Antarctikai

The Land of Daylight and the College Mining Town.
Or, The Land of 2D becomes 3D.
Or, Reunion Under El Sol Perpetua.


Arrived in McMurdo safely only two days ago. It is very surreal to be here, as I expected it to be. I found my boyfriend here, waiting in the snow outside the galley with his chrome bag strapped around his body and a plastic red stem rose. He alctually ran forward in slow motion to greet me (in the form of a person swaddled in a voluminous red coat. Hard to tell who everyone is, because everyone has the same jacket "Big Red". We have name tags though, which helps.) Slow motion because you can't really run here because you would fall and break your face. It is icy and slippery and everything is rock solid ice. The snow is layered on every flat surface like giant slabs of white frosting, frozen and whipped up into strange shapes by the unfailingly biting Antarctic Wind.
This is where Mykle has been. I'd like to report that it wasn't actually a farce and several really good photoshopped photos. I came here to the edge of the world, and found him here, in Antarctica.
It's sort of like leaving your home, travelling as far away as you can possibly get; through deserts and towns and cities and into jungles and sewers and slums, across frozen seas and drifts of cloud, and finally (as the map zooms in and focus tightens) finding him curled under a rock by a giant slab of ice in the dead middle of the most remote place on earth. Actually, it's not sort of that. It IS that.

I now understand the meaning of "windchill". I could stand the cold but the wind is what makes your whole face hurt like you've just eaten a giant bowl of ice cream. Really fast. They give you a lot of cold weather gear, so even though I just have my two patched hoodies and a borrowed jacket with me, I'm fine. The cold is a severely DRY cold, and the gear they give you is made to keep you warm, and the buildings are all very heated and cozy, so it's fine. San Francisco bone-seeping fog chill is totally worse.

We live in a dorm called "Hotel California" (or "HoCal") appropriately enough. We share a small room, and Mykle set it up really nicely, with some fox faces and photobooth pictures of him and I, and fake roses stuck in former nail holes. He put the matresses together on the floor, and the bunk bed is over it, kind of like a little loft. We have a fridge (I know: ironic) and a TV and two huge blue metal dressers. I really like our room. There is about a foot of snow piled against the window. The window looks out on a frozen snowy mountain and closer the helopad (which is where the helicopters take off and land). I haven't heard them once. The impression that it is actually getting dark is pretty strong, unless you go outside. It gets dim out there and everything is this weird shade of blinding grey.

So it's incredibly weird to be here. But it is also really amazing. It's pretty rad to do totally bizarre decision-making like this, and then follow through with it and find yourself in a mysterious land. It's a small and completely (almost) isolated community on the edge of a frozen slab of ocean. It is very "COLLEGE" around here, and the town itself looks very blue-collar, everything is industrial, nothing is pretty, unless you count insane giant bizarre trucks as pretty (which many do). There is a lot of quirkiness, which makes people feel more at home. I guess you have to be quirky to do this, come to Antarctica and work. This makes me feel more at ease. The trucks have names ("Ivan the Terribus") there is a free thriftstore named after a certain type of giant scavenging seagull ("Skua") and everyone is super into stuff like shipments and which planes are taking off when.

I'll write more soon, but it's already 8:00pm (tomorrow! Haha hello from the FUTURE!) and my workday starts at 7:30 AM. I hope everyone is doing good and will soon send me packages of polartech fabric, really nice lotion and lipbalm, and dried mangos and ginger candy.

Ok I love all y'all.
bye,
Kai from electrical supply (more on this next time).