we like, we like to party!

A'ight, this should be the last post-dated post for the time being.

Thursday morning I got a call at 5am saying that the flight had been delayed for 3 hours. So I got up at 7 and worked out at the gym, with the plan of grabbing breakfast in time to make the 9am shuttle. But when I got back to my room from the gym, a notice under my door said that the flight had been delayed again until Friday. Grrr!!! I ate breakfast and decided to go find the campus in Chirstchurch, where my friends Jeanine and Joe from Cornell had studied abroad. The University of Canterburry was a 10 minute bus ride from down town where I was staying. It felt like a normal small college campus. I was hoping to get on the internet and do some work, but I went into the library, and the wireless network was password protected. I asked if there was any way to get on the network seeing as I wasn't a student. They said no, as expected. What surprised me was that they charged their own students to use the wireless. Weird.

After lunch I went into the book store and ended up buying a map and guide to NZ, and a picture book of mountains in NZ for $20 (NZ dollars = 0.75 american dollars). After bussing back to down town, I went into an outdoor store and spent an hour drooling over the climbing and mountaineering guidebooks. I found the same picture book I had just bought on campus, except in the outdoor store it cost $89!!! What!?! Also, all of the climbing gear was really expensive - climbing shoes that in the US cost $130 were on sale for $300 NZ.

I got kicked out of the store (they were closing for the evening) and I was bumbling around down town looking for and internet cafe. I dropped into an All Blacks Rugby store, because I was thinking of getting an All Blacks jersey to take home. Well, the official jerseys cost $180, so screw that! But here is where things get interesting. The lady working there asked me a few questions and it came out that I was going to Antarctica. She asked me about my research there and I told her that I was trying to understand the big bang. She said that was "interesting" and I soon found out that she was a Jehova's Witness. They believe something along the lines of the earth being several thousand years old and being created by God, and that Jesus is going to come back to earth some day soon and set up an everlasting government. It always surprises me when people like this tell me that they are thinking rationally or scientifically. They speak of the Bible as "proof" of things because they were written in the scriptures. Something that caught my interest was that in reference to something else she mentioned that education was the solution to many of the world's problems, and I wanted to say that education is probably what turns people away from believing in things like Jehova's Witnesses. But I kept my mouth shut. In any case, she was not prostletizing, so it was bearable and the conversation moved onto other topics. She did by far most of the talking.

As I was getting ready to leave, the other younger guy who was also working at the store joined the conversation when he found out that I was going to Antarctica. He is a native Maori, and his name is something complicated so he told me to just call him Kay. He is in college and is interested in becoming an environmental lawyer. Very outgoing and personable guy. So he ended up inviting me to a party that he was going to have later that evening, and gave me his telephone number. He then pointed me to a very good Thai restaurant for dinner.

The Thai restaurant was indeed very good. As always, whenever I see a new napkin folding pattern I take it apart and try to learn it, I was going this for their pattern, when the mother of this family owned business came out of the kitchen and her and her son taught me how to fold the napkin. :) I had fried shrimp with sweet chillies and cashews, and it was really good.

Then back to the hotel, where I saw that the shuttle would leave for the Antarctica station at 5:45am Friday morning. I called Kay back and said I'd be excited to go to the party as long as I could be back at my hotel by a reasonable hour. The plan was to go to his house and party there for a while then to come back into town an which point I could split for bed. So Kay picked me up at my hotel, and off we went.

It was exactly like I was expecting a Kiwi party to be - my Kiwi friend in Chicago complained that our parties in the US were lame. Lots of drinking, lots of smoking both tabacco and weed, and people listening to loud music that they were really into. The current fad is a music type called Drum and Bass, or D&B. It is a mix of hiphop, techno, and funk. I couldn't tell if the music was completely computer created and mixed, or if there were people actually playing drums and bass. The music is completely about groove, and there is basically no melody. It is good party music.

We drove up to his house where the party had already started and there were probably 15 people there. The reason for the party was Kay's friend's 22 birthday. Kay introduced me to his friends with something along the lines of, "This is my bro Kyle from the United States. He walked into my store this afternoon, and I invited him to the party. He is going to Antarctica tomorrow at 5 in the morning, and he is an astrologer or astronomer or something and he studies the big bang." Whew, that is one way to get a bunch of mildly drunk people excited! They were cool people and I enjoyed hanging out with them. They started a fire, but didn't have a fire ring so they used an old shopping cart. I'm not sure where the wood came from, but just before the fire started I saw them passing a bureau over the fence from the back-door neighbor's yard...?? Fortunately they put down a board under the cart to catch the ashes and protect the rubber of the drive way. That was especially important when the plastic child seat started to burn and trip molten plastic... Then the fire department came and we had to put the fire out, but no one was cited; they were very reasonable. Good times.

