Home again

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

I suspect that by the time I get this blog updated, I will be back in the USA! I can’t believe how difficult it is to find reliable, and affordable, internet service. I have not seen anything close to free internet anywhere. In Greenland I was spending close to $60 for three hours of internet service. Last night at the Hilton in Copenhagen they wanted 60 cents per minute. I thought, OK, I’ll do it, but my credit card wouldn’t work. I finally begged the guy at the front desk to let me use a computer for a few minutes so I could find out what is going on. I had an email from my bank indicating that there has been “unusual use” of my credit card and they were freezing it until I talk to them. I suspect that seeing charges pop up in Greenland got somebody’s attention, so when I get home it will take a call to Chase to sort it out.

So, let me bring you up to date. I spent all day on Monday traveling from Ilulissat to Copenhagen. A fairly early morning flight out of Ilulissat and some spectacular images of the icecap (that I can hopefully attach to this posting!). Unfortunately, had a four hour wait in Kangerlussuaq and the flight to Copenhagen was almost two hours late. This meant I didn’t arrive at the hotel until midnight. Not bad given that it was only 8pm by the old body clock (four hour difference between Greenland Denmark) and falling asleep was difficult. So, here I sit in the Copenhagen airport after four hours sleep, waiting to start my journey home. First to Frankfurt, then on to SFO and MFR scheduled to arrive at 9pm tonight.

When I checked in this morning, I was told that it was a good thing I was getting out in the morning because they are expected a big snow storm later in the day with up to a foot of snow.

I can’t complain about the travel so far…no cancellations…just minor delays. Considering it is winter here, and according to one story I heard yesterday while killing time in Kangerlussuaq talking to an American from Santa Fe, winter storms can strand you big time. For example, she was stranded in east Greenland last December for 10 days! No flights in or out. So, a two hour delay kind of put is in perspective.

If I continue to work in Greenland, I am going to have to travel lighter. There are stiff excess baggage penalties. I needed to check my small second carry on bag full of books and teaching materials. It weighed less that 10 pounds and I was charged $170! I am going to send the bill to the University of Greenland to cover the cost of shipping teaching materials, but I couldn’t believe it.

This is perhaps the longest period of time (2 weeks) that I have traveled without access to other folks for whom English is the first language since I traveled in Europe in 1980. It is interesting to reflect on what is like to be a language minority. Nothing is easy. Greenlandic is completely inaccessible to me and I can only make out a few words in Danish. I really might have to spend some time with Rosetta Stone for Danish!

I have just arrived in San Francisco after the 11 hour flight from Frankfurt and now have to wait 3 hours for the final leg to Medford, due in at 9:15pm. Can't wait.

I have included in this blog a little video I shot yesterday on the way from Ilulissat to Kangerlussuaq and you can see where the polar ice caps starts...nothing but ice for as far as the eye can see. Amazing.

When I get a chance I'll make a final post with photos and videos.

Almost home again!

Geoff

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

Quick update

OK, I give up. The internet here is bad...really bad. So, this is a quick update before I start the long two day journey home. I will try to update with some movies tomorrow night when I get to Copenhagen.

Did an amazing boat trip today sailing between the icebergs. I have some short movies so you will get a sense of what it is like here. So, more about that tomorrow.

Finished teaching yesterday, today was a rest day, and most of the students played pretty hard last night and I think spent most of the day sleeping...at least they have not been very visible :-)

So, more tomorrow if/when I get a reliable high speed internet connection.

Can`t wait to get home.

Cheers
Geoff

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.

Smoked Whale and Muskox

Wednesday, January 27

Who said global warming isn’t real? It has been above freezing today and raining—the locals are convinced that global warming is real, and where there used to be sea ice, there is now sea. They told me to sell my ocean front property in Australia because within 10 years it will be ocean bottom property! They may have a point.

Fascinating class today. Working with students for whom English is a third or fourth language is a challenge for all involved, but we have established the norm that when students are talking to each other they will use whatever language they want. For most of the students they choose Greenlandic as they are Greenlandic. The two Danish born students speak Danish even though they understand Greenlandic. The students who are proficient in English have taken to walking to wherever I am in the classroom and providing an interpretation—without being asked—very nice.

No photos today—didn’t leave the hotel and the weather wasn’t conducive to photography.

Food continues to be good. Last night was veal. We are served one glass of wine with dinner, after that you are on your own—beer is about $13/glass and wine about $15 a glass. A bottle of beer from the mini bar is $9—might be the most expensive alcohol I have seen anywhere in the world.

Breakfast has been a selection of meat and cheese, but cereal, bacon, sausage, and hard boiled eggs are also on offer. Lunch has been some kind of soup (today it was a curry vegetable and some kind of meat), fish, pasta, cheeses, pate…unfortunately, no exercise room…so I will be back in training when I get home next week!

In the evenings the students tend to drink coffee and visit for a while and then head to their rooms quite early to watch the news, read, etc. So, the nights have been early. The hotel only has one channel and it is in Greenlandic…so, no TV watching. There is a pay per view movie channel, but English isn’t offered. So, I guess blogging isn’t a bad idea—gives me something to do J

I have been invited to go to a fitness center after dinner tonight…so will maybe have a comparative fitness center story to report tomorrow.

