greek lunch at Dmitri's and then caught a shuttle to the CDC to mail some packages home. My box of stuff was huge, but it's way better to mail it than lug it around Australia with me. Helen, my McMurdo roommate, just happened to be getting her new Scott Base gear from the New Zealand CDC just down the sidewalk. She was able to give us a lift into town, and we made plans to meet up for dinner. I spent the afternoon window shopping and wandering town. I spent a half hour in a convenience store trying to decide which ice cream treat to get. It's all a little overwhelming, yet surprisingly easy to slip back into life here.
Last night Helen was running late, so Erik, Ralph, Mark, and I picked a Thai restaurant. Helen and her friend Grant were able to meet us awhile later. After we finished dinner and our bottle of wine, we headed to the Honey Pot for drinks and/or coffee and a couple games of pool. We all walked to Helen's car and waved her off as they drove away.
Today I packed up all of my gear to store it in the luggage closet at my hostel. Ralph and I were planning to go to Akaroa to visit our friends Bill and Joolee, but all accommodations there are booked. So right now, we're both homeless and looking for another town for a quick escape from Christchurch!
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Ivan Take Me Away
---------------- INTERCONTINENTAL ----------------ICE 54 C-17 ETD 1100
DEPARTED CHRISTCHURCH
ESTIMATING PEGASUS
ESTIMATING 60S
ESTIMATING PSR
ARRIVED PEGASUS
DEPARTED PEGASUS
ESTIMATING CHRISTCHURCH
---------------- INTRACONTINENTAL ----------------
SKIER 71 LC130 ETD 0830
DEPARTED WILLIAMS FIELD 0740
ESTIMATING SOUTH POLE 1035
ARRIVED SOUTH POLE
DEPARTED SOUTH POLE
STIMATING PEGASUS
RRIVED PEGASUS
EPARTED PEGASUS
ARRIVED WILLIAMS FIELD
SKIER 72 LC130 ETD 0915
DEPARTED WILLIAMS FIELD 0835
ESTIMATING SOUTH POLE 1120
ARRIVED SOUTH POLE
DEPARTED SOUTH POLE
ESTIMATING WILLIAMS FIELD
ARRIVED WILLIAMS FIELD
SKIER 73 LC130 ETD 1000
DEPARTED WILLIAMS FIELD
ESTIMATING SOUTH POLE
ARRIVED SOUTH POLE
DEPARTED SOUTH POLE
ESTIMATING WILLIAMS FIELD
ARRIVED WILLIAMS FIELD
**We are waiting for our departure time from town. As soon as the C-17 takes off from Christchurch, we'll know more. Three flights headed to Pole, and I'm assuming we'll have to wait for at least one of them to return. As long as the weather stays calm and semi-clear, we'll all head up to Building 140 for Transport and say our goodbyes, check-in for our flight, and board our bus/delta/airporter. Looks like the rest of my updating this weblog will have to be done off the Ice as I still have about two hours of errands to run before I leave. Next update (hopefully) from New Zealand!!!
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Last Full Day in McMurdo
The season is coming to a close for me. I have so much going on right now, my head is spinning. Yesterday was my last day of work. In the afternoon, a hundred people left town. Everyone departs from Building 140, so there was a large group of people standing outside hugging people as they got on the different deltas and Ivan the Terra Bus to drive out to the runway.Today I'm packing up and cleaning my room. One of my co-workers from the Housing office will stop by sometime after 3pm to make sure I've cleaned the room and defrosted the refridgerator. I still have over 4 hours to get it done. At 4:30pm, I have Bag Drag. Bag Drag means I have to carry all of my things up to Building 140 and have them all weighed in. Even the carry-on I'll take on tomorrow's flight.
Tomorrow I'll have to wake up early to find out what time Transport is. That's when it's my flight's turn to gather at Building 140 and check-in for our flight out of here!! I'll be staying in Christchurch until the 22nd. I need to do a little shopping for some items that missing in my luggage (like a swimsuit for the beach).
Travel plans are all coming together. In Sydney, I might be meeting up with a very old friend of mine (we did a lot of 4-H activities together when we were younger) and her fiancé, my third cousin Marty. Yesterday, I realized that I have almost 16,000 frequent flyer miles in a Qantas account from a trip I took almost 3 years ago. Well, if you don't use them in 3 years or have any other additions to the mileage, you lose them. I decided to look and see if I could use them for a one-way ticket between Sydney and Melbourne. Luckily, there was even a special so it only cost me US$30 and 6000 air miles for that flight.
I have booked my round-trip ticket to Turkey, and Mark has booked our one-way tickets from Istanbul to Erzurum. We have to pay for letters of invitation to Azerbaijan, and I lucked out again in that the company who we're getting them from accepts PayPal payments (so I can pay online), making ten times easier for me to get them their money.
