Day 142: Halifax.

Heyyy so I did indeed finally land myself safely in Halifax. My friend Lisa came to pick me up with her fantastic black lab (sorry, no photos yet) and then I got to go to her place and sleep all afternoon. She lives in an amazingly nice townhouse with three roommates and I sleep on a futon in their den. The dog gets on the bed and sleeps with me whenever I'm too tired to protest. But she's very clean so I guess its all good, except for the black dog hair that has permeated everything that I own.

The last few days have been spent recovering, doing some shopping, and running errands with Lisa. I also launched an attack on the local post office with about 50 tons of stuff to mail, which apparently has no earthly way of getting to anyone on time for Christmas. And then today I went out and bought a bunch more stuff that will have to be the post-late-Christmas gifts. Soon we'll be driving to Lisa's parents to spend about a week living out Christmas with them.



So: no more Greenland. Now that I'm back in a world a little closer to my own, Greenland seems very far away. For how much I needed to leave, actually leaving turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. There is a barren beauty to the land that you can't get anywhere else, and even through you get used to it after a few weeks or so, when you start to leave you realize what a hold it has on you. It's really why I decided to come to the Arctic in the first place.

A last look at my room in Greenland:



And leaving my host family was especially hard, particularly the boys. I gave everyone their Christmas presents the night before, which they all seemed to liked very much, but I think also made the boys in particular wish that I wasn't leaving. It was just another occasion of me waving goodbye to everyone I know to spend some time alone again.

The boys playing with their Christmas presents:







If you give a child silly putty, this will happen eventually:



But it was funny - when you have a town of 500 people, there's not a whole lot of air traffic in the middle of winter. Aviaja's boyfriend works the air tower at the airport, so she said I should go meet him. So at this ice-locked airfield I just started wandering through this "PERSONNEL ONLY" building until I found some stairs and starting shouting "ESPEN?" That's Arctic security for you. Then when I got on the plane, I knew literally every one of the seven passengers (including a fellow teacher and one of my 8th grade students).

In the host family's living room, they have this family tree of all their kids - 13 all told:



Well. Canada is a different place. A lot warmer, if nothing else.