This morning, I thought about the routines and rituals down here that are so different from home. My room is completely dark when the lights are out, and so while I sleep like a rock, I sometimes have to really convince myself to roll out of bed in the morning. If I wake up early enough, I enjoy some cocoa before breakfast. Breakfast is buffet syle here ... and so far I've been very good about avoiding the bacon, which sometimes beckons me. I generally start my days down here with oatmeal with dried fruit, eggs (scrambled or omelet, whatever's available) and more and more often, yogurt. It's so much more breakfast than I have at home - but of course, the days down here are generally quite long and very active, and we spend so much time out in the cold. It's a great start to the day, and usually there's time to sit and chat with people before we head out to work.
I'm almost done with data collection for this trip, and then I'll get to enjoy a little break - although I expect to still be put to work wherever someone is needed. By now my room smells pretty obviously like guano, and I'm hoping to be able to clean out the gear and equipment, and freshen the place up a bit in the next few days! Much though we love the smell of Antarctic summer, it would be nice not to have the smell wafting down the hall for everyone to enjoy.
It's been a great trip so far, and if you ask me, we've gotten a lot of excellent work done. We've also seen a lot, and I hope to write more about it all in the next few days. I'll close by including this photo of an iceberg I saw the other day, in honor of the snow & ice I've heard is piling up at home. =) Hope you are staying warm!
3 comments:
Great picture... but now I'm trying to imagine the gentle aroma of guano permeating everything... sounds memorable.
Elise, this is a great e-mail. I understood almost everything. What in the world is guano permeating? Dead fish smell? good job with making the post interesting.
To clarify, Guano is penguin poop, and there's a lot of it around now that the penguins have been at the colonies for months on end. All my stuff winds up smelling like it. Penguins eat krill (kinda like shrimp) and/or fish, so sometimes it smells more fishy than other times.
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