farewell nunavut!

down to my last few hours in rankin inlet. i've been jotting down reminders of the things i've liked and disliked about staying here, and the like side wins by a landslide.

things i love about life in this little arctic hamlet:

• i love the sunrise and that i am always awake to see it
• i love the colour of the snow at different times of day. blue, pink, orange,  white.
• i love looking away from town into absolute darkness
• i love the silence, except for the sound of dogs barking somewhere in the distance
• i love that no one knows their address, but everyone seems to know who lives where
• i love that people give their phone numbers as just 4 digits, because the first three are always the same
• i love shared taxis
• i love that there are no sidewalks
• i love how trucks and skidoos just made their own roads. why go around the lake, when you can go across it!
• i love all the homemade parkas (i can never brag about knitting my own scarf again)
• i love babies in hoods (amauti is the inuit coat the mothers wear - the babies look so cozy!)
• i love wearing snow pants. this is something i plan to do at home, fashion be damned!
• i love that it's like a town full ofsouthpark kennys walking around. nothing but eyes in hoods
• i love having to do that full body swivel to look to the side.
• i love that i'm "from down south". winnipegger = southerner. weird
• i love the friday night bingo on the radio that everyone plays
• i love the sense of a close community and that i have temporarily been a part of it.

things i won't miss:

• dry skin. seriously, i slather on coats of lotion and i still feel like my skin is cracking.
• all the static to go along with the dryness
• brain freeze from the outside in. that's where the cold hits: right between the eyes.
• coffee. oh my god i am just so sick of it. everyone drinks coffee all the time. i have been havnig 4 cups a day, just because it's the thing to do.
• coffee-mate. drinking 4 cups of coffee and i don't even have cream!
• the evil giant ravens. they just hover and circle above me, like they are waiting to pick at my frozen corpse. man, they creep me out
• the constantly drippy nose
• wiping said drippy nose with the wad of frozen-snot kleenex that is always in my pocket
• my eyelashes freezing together when i blink.

actually, i like that. i'm moving freezing eyelashes to the "i love" column.

well kids, that's it, i'm outta here. flying south the rest of the winter :)