Day 4 Teaching

Friday, January 29

End of my fourth day of teaching. Spent a couple of hours after class meeting individually with students talking about their research proposals. It was great to hear from each student their hopes and dreams for their research whether it was big or small. However, given the size of the Greenland population (a little more than 56,000 people) many of the proposed projects if successfully implemented will have national impact.

Staying in a very nice hotel isolated from the outside world, it is easy to forget that I am in fact, in the middle of nowhere. Of course, I have been in similarly isolated places in the Australian outback, but never surrounded by enormous icebergs. I have included a few more photos today to remind you of the view outside of my room (where these photos were taken). It is breathtaking. I am hoping to go dog sledging (not sledding) on Sunday and get to an outlook close to the mouth of the ice flow. Those photos should be really spectacular.

There is a full moon tonight, and I have been warned that the dogs will likely howl (I have included a photo of the dog team living outside my room). So I have my earplugs and noise machine ready J

The food continues to be very good and every meal has fish of some kind on offer—much better than taking the Omega 3 fish oil pills! I met one other English speaker yesterday—a person from Hawaii who is working on the CREDE project based in Hawaii—now that’s a long journey and a very different climate.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is my last teaching day. There are no flights out until Monday, so all of the students have a day in the town to shop and visit. I have been looking at other routings to Greenland. It is possible in the summer time to catch a direct flight from Seattle to Iceland on Iceland Air, but there are only two flights a week from Iceland to Greenland, so I don’t think that is going to work for the June trip.

I am really ready to be home. This has been a long trip!

Cheers

Geoff

PS Not sure the photos uploaded--the wireless is really slow.