OK, wireless is down, so thought I would update dinner. New taste sensation tonight for dinner. Appetizer = smoke whale. Dinner = Muskox. The whale was pretty good. Only problem was that I kept picturing that I was eating Whillie from “Free Whillie”. The muskox was a little…rare. The locals recommended it be eaten “medium” which is how I ordered it, but it was definitely rare—I am sure it made a sound when I cut it with the knife J

Now I’m off to the fitness…and will try not to mix the whale and muskox all over the fitness center!

Cheers
Geoff

Thursday, January 28

Sorry for the irregular blogs…internet is spotty…especially the wireless. Which, by the way is the reason I have no photos attached.

Visited the village fitness center in Ilulissat last night. Pretty much like fitness centers anywhere else in the world. Really a central meeting place in a small village like this with lots of kids and families exercising and playing soccer.

Pleased to report that I had no side effects to the whale and muskox J

I have settled in to a daily routine of teaching (1-5), dinner is at 6pm. After dinner most of the students drink coffee and talk, at 7:30pm they all go and watch “the news”—a 30 minute news program out of Denmark—then they disappear. They tell me they are “studying” but they will celebrate on Saturday night when the class is over. Breakfast is from 7-8am and the students go to class from 8-12—I head back to my room and read and write. And, lunch is served from noon to 1pm and we start all over again.

If you would like to see some information about Ilulissat and a short video about the UNESCO World Heritage site you could visit:

http://www.hotel-arctic.gl

If for some reason that doesn’t work, just google Hotel Arctic—it is the only one that will pop up!

Hopefully the wireless be up again soon and I can post some pictures and a video of the dogs howling outside my window for no apparent reason!

Cheers
Geoff

Teaching Day 1

January 26, 2010

First day of teaching.

After a somewhat relaxing morning preparing for class (making copies of materials, getting together Vegemite on bread and butter—heh, it’s Australia Day!), and working out how to drive a state-of-the-art classroom (really, it is amazing, all touch screen technology) it was time to have my first class with the 17 students.

It would be an understatement to say that this is a learning experience for the students, and me. There are many cultural differences (apart from the language) that make this a very challenging environment. The students move back and forth between Greenlandic, Danish, and English but we have established a norm that individuals will speak in whichever language they are most comfortable in, but that someone will translate a summary for me. There is some tension between the two Danish students and the rest of the group. This became evident today in an exchange around appropriate choice of language. As one Greenlandic student pointed out quite emotionally, “We have waited many years (nearly 300) for the right to speak Greenlandic!” I am learning that in an era of self-rule, the native Greenlanders are ready to keep colonialism back to the 20^th century. The irony in some the discussion was discovered after dinner when somebody pointed out that the only two teachers working in settlement schools (for example, a k-10 school of 19 children) were the two Danish-born teachers. Interesting stuff.

I have not been outside since arriving yesterday…no time and too cold…oh, and I have developed a cold just to make things a little more challenging J Here are a few photos:

1. The classroom: a beautiful high-tech environment. We break after two hours and have cake and coffee.

2. The view out of the classroom window—spectacular!

3. A view of the sun: this is as high above the horizon as it got. I think that there is officially 3 hours from sunrise to sunset…but I think they are exaggerating!

After today’s class I met with a group of three students to talk about the class and what they would like to get from the remaining classes. They are very concerned about their research proposals and academic writing, so I will start to build time in every day to focus on these topics.

So, time to sleep and try to ignore the dogs outside my window!

Cheers

Geoff

Australia Day above the Arctic Circle!

January 26, 2010

Australia Day! That’s right—the celebration of the arrival of the first fleet in Australia in 1788—and here I am 200 miles above the Arctic Circle! Kind of amazing to think about really.

After a quiet weekend in Nuuk that included a reindeer fondue meal at the home of one of my hosts, it was time to pack up and head north. The weather in Nuuk on Sunday was dreadful, so I chose not to leave the hotel…just worked on my classes and watched DVDs.

Monday at noon I flew from Nuuk to Kangerlussuaq and then connected to the flight to Ilulissat. It was amazing to fly in over the ice and to see amazing icebergs. The photos in this blog are taken out of my hotel room window. Talk about a room with a vieI guess I should also mention that these photos were taken around 10am. There will be some light here for just a few hours, but if it brightens up I hope to get some more photos.

I met most of my students last night and was pleasantly surprised that many of them had some English language capacity. However, I also found myself facilitating an after dinner meeting where the students wanted to talk about how the classes would be conducted. Turns out that they are very unhappy about not having time to discuss issues and that they do not want to sit passively through long lectures: sounds like we will be a good match for each other.

I also met my teaching partner Dr. Anton Hoem for the University of Oslow (Emeritus). It was a brief meeting, and I suspect that Anton and I will do our own thing. He will teach from 8-12 and I will teach from 1-5.

Did I mention that there are a lot of dogs in Ilulissat? There are reportedly 4,500 people and 6,000 dogs. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of dogs howling—not quite a full moon—but enough to get the hounds excited. This morning I can see that a dog team lives about 50 yards from the hotel. I have been told that all of the dogs north of the Arctic Circle are sledge dogs and that they are bred specifically for the purpose of dog sledging. In fact, dogs from the south are not allowed in this area for fear of cross-breeding and weakening the working dogs.

I will blog again after my first class today.

Cheers

Geoff