green!

it's really green here right now. i might even call it scotland-ish. it's really awesome and i love it. it never gets dark and there's a good healthy mix of rain and sun so it went from brown to green very quickly. 

last sunday ian and i went to apex to walk around and climb hills. it was really pretty. oh! i forgot to tell you guys that the sea ice has melted (for the most part). today i smelled sea water for the first time since we first got here. 

here's ian getting a little too close to the edge, if you know what i mean.

here's the bottom of one of the hills we climbed. 

here's the sea. 

remember when i told you about the giant ravens? everything is giant here. i think it's because animals need to pump iron and take steroids to survive the cold. anyway, recently the mosquitoes have arrived and they. are. huge. like, HUGE. they swarm you and the bites hurt wayyy more than an appropriate mosquito bite feeling. apparently it hasn't even gotten that bad yet, so i'm a bit concerned for july. rumour has it that breathing through your mouth when you're outside is a no no. 

seal city

hey! it's me. i'm alive, so don't worry about it. i hope you're having a fun summer. i sure am. it turns out that it's really pretty here in the summer! for some reason i assumed that it would be brown here all summer but when the snow melted and the sun decided to never go down, things happened. 

last friday ian and i went to the celebration of the seal at sylvia grinnell park. it was a hoot and a half. actually, it was really cold and raining. it was still neat, though. even though i'm a vegetarian i can really appreciate the way inuit use seal. they use everything. seriously, everything. so on friday evening we watched seals get sliced up and the meat was handed out for everyone to share. we ran into one of ian's students and he was chewing on one of the eyeballs. that almost put me over the edge. 

here you can see the seals in the background. the air smelled really strongly of seal.

after this, things got really graphic. ian took a ton of photos but i won't put those on here because you might not appreciate it. 

have you ever wondered what my face looks like when the colour gets washed away and i have to concentrate on not looking grossed out? refer to the photo below. 

i'll post later with some better photos of the green-ness that i didn't expect to see. bye!