Sunday

Sunday, January 31

We finished classes yesterday and the students celebrated last night. The meal was excellent: halibut appetizer followed by a steak dinner and TWO glasses of wine! Followed up with dessert, coffee, and Bailey’s (but nobody told me I had to pay for the Bailey’s!). After dinner we headed back to the classroom where the students taught me a Greenlandic dance, and I reciprocated by teaching them the Australian Barn Dance! Very entertaining. I called it a night about 1am, but a fairly large group headed into to town and reportedly didn’t get home till 4am—glad I skipped that one.

I was hoping to dog sledge today, but the weather is bad for sledging. It has been above zero and the I guess the ice and sludge are bad for the dogs paws. But, a group of us was able to go on a boat ride to the icebergs. Wow! You must put this on your top 10 list of things to do. Absolutely amazing. Of course, my camera has stopped working, so on this trip I shot video using the Flip camera. I have attached a couple to this posting and hope that you can see some of what I experienced today. You might want to turn the sound down…it was REALLY windy and you catch a lot of wind noise on the video. Of course, you can turn it up to hear me do a Steve Irwin impersonation! Nice hat eh? Go Ducks!

We were at sea for about two and half hours and pretty well snap frozen by the time we returned. The icebergs are a few hundred feet high, and of course there is much more under the sea than above. We were in about 800 feet of water and I was told that all of the icebergs are resting on the bottom of the ocean. I was also told that icebergs move out of the ice flow at 40 meters (about 120 feet) per day, so the landscape is constantly changing. All in all, an amazing experience and a great way to finish my trip to Greenland.

I leave early tomorrow morning from Ilulissat back to Kangerlussuaq to catch the flight back to Copenhagen for an overnight, 12 hour stay before starting the trip home on Tuesday morning. It will take about 24 hours to travel from Copenhagen to Medford via Frankfurt and San Francisco.

Looking forward to seeing you all soon.

Cheers

Geoff