At this point, I return home on March 6th. I say "at this point" because things are always changing with this program. I could get off the Ice and find out that there are no seats available that day, and I will just have to adjust. You have to flexible and not stress out. Patience is a virtue.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Up Next...
**UPDATED!!**My travel plans are finally getting finalized. I booked my airline tickets today. This is what I'm planning as of today:
Feb 18th: Leave Antarctica!!
Feb 22nd: Fly to Sydney to hang out with my friend Anna
Feb 28th/Mar 1st: Fly to Melbourne to visit my friend Mark
Mar 6th: Arrive LaCrosse, WI airport at 9:15pm
Mar 10th: Back to work at the fireworks store
Mar 27th: Depart Minneapolis at 3:10pm
Mar 28th: Arrive Istanbul, Turkey at 1:45pm, meet up with Mark (from Australia)
Mar 29/30th: Fly to Ezerum, Turkey (I think) and bus across the border to Azerbaijan
Apr 29th: Depart Istanbul at 5:15pm, Arrive Amsterdam Schipol at 7:55pm
Apr 30th: Depart Amsterdam at 9:50am, Arrive Minneapolis at 11:50am
Our plans in Azerbaijan are still up in the air and will be until we are there and on the move.
More Posts Soon to Come
Keep checking back for a bunch of postings I will make soon. I'm a bit behind on some of them - like almost 2 months behind, but I don't want to leave here without giving as much information as I can about my experience here.Friday, February 09, 2007
The Funniest Thing That's Happened to Me in a Long Time
This could be a sign that I'm losing it. I hope, however, that you will be as thoroughly entertained as I was when it happened.This afternoon I was tasked to deep clean a bathroom that one of my former janitors used to clean. It wasn't taken care of very well, and so me and one my other janitors were going to get it back to where it should've been all season. I was cleaning the chrome around the faucets with a toothbrush when I dropped it brush-first into the drain. Peter, my co-lead, walked in just then, and I sent him off to get some tools to help us pull it out. He was able to get his needle-nosed pliers in there and got a grip on it. You'll never guess what was hanging from it's bristles!! Another toothbrush!!! I cracked up, and then Peter realized that I was only expecting one toothbrush!!! It was SOOOOO funny!!! Someone get me off this rock.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Stellar Axis
I'm not going to go into a long explanation about the whole event, so if you want to know all the details, click on the main page link here. Click the link to the "About" page, or check out some other photos taken from the helicopter and from a delta near the site by clicking on the weblog for Stellar Axis here. The whole thing was conceptualized by an artist named Lita Albequerque.
Someone else snapped this photo, but I thought it was a great shot and worth adding on here.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
First Season Winding Down - Some Random Thoughts About Leaving This Continent
I've got 11 days and a wake-up before I'm back in New Zealand. I am looking forward to getting off the Ice, but there are so many things I have left to do here. It's so easy when you first get here and know that you have six months to do everything and you put stuff off. But now I'm running around trying to fit it all in. The thing with working down here is that you never know for sure if you're coming back. You can hope to, but if you fail the physical and dental exams and don't have time to correct things to pass, you have to sit at least one season out.Scents: the only scents we really have here are exhaust and whatever the Galley's cooking that day. My sense of smell is becoming so finely-tuned, I can usually tell you what KIND of fish is being fried that day for lunch (and I don't even eat fish). I'm going to have a sensory overload when I step off the plane. Or at least, I hope I will.
OOOooo... RAIN!! I haven't felt rain in more than 6 months. The closest I've come is standing under the leaky roof in the weight gym/ceramics room/bowling alley/craft room/bouldering cave building. It was so leaky that I would say we had twenty to thirty buckets lined down the hallway collecting the little drips.
The station feels a lot differently now. A couple of weeks ago, people were starting to look really glazed over and spacey. Now we're starting to talk travel and make plans for our off-Ice time. Thoughts of trees, grass, and babies put a huge smile on my face. Having options in grocery stores and shopping and restaurants will be great, but will definitely seem a little overwhelming the first time.
I've heard many people talk about how long it takes them to adjust once they leave here. I'd say the average is two weeks. Today, our winter-over janitor Jim Julian returned to the Ice, and he informed Roxanne and I over dinner that it took him a month to feel human after leaving here in October. He only had three months of living as a human before flying back down here. I am looking forward to experiencing the adjustment of life here to life back in "the real world".
Gingerbread House Making
This entry is kind of late seeing as how we're already into February, but I thought I would show one of the holiday activities offered to us here in McMurdo. Just before Christmas there was a sign-up for gingerbread house making. My neighbors at the end of the hall, Lavonne and Lorraine (sisters from the Milwaukee, WI area) signed up and asked Helen (my roommate) and I to join them. A table was spread out with lots of candies and some frosting to decorate, and everyone's house was pre-assembled, although that didn't stop some people from doing a complete remodel...Laura was mostly there for morale support since her dad had the whole thing planned and came with his own decorations.
