Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Alright alright...

I'm finally updating. Sorry its been such a long time.
Lets see its been what, three weeks? Crazy, time goes by so fast here.
Well I'll start on some of my adventures and we'll go from there.
On our day off, three weeks ago, kendra, jes, and I hoped on Ivan the Terra Bus and headed out to LDB with John the cook. LDB is a NASA run camp of sorts, and it stands for Long Distance Balloons. The Balloons are used for weather/atmosphere/etc research.
John had asked me to come out there that day so I could photograph their freezer.
A freezer you ask, how could that be interesting? Well this freezer is actually a hole cut into the ground. Inside of it there were all these amazing ice formations, and he wanted me to photograph them for him. They were amazing! Think of like a snowflake, and how it looks magnetized, thats what these crystals were like. So the girls and I had fun hanging out down there, and then we got to see the galley at LDB which was pretty awesome. It was actually what I imagined coming to antarctica and working here would be like. So yeah that was really nice.









That night we had another adventure as well. We got to go on the Ice Caves tour. There are these caves that form when there is running water inside of the glacier and it ends up forming the caves (you can wikipedia it if you want to know more, its pretty interesting stuff). The cave was amazing and I got to touch an actual Antarctic glacier. It was mighty cold though, as can be expected, and the wind out on the field was pretty strong, but we had an amazing time nonetheless.







Let see now, last week for our day off we had a pretty great time again. We got up early in the morning for memosas and bowling. It was so much fun. I was terrible at the bowling part, but I got to wear these sweet old lady bowling shoes that look like plain sneaks, and rocked my christmas socks.
Then we sat in the galley and had a long lunch which is always nice. Getting to eat for longer than half an hour and not rushing it is great. I got to sit and watch a skua outside of the window for a while. That was really awesome.





Then later that day Kendra and I walked over to Scott Base, which is the New Zealand base, so we could check out their store. It was a really good walk, and was really warm, I only wore my jacket for a little while, and the walk was only like 45 minutes so it was nothing. On the way back though, some scientists gave us a lift, so we got to sit in the back of a pickup with a geophysist, she was super nice. Then after that we had dinner, and then Ben and I made our way up Observation Hill, since I hadn't been up it yet. It was a rough hike, and I'm very out of shape, and really windy (I just now realized today that I had a windbreaker and didn't have to carry my heavy big red up the hill ugg). But it was so beautiful up there. We made it to the top and Ben and I just stood there and hugged and took the view in. We both agree, that Antarctica is by far the most beautiful place in the world, and its something you can't even comprehend unless you've experienced it for yourself.

So yup thats life as of right now. Things are going fantastic for me. We have Thanksgiving on saturday so that should prove to be interesting. I'm pretty tired today, and have decided to have a nice slow easy day, and just relax all day, which is something I haven't had a chance to really do on any of my last days off.

Oh and I suppose I should also update on my love life (per shawns request). I've been seeing a boy named ben (the aforementioned one) for about threeish weeks so far. He's pretty fantastic, but I totally don't want to screw this up...I'll keep ya'll posted on that as well.

Well thats all for now!

2 comments:

dane said...

aw kat i'm so envious :)

i don't mind if you don't update your blog super often - chivolvo gets the cliff notes, but i like reading the more indepth stuff too :D

Shawn Small said...

I demand more updates, how else can I stalk my favorite south pole person!