I talked to one guy Ethan, who seemed a bit older than his other friends. He was really excited that I was going to Antarctica, and was trying to figure out how he could go eventually himself. He was studying environmental studies with a focus on climate in order to try to get down to the ice. Apparently he started college a few years ago, but as he said, "I spent too much time partying with these guys, and dropped out." He took a year off, worked, and is now back in school and much more motivated. A lot of the guys there new a fair amount about astronomy and such, and one guy had read "A Brief History of Time," the book that originally got me excited about physics way back in high school. We finally headed back into town at 1am. One guy who was so drunk he could hardly walk was trying to drive and the tried to take his keys from him. They couldn't get the keys, so one friend decided to stay and sit on the hood of the car until the guy got out and handed over the keys. We took a taxi into town, and I walked back to my hotel from there, a 5 minute walk. I only slept for 3 hours last night, but that was totally worth it! Then this morning we all shipped back to the Antarctic center at 5:45am. Psyched!

Definition: Boomerang

boo⋅mer⋅ang

 [boo-muh-rang]

1. Spending 9 hours on an airplane when you land in the same place you started.

Here is a photo of the interior of the plane.

I was supposed to fly out of NZ to McMurdo in Antarctica on Jan 5, but the flight was delayed for 24 hours and I spent the day at the beach. Wednesday Jan 6 started well, with me waking up before my alarm went off at 4:45am. We all shuttled over to the Antarctic Center, put on our clothing and had our briefing. We boarded the plane at 8am. The airplane is a military plane that had a so-called "comfort pallet" put on, which is basically a removable insert of normal airline seats. There were 117 people flying, plus the normal aircraft crew, so pretty much every seat was full.

The flight from NZ to the McMurdo station takes about 4 hours. I am used to being able to look out the window during takeoff, but there are only a few small circular windows in the plane, so I just had to sit tight during takeoff. The flight was uneventful, and 4 hours later they announced that we were circling McMurdo waiting for the weather to improve so we could land. I should have hopped up to look out the window, but I didn't - some other people got some great pictures of the mountains of Antarctica. An hour later we were still circling, and they announced that we couldn't land and were heading back to NZ. So 4 more hours of flight. We landed again a but after 6pm, 9 hours after taking off.

Back in the Antarctic station, we picked up our "Boomerang Bags" and changed to go back into town and to our hotels. We get a carry-on bag and 2 checked bags, one of which stays on the plane in the case of a boomerang and the other which we get back for the night. I have been hanging out with two friendly and interesting people, Dan and Ann. They are here because they put in for a grant through NSF to visit Antarctica. Dan is a weather man for CBS out of Arkansas, and Ann is a writer from Washington DC who works in environmental writing and education. Dan put his shoes in his check bag, and so the only thing he had for footwear was his huge white Mickey Mouse boots that they issue for walking around in the severe cold. Fortunately I had put both shoes and flip-flops in my boomerang bag, so I lent Dan my shoes. The three of us went out to dinner, at which I ate a good chicken and mango-chutney pizza.

Then off to bed in expectation of flying the next day... which would be cancelled :(

Fish and Chips and grease

As expected, just getting to Antarctica depends on the whims of the weather gods. I arrived in NZ on Jan 3, and was supposed to fly to the ice on Jan 5. That flight was cancelled by bad weather, so I took one of the hotel's bikes and biked 30 min out to the beach. Remembering that my Kiwi friend has said that a local classic was fish 'n chips, I decided to buy some for lunch. I went into a fish 'n chips joint, hoping to see something on the menu called "fish and chips: $xxx". However, I was confronted by a bewildering array of fish options, and no obvious parings with chips. Then I noticed a hand-written board on the side advertising "$12 meal deal." Awesome! No thinking required. So I ordered that. As I was waiting for them to make my order, I read the meal deal more carefully. It involved 12 bites of fish, 5 potato plates, 2 scoops of chips, and 4 hot-dogs. When it came out, the package was the size of a textbook and weighed a couple of pounds. I went back to the beach to eat it, and when I opened it, there was an enormous amount of fried food, WAY more than I could possibly eat!! I ate maybe a quarter of it. Fortunately, there were a couple of German tourists who were watching the sea gulls circle around me, and they agreed to eat some of the food. I fed at least half of the food to the gulls. By the end, I could almost feel grease coming out of the pores of my skin. Next time, I'll be a bit more conservative on the quantity that I order!

Welcome

Well shucks, here I am at the bottom of the world, and blogging for the first time ever. So many of you nosey people want to know what I am doing, that I figure blogging is the easiest way to reach you all. :) It is going to take a while to figure out how to write a good blog post, so your patience is graciously requested ;) Here goes nothing...

I flew into the McMurodo station in Antarctica yesterday afternoon. We were supposed to fly to the South Pole this morning, but the flight was delayed. I believe that there were other flights that got moved back on-top of ours, and ours was simply cancelled. Today is Saturday and there are no flights on Sundays, so we will try again to fly in Monday. Fortunately, most of the work that I need to do is software, so I can do a lot of work from anywhere that has a power plug, and even more with an internet connection. The internet blows my mind sometimes. Speaking of internet, the plug here is extremely flakey, so if I even touch it or move my computer, I get disconnected.

I am planning on writing a few post-dated blog posts to describe some of my adventures already, and will try to update this blog somewhat regularly while I am in the Antarctic. Your comments are welcomed and encouraged!!

Love and Laughter