The finished product. The highlights of the trailer are the washing machine on the deck with the puddle of water below it and the car with the engine hanging from the swingset.
We had a great afternoon of decorating, chatting and laughing. Some people raided the candy table right away, leaving us to decorate with mostly stale sour gummi worms and gum drops. But I think our 4-seasons house turned out well. Each side was decorated for a different season. Mine was the front and it was decorated for summer.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Biggest Loser Weigh-In
It's getting harder and harder to update this weblog lately. My apologies. I'm really going to concentrate some time this week on updating all of the posts I've been putting off too long. This one, however, is very recent. I wasn't even going to post about it, but it does tell a bit about life on the Ice especially for me, which is what this blog is all about.When I first arrived in Denver for training, I met this guy named Atlas... yes, Atlas is his first name. I don't remember much about the first few days of knowing him, except that he had a cool name. I'm not even sure how I found out about the group he was starting down here, but there were posters plastered all over station within two weeks of arriving on station advertising something called McMurdo's Biggest Loser (aka MBL). I started asking him about it and got more information. We had a meeting where Atlas told us his idea to start a weight-loss support group on station.
The phrase "support group" leaves an icky taste in my mouth usually, but after hearing horror stories of how people put on weight like crazy down here I was really interested. I was already down 12 pounds before I got here and couldn't imagine gaining again. The meals are buffet-style. Not just some of the meals, all of the meals. And they're made to feed the people who work outdoors all the time... it's rumored that the food is based on a 5,000 calorie diet.
Atlas's great plan included daily emails, a monthly discussion group, and a little incentive to keep it up. Everyone that was interested threw in $100, and we all weighed in at Building 140 on the calibrated scale in September. Even people that weren't interested in the money weighed in. Atlas offered to do measurements for those that were interested in seeing how many inches they lost.
The discussion group was great, but we only ended up meeting once or twice. We talked about what worked for us and what didn't. People were able to offer suggestions for breakfast choices or exercise routines. We got together for walks once in awhile, but people had lots of things going on and weren't always able to get together.
I only worked out once this whole season. I was just too tired at the end of the work day to go to the gym. Some nights I would go out on hikes, thanks to my roommate Helen and my friend Ralph (who always gave a disclaimer that he took a percentage if I won and also offered to get me a tapeworm for Christmas). I watched what I put on my plate in the Galley. I stuck to the one piece of bread rule almost every single day. I tried to ignore the dessert section even though it called out my name more than a few times a week. I had a few friends that were dining attendants yell at me if I took more than one cookie on Cookie Day (Wednesday lunch), and other people in MBL would comment on what was on your plate. When I got up the guts to browse the store's offereings, Kelly an MBL-er works in the store, would always comment on that weekly bag of Cheetos I bought (which kept me from buying more of them each week). I thought about all of the steps I walked for work and tried to be as inefficient as I could be to walk more than I really needed to. A whole lot of thought and effort went into it.
But it was worth it. I started to notice my work pants slipping down by the time I got to work in the morning. When I had to hold them up to run somewhere, I knew it was time for a belt. Not only was I holding them up, but I was RUNNING! I hadn't done that in a long time. People started to make comments. Very randomly one day, my co-worker Peter told me "You walk faster now." When I first got here, I remember being 40 paces behind Peter sometimes. Now I keep up with him. One of my co-MBL-ers started calling me Skinny. My belt cinched up tighter and tighter each week. I had to tie a few knots in my navy blue work pants to keep 'em up. I checked my weight on one particular scale every other week, but it didn't really hit home until the big weigh-in last week.
Friday the 2nd of February was our big end-of-season weigh-in. A group of us Win-fly/Summers were all around to weigh in together. When they told me my weight I screeched a little bit. I definitely wasn't expecting to hear that I had lost 25 pounds; I was figuring I was just under 20. This picture was taken just after Atlas told me how much I weighed.
There was a bit of a discussion earlier last week as to whether or not a contestant should be allowed to weigh-in off the Ice using a different scale. Emails flew back and forth, back and forth between contestants. I suggested that if the contestant off the Ice won, that the pot be split between them and the winner here. The Summer (October-February) contestants had a $500 pot, but the Win-Fly/Summers (August through February) were going for a $1200 chunk of change. Atlas had a decision to make.
Fast forward to tonight's awards presentation. We talked about what worked for us and what didn't. We talked about keeping it up off the Ice. Some think it will be easier and some think it will be harder (I'm one of those). Finally we ended with the big announcements. The good news was that everyone who put money in for the competition LOST WEIGHT!! The Summer season winner lost 28 pounds and went home with $500. Atlas announced a tie between two Win-fly/Summers because of the big debate with the off-the-Ice weigh-in, and so just to make it fair he decided to split the money between the contestant off the Ice and the winner here. And I tied for first! I'll post a picture of me in the T-shirt I also won.
Now I just have to figure out what kind of camera I'm going to buy with my winnings!!